W.Hill & that Dawn Approach Ante-Post Double & some e-mail's

Stephen Pollard is currently Editor of the Jewish Chronicle and has written columns for several publications including The Times and the Daily Mail and maintained a lively Spectator blog. He is also the author of the controversial 2004 biography of David Blunkett, and co-authored A Class Act: The Myth of Britain's Classless Society, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

The power of Twitter: it can make a bookie pay up

By Stephen Pollard Sport Last updated: May 28th, 2013
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/stephenpollard/100219008/the-power-of-twitter-it-can-make-a-bookie-pay-up/

I don't have much in common with Sheikh Mohammed.

For one thing, I am editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and he is the Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates and monarch of Dubai. But we've shared something these past seven months.

We have both followed every twist and turn in the training of his horse, Dawn Approach, in its preparation for the 2000 Guineas earlier this month.

My interest was rather less direct than his. He was anticipating being the owner of the winner of the first Classic race of 2013. I was anticipating the success of a bet.

Last October, after Dawn Approach won a big two year old race, I backed him in a double to win the 2000 Guineas and Derby.

This post is not, however, about my amazing prescience and tipping ability. It is about the power of social media.

But to understand the story, I do need to give you the details of the bet – and thus of my amazing prescience and tipping ability.

The bet was a £25 each way double on Dawn Approach winning the 2000 Guineas at 4/1 and the Derby at 12/1. Should it come off, I stand to win £1825.

Dawn Approach won the 2000 Guineas easily, and is now the odds-on favourite for Saturday’s Derby.

As you can imagine, I have been eagerly anticipating the Derby.

Until last week. On Friday, I received this email from William Hill:


Dear Mr Pollard,

We are writing with regards to your recent bet on Dawn Approach to win both the 2000 Guineas and the Derby.

You have placed the bet as a standard each way double, however when bets are incorrectly accepted on accumulative antepost bets, using the same selection we settle at a special combined price.

As such the new price we are offering you on the bet you have placed is 15/1.

We understand that this is a shorter price than you were expecting, and as such offer our apologies with the option to settle both bets as singles.

Translated into English it meant that William Hill had decided – seven months after the bet was accepted, and nearly four weeks after the first leg won – that it shouldn’t have offered the odds that it was offering in October. And so it was unilaterally changing the odds for the double succeeding from 65/1 to 15/1.

There is, in betting, a concept known as ‘related contingency’. If two events are related and the chance of the second event happening is related to the first, then the odds offered against are not simply multiplied – a bookie will offer a special price. In other words, because the chance of Dawn Approach winning the Derby is that much greater having won the Guineas, and his price would contract, in advance of both events they would likely offer a much smaller price on the two events happening.

But similarly, from the punter’s perspective one of the key tools is spotting when you think a bookmaker has priced something wrongly – that you think he has underestimated the chance of it happening. So when I saw the combined odds last October of 65/1 – that was 4/1 and 12/1, both advertised on the William Hill site – I pounced.

Had they said within a few days that they had made a mistake – computer error and all that – then I’d have been annoyed, but mistakes happen.

But it took them seven months – and the first leg winning – before they noticed their ‘mistake’. Indeed, they didn’t even get in touch straight after the first leg. They waited another four weeks.

I wrote to their customer services. And for 3 days, not a word.

So I wrote to the CEO, Ralph Topping. I was polite:


Dear Mr Topping,

On 13 October 2012 I placed a £25ew double on Dawn Approach to win the 2000 Guineas and Derby.

Since his Guineas win, I have been counting the days to the Derby looking forward to – hopefully – winning.

Yesterday – over 7 months after the bet was placed, and weeks after the first leg won – I received the email below.

I am sure that you will be able to point me to small print that justifies your stand. But I would like to ask you to think, for one moment, about the ethics of your decision.

For seven months – seven months! – the bet stood. No one at any point mentioned anything about a mistake. Believe me, I have placed a number of bets in the past and then been contacted to be told that the price was a mistake. But after seven months? And, conveniently for William Hill, only after the first leg won, meaning that you might actually have to pay out.

The sums involved, in any case, are hardly earth shattering. For a small punter like me, they are amazing. But for William Hill they are chicken feed.

What we have here, in other words, is a bet struck in good faith, for a small sum, which stood for seven months – and then eight days before a possible payout, a decision  was taken to void it.

In any other walk of life you would surely agree such behaviour is outrageous.

I ask you please to reconsider.

Should you not, then I will consider it my duty to make the betting – and wider – public aware of how William Hill behaves.

That would not sit well with me, since I have always bet with you, as you will see from my account and have always thought you an honourable firm.

Yours,

Stephen Pollard

Again, not a word. I re-sent it. Not a word. Not even a response from an underling. Nothing.

And so I turned to Twitter. And everything changed.

On Sunday morning, I set out what had happened in a few pithy tweets. Over the course of the day, I was flooded with retweets and responses. From punters, from politicians, from journalists – from all sorts.

They pointed out that bookmaking depends on trust. And a bookie who retrospectively changes the odds is not a bookie to be trusted.

And they pointed to the self-inflicted PR disaster. First, in ignoring my polite emails. And second…

William Hill's social media team provided an object lesson in how to dig even deeper into a hole. Because I did, at last, start getting a response from William Hill: to my tweets, and those from others who tweeted the story. And boy, were they bad: spectacularly sneering – as if they realty had better things to do than waste their time on an idiot like me.

After I pointed out that their behaviour showed they couldn’t be trusted to honour a bet struck seven months ago, they replied:

“@WillHillBet: @stephenpollard Trust is built by adhering to our terms & rules which are we correct any obvious errors. The bet stands at the right price.”

When I said they had voided the bet, they replied: “For clarification, the bet is not void. It stands at the correct price of 15/1 or can be split into singles at marked odds”

And when I pointed out it took seven months for them to decide the bet was a mistake, they said: “It was accepted in error seven months ago but has only come to our attention since the first leg won.”

And that was it – the sum total of the response William Hill deigned to make to my emails and tweets.

With every new sneer, more people were jumping in.

Because of Twitter, and the immediacy of the support it can generate, a small potential payout to a few people over a bet was fast becoming a PR disaster, with the company’s social media team managing to make things worse with their tone and responses.

And then, last night, I received this:


Dear Mr Pollard,

I’m pleased to be writing to you to confirm that William Hill WILL honour your bet on Dawn Approach to win both the 2000 Guineas and the Derby at the full odds at which your bet was originally placed.

This decision actually contradicts our own rules around the placement of bets with related contingencies, but because your bet was placed in goodwill we have agreed that our response to this situation should also reflect that goodwill intention.

On that basis, we hope you enjoy the big race this weekend and I’d like to thank you again for choosing to bet with William Hill.

Had they had the least idea of decent customer relations – and decent PR – they would have said, from the start, that while the bet was accepted in error, as a goodwill gesture – given that the error was not spotted for seven months – they will honour it.

Instead, they have now convinced a large number of people that they can’t be trusted, and that the only reason they have acted with honour is because they have been forced to do so by a Twitterstorm.

There are any number of lessons from this. My mother would probably tell me that the biggest is not to bet. But I'm grown up now, so it's a vice I will live with. The biggest, surely, is that customer relations really do matter. Had they bothered responding to my initial emails, I might never have taken to twitter – and so alerted so many people to the story. Then again, simply contacting me without changing their tune wouldn't have done any  good.  But thanks to twitter, they've not only had to change their mind – they've also portrayed themselves as obstinate and sneering.

And because of a bet which, if Dawn Approach bombs on Saturday, will cost them precisely nothing.