Review: William Hill Poker

Online

Jul 6

Overall: 🍋🍋

William Hill is a British bookmaker based in Gibraltar (similar to many other British gambling establishments looking to take advantage of the lower tax responsibilities in this British territory) that is primarily known for its brick-and-mortar high street booking shops, and online casino offering of slots and sports betting.

Today, however, we’re going to take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of the William Hill Poker website and client - an arm of William Hill that appears to have been tacked onto the selection of gambling options at William Hill as an afterthought more than anything else.

Signing up for William Hill Poker

Signing up for William Hill is fairly straightforward. You’re asked to provide your name, date of birth and address in a pop-up after clicking “Join” in the top right hand corner of the home screen.

Depositing funds to William Hill

Remarkably, however, you’re then taken directly to the deposit screen, where you can make your first deposit to William Hill’s online casino without having to submit any form of official identification (which is the standard across most online casinos).

We used PayPal to deposit our funds, but you can use a debit card, bank transfer, or William Hill Cash Direct in order to fund your account. William Hill Cash Direct is a voucher system that allows you to deposit cash into a William Hill brick-and-mortar shop to then be used online. (You can also cash out using these William Hill Cash Direct vouchers.)

We were not asked to give any identifying information until the day after sign-up, which was approved within an hour. Considering the usual 24 hour turnaround for identification approval, this is very fast - but odd considering they don’t ask for it until you’ve deposited funds.

William Hill Signup Bonus

William Hill’s signup bonuses might look great on the surface, but in reality they’re some of the worst value signup bonuses we’ve ever seen in any online casino, and they’re not at all upfront about how much you’ll have to stake to receive those bonuses.

Luckily, we worked it out for you so you don’t have to get stung with the William Hill sign up bonuses.

€6 Twister Discovery Pack

A simple sign-up bonus offered on the William Hill Poker site is €6 worth of tickets to William Hill’s Sit & Go (SNG) “Twister” games. This bonus is the most straightforward and honest of all the William Hill sign up offers. For signing up, you receive:

3 x €1 tickets to Twister Sit n Go Tournament
3 x €1 tickets to Age of the Gods: Twister Sit & Go Tournament

It’s essentially a free €6. Can’t fault that.

10 Bonus Spins

William Hill gives 10 free spins on the slots to new players upon signing up. These can be redeemed on any of the slots games on William Hill. However, it’s worth noting that the following - frankly, archaic - terms and conditions apply:

Your bonus spins will expire within 14 days if you don’t use them
The max redemption is £20 on those free spins
Any money you win in your bonus spins is not yours to cash out and you will have to wager that money 40 more times on the slots before you’re able to cash it out (meaning you are essentially guaranteed lose that money and then some)

To put this into perspective, if you use your free spins and win the maximum amount - a somewhat measly £20 - you’ll have to stake £800 of your own money on the William Hill slots before you’re able to cash out that £20.

Given that slots are the casino games that are weighted most heavily against the player, you’d be better off not playing your free spins at all.

Note: When we played William Hill slots we encountered the following 3 issues:

For the first few days, it wouldn’t let us play at all
Once we were able to play, we discovered there’s nowhere to find the ‘return to player’ (RTP) percentage in-game
There’s weirdly no way to close the window with the slots games on, unless you manually override it in your operating system.

£100 Bonus Money

William Hill’s biggest sign up bonus at time of writing is a £100 free bonus “when you make your first deposit, no matter how much you deposit”. However, this doesn’t mean that if you deposit £1, your account will suddenly show a generous balance of £101.

In fact, this money is redeemed in two stages.

The first stage of receiving your bonus is receiving two lots of £5 for every 280 William Hill Points you earn, up to £10.
The second stage is receiving eighteen lots of £5 for every 350 William Hill Points you earn.

This is known as a rakeback scheme, where you are rewarded points with a cash value after spending a specific amount of money on poker rake - in either cash or tournament games.

William Hill Points (WH Points)

The William Hill rakeback scheme is measured in William Hill Points (also called WH Points or WHPs). William Hill Points are paid out to users at 14 WH Points per £1 raked on cash tables or £1 paid in tournament fees. (Or 9 WH Points per every €1 paid on cash tables or tournament fees.)

This means that to meet the threshold to receive the entire £100 “free” bonus money for your first deposit, you’d have to pay a total £490 in rake within 45 days of signing up.

William Hill Poker Software

On the William Hill Poker homepage, you’re given the option to either Download the client, or to “Instant Play”. Selecting Instant Play opens up an extra window in your browser and attempts to boot a Javascript version of the client in-browser. However, when we selected this version (on a >200mb internet connection) it hadn’t progressed past the loading screen after 5 minutes so we decided to give that a miss.

After downloading the William Hill poker client - which uses the iPoker network owned by PlayTech (a company that owns about 30% of William Hill) - it’s worth noting that we were still not required to confirm our identity by submitting any kind of official documentation until the next day, after we’d played several games.

The client itself is relatively simple and easy to play, but doesn’t offer anything special and looks a bit “cheap” - like a poor knock off of a better client - like SkyPoker, for example.

In order to play on the William Hill poker client, you have to transfer the money you deposited into your “Main Account Balance” to your “Poker Account Balance”, a confusing aspect of William Hill which originally led me to believe my original deposit had simply disappeared from my account until I clicked around for a while. The likely reason for having to transfer your balance is due to the funds having to be transferred to the iPoker network.

Playing William Hill Twister SNGs

Twister SNGs are William Hill's answer to the Spin N Go craze started by PokerStars.

The William Hill Twister Sit&Gos are 3 max turbo SNG tournaments with a winner-takes-all format. The Twister SNG buy-ins are: €1, €2, €5, €5, €10, €20, €50, or €100.

At William Hill, Twister poker offers players a random jackpot - or in the case of the Age of the Gods, a progressive jackpot taken from a small percentage of each player’s buy-in. The random jackpot is decided by a “spin” that resembles a slot machine prior to each Sit&Go tournament beginning.

william+hill+age+of+the+gods+twister.jpg

We only used our 6 x €1 free bonus tickets to the William Hill Twister Sit&Gos (and won €2 in the Age of the Gods Twister game).

The Age of the Gods Twister Sit&Go gives you 5BB starting stack so the games go by within a matter of minutes, if that.

In the regular Twister games, you get a larger starting stack of 25BB, and a slightly larger prize pool on average too. (We got a €2 prize pool in Age of the Gods and €5 on Twister.)

william+hill+winning+age+of+the+gods+2.jpg

Playing William Hill Poker Tournaments

The overall poker tournament offering at William hill Poker is fairly good. By this, we mean that the rake and structures of the poker tournaments are generous. The tables at William Hill are capped at 8-handed maximums too, which is a nice touch.

Generally speaking, William Hill poker tournament starting stacks are 10k chips, with a level 1 coming in at 25/50. Most poker tournaments at William Hill have 10 minute blind levels, with late reg ending at the end of level 11 (120 minutes in). Level 11 has blinds of 250/500 which will give new starters at the end of late reg a measly stack of just 20 big blinds.

The one gripe here is the length of late registration. A total 2 hours before the end of late reg feels excessive for lower buy in tournaments (in the £5 to £25 range). Other sites typically go with a standard 1 hour late registration period.

The tournament information displayed at the bottom of each table window unobtrusively displays all relevant information to the tournament you are playing. This is handy if you’re multi tabling tournaments, as it allows you to get some quick info.

Playing William Hill Poker Cash Games

After the problems we’d had playing William Hill poker so far, we were surprised to find that the William Hill poker cash games were actually quite fun to play. As is the norm, the cash game tables had a maximum of 6 players (6 handed tables), and the ability to multi-table.

Rake at William Hill

The rake for cash games at William Hill Poker is the highest we’ve ever seen on a mainstream poker site. Minimising the amount of rake you pay is critical if you want to make a profit playing cash poker games online.

Here’s the cash game rake at William Hill Poker:

    Players
    Stake
    Rake
    Cap
  


    2-10
    2NL
    €0.01 for each €0.15 in the Pot
    €0.50
  

    2-10
    5NL
    €0.01 for each €0.15 in the Pot
    €0.50
  

    2
    10NL
    €0.01 for each €0.15 in the Pot
    €1.00
  

    3-10
    10NL
    €0.01 for each €0.15 in the Pot
    €2.00
  

    2
    20NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €1.00
  

    3-10
    20NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €2.00
  

    2
    50NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €1.00
  

    3-10
    50NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €3.00
  

    2
    100NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €1.00
  

    3-10
    100NL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €4.00
  

    2
    1kNL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €1.00
  

    3-10
    1kNL
    €0.01 for each €0.20 in the Pot
    €4.00
  

As you can see the rake at the 2NL, 5NL and 10NL levels is very high at 7.5%. The WIlliam Hill Poker rake cap goes as high as €2.00. At this level, you must avoid getting involved in too many pots if you want to make any profit playing cash games. The more pots you get involved in, the more rake you will pay (and the less profit you will make).

At 20NL and above it is far more reasonable at 5% with a cap that varies by stake but which is not out of step with the industry.

Tournament rake at William Hill poker is just under 10% on all events. For example, a €5 buy-in tournament has a rake of €0.45 - which is essentially a €4.55 + €0.45 buy-in. As online poker tournament rake goes, this is on the generous side - compared to other poker sites which will typically charge 10% or more on tournaments.

If you’re thinking of playing poker at William Hill, we’d suggest that you stick to the tournaments and take your cash game play elsewhere.

At 20NL and above it is far more reasonable at 5% with a cap that varies by stake but which is not out of step with the industry.

If you’re thinking of playing poker at William Hill, we’d suggest that you stick to the tournaments and take your cash game play elsewhere.

William Hill Rake Back

There are a number of aspects to the William Hill rakeback scheme.

The points: Firstly there is the points scheme which comes in two flavours - William Hill Points (WHPs) and Club Points.
The Club: The William Hill Poker Club has 7 statuses. Each month you will earn a status based on the number of William Hill Points you earn. This status is maintained for the following month.
The Freerolls: Once you have achieved at least Club Status 2 you will be eligible to play in a series of freerolls that are held every day.
The Monday Top Up: Once opted in to the Monday Top Up benefit, you will receive $0.50 for every 50 WHPs you earn in a week. This benefit is valid up to a maximum of $5
The Shop: At the William Hill Shop you can spend any club points you’ve earned on Tournament tickets, live event packages, or exchange them for cash.

Now let's make some sense of these different aspects of the William Hill rakeback scheme.

The whole system revolves around William Hill Points which are accumulated at a rate of 10 points per €1 in rake. You also earn Club Points based on your club status.

Your club status multiplies the amount of club points you earn. With a multiplier of 1, WHPs and CPs are accumulated at the exact same rate.

The William Hill Poker Club status structure is as follows:

Club Status 1 - 0 WHPs required (CP x1 multiplier)
Club Status 2 - 25 WPs required (CP x1 multiplier)
Club Status 3 - 200 WHPs required (CP x1.1 multiplier)
Club Status 4 - 400 WHPs required (CP x1.2 multiplier)
Club Status 5 - 1000 WHPs required (CP x1.5 multiplier)
Club Status 6 - 5000 WHPs required (CP x1.7 multiplier)
Club Status 7 - 12000 WHPs required (CP x2 multiplier)

We’d like to point out that this system is very reminiscent of the old PokerStars Supernova Elite system which was discontinued despite the fact that virtually every poker player on the planet rallied against the decision.

Player Pool at William Hill

The William Hill player pool is on the weaker side but is by no means the weakest you will find in online poker. I can say with certainty that players here are better than on Sky Poker, Unibet and Party Poker. I would not go as far as to say that players on William Hill are better than those on PokerStars.

Overall, with a bit of study, the games on William Hill are very beatable and there are plenty of fish to go after.

William Hill Summary

The software at William Hill looks nice enough and functions fine when you’re in a poker game, but has some glitches elsewhere (the slots, for example) - which really isn’t what you expect when you’re using gambling software in such a competitive market.

This, combined with the outdated and poor-value sign-up offers gives the impression that William Hill doesn’t particularly care about its poker players enough to make William Hill the kind of poker destination you’d expect from such a big name in gambling.

That said, the poker tournament structures are good, (nothing special, but good enough) and with a player pool that’s on the softer side, there’s some value to be had in playing at William Hill Poker.

Poker feels like it has been tacked onto the William Hill offering as a half-baked idea rather than to actually give something unique to the online poker community. This isn’t surprising as William Hill is much better known for its sports betting, not its card games.