Originally Posted by Sprint
If you read my posts you would know that I feel that William Hill has not been sinister here. Your hypothetical about Maximum Security bettors is not relevant, because there is a long standing precedent as far as bettors in that regard. The results are final.
Simply put, all facts considered, this guy had a reasonable expectation that he would be certain to be paid his total winnings, considering it was a William Hill establishment, it was derby day, and he was betting thousands of dollars. No reasonable person in his situation would EVER make those exact bets at this location, if the person knew that the most they would get paid if the best case scenario happened would be well under ten percent of what would have been received at a parimutuel establishment.
This isn't 30 years ago. It is not reasonable for the player to have the onus be on him in this particular case. Though you, and some others may disagree, I actually believe that the huge payout of 600k helps the player here. In other words, if he had made a much smaller bet on a random race at a small track, and encountered this capped payout, then he is probably out of luck. But this was the Kentucky Derby, and the book was William Hill, and it is life changing money, so all things considered, it is far more unjust if he receives just the 35K instead of over 600K. That is how the world works.
I will give you a similar example. When people neglect to pay their real estate taxes on property they own, eventually the property goes up for sale at an auction at the county court house. Throughout the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of properties that are about to be sold at auction at any given time. Real estate investors show up at the county courthouse for the auctions, after having done their research from lists of properties given to them by the county tax office, which lists properties that will be in the sale.
Many properties are sold each day at these sales, with a vast majority being low value properties, often plots of land, where the owner is simply letting the property go on purpose. On a frequent basis, there are tremendous deals that get into the system as a result of an oversight by the property owner, whom has accidentally not paid their taxes, for various reasons, or whom otherwise has a good faith reason to not have paid.
Every once in a while you will see a national news story about a recent widower (for example), whom has lost an extremely valuable property (house) at a tax sale. Justice usually finds a way for her to keep the house, even though the buyer at the tax sale is arguing that "the law is the law", and he deserves the windfall. In the most extreme cases, even if the county has sent the delinquent tax notices properly, and followed the process according to the law, and even if the buyer has done nothing wrong, and technically should be the owner of the house, the end result will be that the lady keeps the house. If that same lady has simply neglected to pay the taxes on an adjacent plot of land, worth a few thousand dollars, she would almost certainly lose the land at the tax sale.
If you don't understand, then that is fine, but I am not going to teach you how the world works for free. And I suspect that you might be older than me, and we all know that old dogs have problems learning new tricks. You are not approaching this with the correct mindset, so you will likely be dismayed when this guy gets a large amount of money, and business continues as usual at these William Hill locations, as if this never happened, with caps in place, and others not being as fortunate as this guy. The large life changing payout helps his cause, especially given all of the facts of that particular day.
One final example that should help you understand would be a "bad line" example at a Las Vegas sportsbook. If the sportsbook puts out a bad line and loses a few thousand dollars, they aren't going to be bailed out by the gaming control board....The sportsbook will have to pay the ticket. But there is no scenario where a customer can luck into a bad line and put the casino out of business. It won't be allowed to happen. Some sportsbooks in New Jersey paid some five figure mistakes last year. If their system somehow made a mistake that allowed a player to think that he would get an excess payout of 40 million on a small bet, the sportsbook would not have paid it, and the courts would not have made them pay it, even if the rule/law stated that all bets are final.
