Online casinos don’t come much bigger than the William Hill casino. The brand is a colossus generating billions each year and employing over 16,000 people. If size matters then there are not many that can compete in terms of reputation.
The William Hill casino and brand, in general, have vast resources available and this means they have virtually every product a player could want with plenty of innovative and well-funded offers, features and products. For anyone who is looking for a one stop shop for all their casino and betting needs then William Hill are a must have as part of that list.
As a physical bookie they also have an added advantage over their competitors which they have used to their fullest with the introduction of the Plus Card.
- Every Feature Imaginable – If bigger is better then this is your home
- Industry Giant – Complete betting & gaming site covering every inch of the industry
- Curated Games List – Small but quality games list, with only headline titles making the grade, absolutely zero padding.
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This review is editorial and impartial but features affiliate links from which we may earn commission.
Software and Games
For such a big company you might wonder why William Hill have one of the smallest games libraries out there, but this is a targeted approach by the company rather than any sort of failing.
Thousands of games are all well and good, but there are a lot of players who don’t want or need that sort of choice and just find the sites that offer these numbers overwhelming and difficult to wade through. This site is not only incredibly light by comparison, but there are so many filtering options that you can often drill down and find exactly what you want without any scrolling whatsoever.
If you are worried this might have an impact on choice or quality then you don’t need to. This carefully curated list of around 300 games includes slots from at least 10 different providers, including the mighty Playtech, NetEnt, Cryptologic, Microgaming, IGT, Bally, Gamesys, Quickspin, and others.
This list will include Jackpots of which William Hill also offer their own exclusives in the way of their Vegas Millions offerings, but there are plenty more, not to mention the Table Games, Instant Win Games, and a little bit of Slingo too.
So, plenty of choice and variety, all laid out perfectly and with no fuss or confusion, and a guarantee that not a single game on the site will be a waste of your time.
Live Casino
It wasn’t enough for William Hill to host a live casino like everyone else, so they play host to two instead. You can only play one at a time, but you can view games from both lobbies in the Live Casino section so at least they are all found in the same place.
The Playtech live casino offers a host of quality blackjack and roulette variations as well as one or two baccarat and poker games. Once the live casino is launched the Playtech Live lobby grants access to around 45 different tables that are well suited to players with small to medium sized bankrolls. The Playtech interface is just as good as Evolution’s so it really is down to personal preference in this department.
The second live casino has its own dedicated lobby and is powered by none other than Evolution Gaming. There are a few quickplay options for blackjack and roulette but I would suggest having a look in the lobby for the game that suits you best, as there is quite a range.
Over 100 tables await inside the live casino, covering roulette and blackjack from every angle including a lot of William Hill exclusive tables. Baccarat is on offer in strength as well, and there are a few poker tables to go alongside plus a money wheel and football studio game.
The Evolution interface also carries the added bonus of being able to play more than one table at the same time. If you are a high roller this is probably the better option of the two.
William Hill Then and Now
William Hill are often seen as a big faceless corporate brand, and when you are generating £1.6 billion a year with profits of around £200 million and you employ tens of thousands of people – as was the case in 2018 – that can often be the case.
The fact is William Hill are one of the UK’s, and now the world’s, biggest and most instantly recognisable brands, but as the saying goes: mighty oaks from little acorns grow.
The Man
William Hill was born in Birmingham in 1903 and first started taking bets illegally while working at a factory in his hometown.
After a spell in Ireland and an initial false start, he moved to London in 1929 and started taking bets on the greyhounds. Clearly, he was a sharp minded gentleman, because in 1934 he opened an illicit gambling den and exploited a loophole allowing credit/postal betting but not cash.
After starting out on the wrong side of the law and being vocally negative about legal betting offices – “a cancer on society” were the words he used – he went ahead and rather hypocritically opened his first in 1966.
Hill had a keen interest in horses owning and breeding them throughout his adult life, and it was at Newmarket that he died aged 68, only a year after retiring.
The Brand
William Hill the brand has been around for every major step in modern betting and gambling; they were the first to produce coupons and the first bookie to be listed on the stock exchange. They have lived through the legalisation of high street bookmaking, advertising regulation changes, and the dawn of the internet.
Following legislation changes in the early 1960’s allowing off-track gambling, William Hill created the biggest portfolio of high street shops in the country, and by the turn of the millennium when they launched their online betting site and casino, William Hill were clearly dominant among the top three biggest operators in the world.
Since then they have attempted to push forwards globally with countless acquisitions and buy outs, facing a number of setbacks and big losses along the way, especially in Italy and Spain. They had more luck in Australia although their time there has now come to an end after an AU $300 million deal was agreed.
They also found themselves in hot water in 2018 after the UK Gambling Commission found systematic failures regarding anti-money laundering and problem gambling – costing William Hill £6.2 million. £5 million of that was a fine, the other £1.2 was the amount they were ordered to return because it was profit linked to illegal activity.
Despite most of the online operation now being based in Gibraltar, William Hill are still a big British company employing many thousands of people and remaining extremely popular. The casino and sportsbook combined can boast nearly 3 million active customers, so they must be doing something right.
In 2020 an American company named Caesars Entertainment made a successful bid for William Hill in order to buy in their expertise for the American market. They would sell off the UK assets and in effect split the company in two after the deal went through in 2021, and time served online operator 888 snapped up the UK and European assets, marking a brand new chapter in William Hill’s story. One that is yet to be written.
Promotions and VIP
William Hill are fairly professional when it comes to their promotions. It’s about regular long terms rewards rather than flashy short-term offers with these guys, they are too long in the tooth for that.
Free Spins, for example, are regularly given to customers to try out new games or just to reward gameplay. This is totally unobtrusive but a more than welcome way of rewarding loyal customers.
Festive or seasonal offers crop up too but are less gimmicky than you sometimes see at other casinos, while others might offer bonuses to shunt you in the direction the casino wants you to go – live casino for example.
You will also find that there will be promotions specific to different areas of the site. For instance, there are some promotions exclusive to the live casino section and others specific to the main casino, but others will cross over.
Loyalty is also rewarded with personalised offers emailed out to you, and these will be targeted offers.
What’s the Site Like?
It can be difficult to run a website the size of William Hill and still retain any sense of order from one section to another, but to my mind this is one of the best examples of its kind.
The site is nice and clean, well proportioned, and not too heavy on the graphics. It’s nothing special to look at, mostly white and very pale blue brought to life by the game tiles etc., so not dull but I don’t imagine they gave too much thought to style, it’s all about functionality here.
Once each extra section is loaded everything within it runs from the integrated interface so no more reloads are required that might interrupt the flow and slow you down.
This does mean that jumping from one section to another quickly becomes a chore if you do it often, but otherwise you will settle in nicely and enjoy relatively pacey response times.
Anything transactional or account based is kept neatly out of the way, small enough to blend into the background but big enough to be easily identifiable if you are looking for it. The games are given centre stage here.
Game Organisation
Games are divided into sections and handy sub-sections that means little to no scrolling to find your next title provided you use the options available.
There are certainly better desktop casinos around for style but for substance and usability there are not many contenders.
Games will be categorised for you on the left hand side of the page, and you can expand each category as you see fit which saves a lot of space; so for example if you expand the Jackpots category you can choose from progressives, must drops, Jackpot King games etc.
There is a search bar too but it’s easy to miss, not that you should need it anyway.
Game tiles span the full width of the rest of the screen meaning no distractions when browsing, and this also makes them very easy to scan while giving the graphics a chance to shine.
I would have liked a few other categorisation options; provider perhaps, or a few themes, 5/3 reel – but in general they do a much better job of splitting the games into manageable genre’s than other brands.
Small Screen Casino
There are several apps available for William Hill, the main one being the casino with sister apps for sports, poker, etc. This is slightly frustrating if you do like to switch between various products but then it does also lend itself to uncluttered apps overall, and you can jump from one to another internally.
It’s certainly a quality product, but there are better mobile casinos out there, so if this is the only way you play casino then it might not be the best choice.
To be fair, though, both the casino app and the mobile site are very good in terms of the number of games available, access to other features (account, support and banking), and they are very quick, quicker than the desktop site in some areas, which is arguably the most important aspect.
For those players who like to have a wide range of choice from their online casino the mobile apps at William Hill are a great addition to the overall product, and if you are already a William Hill customer you will find very few things to complain about.
You have all of the same categorisation options and most of the smaller features such as info buttons on games etc; there is a great lightweight feeling about it but at the same time it feels professionally managed and the navigation makes sense.
In particular, I appreciated that even when playing a game in full screen I had access to my phone’s functions – sometimes games lock you out of everything else so you have to manually mess about closing the game to view a message for example – not here.
There are also occasional mobile specific bonuses, and for this reason alone it is worth having the app even if you don’t use it as your primary means to play.
Support Options
Type ‘William Hill customer service’ into your search engine and you will see a string of complaints. William Hill actually have one of the best support services you will find, but this is a numbers game, and William Hill have millions of customers so there will always be unsatisfied players looking for revenge. The vast majority of experiences with William Hill support are good and, personally, I have never had an issue. The operator has in fact won numerous awards for their support.
You can get in touch 24 hours a day 7 days a week, which is already a better effort than many others, and the best contact methods live chat or Twitter, the latter being well manned but it does close at 11pm.
The staff at the support centre are some of the most experienced you are likely to find and response times are astonishingly quick most of the time, especially when you consider the size of their customer base.
The freephone service is no longer available for online customers but there is a number for retail and Plus Card customers that you can try.
The help centre is available from the homepage and serves as a searchable FAQ as well a link to the contact options. Live chat could be added as a quick link to the home screen as a minor improvement, but they do have a feedback tab quick link which can take you to the contact page if you wish. The fact that they invite feedback at all speaks volumes for their customer focus.
On the Money
| Method | Min Deposit | Min Withdrawal | Fees | Withdrawal Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Debit Card | £5 | £5 | 0% | Up to 4 Hours |
| PayPal | £10 | £10 | 0% | Up To 24hrs |
| Skrill | £10 | £5 | 0% | Up To 24hrs |
| Neteller | £10 | £5 | 0% | Up To 24hrs |
| Cash - Plus Card | £10 | £10 | n/a | n/a |
| Apple Pay | £5 | n/a | 0% | n/a |
| PaySafeCard | £10 | N/A | 0% | 3-5 Days |
| ecoPayz | £10 | £5 | 0% | Up To 24hrs |
| Bank Wire | £10 | £25 | BACS Free | 3-5 Days |
Its ten out ten when it comes to payment options available at William Hill. I won’t list them all here but if you can’t find a payment method that works for you here you won’t find it anywhere else either.
Limits vary based on the method but the lowest deposit available is £5 (watch this though if you are trying to claim deposit bonuses) and there is a maximum of £99,000. Withdrawal minimums range from £5 to £25 depending on the method. Some methods have transaction limits but you can generally make as many of these as you like.
When withdrawing to digital wallets William Hill are one of the fastest around for processing times too, you can have your cash in a couple of hours a lot of the time. Banking is one area where William Hill simply can’t be beaten, if choice, high limits, security, and safety are very important to you then this is a good casino to call home.
Plus Card
The William Hill Plus Card (formerly the Priority Access Card) allows you to link your online account, your bank account, and the cash in your pocket in one easy swipe. The is one of the major benefits of betting with an online casino that also operates high street shops.
They are free to claim, just ask at the counter and register online and you are good to go. You can deposit into your online account using any of their 2500 high street shops, and equally, you can withdraw money from your online funds in cash in-store.
This means instant access to your winnings.
They also throw in exclusive offers and bonuses from time to time so even if you don’t use it often it is worth keeping one in your purse or wallet. It’s especially useful if you also enjoy sports betting.
Contacting William Hill
UK Gambling Licence Number: 39225
- Name: William Hill Casino
- Operating Name: WHG (International) Limited
- URL: https://casino.williamhill.com/en-gb/
- Phone Number: 0870 51 81 715 (Retail) 0330 123 9638 (Plus Card)
- Live Chat: Available 24/7 via site
- Email: Apparently no longer supported but perhaps worth a try – [email protected] or [email protected]
- Address: 6/1 Waterport Place, GIBRALTAR, GX11 1AA
- Twitter: @willhillhelp