Online casino news and William Hill

Here at onlinecasino.ie we normally confine our regular online casino news reports to matters solely concerning our online casino operators and of course their range of casino games. Over the last couple of years we have been pleased to welcome a number of new small specialist online casinos to the market, but it is still true that the online casino sector remains dominated by the big bookmakers who operate online casinos as part of their large online gambling sites. We have also recently reported on a series of high profile mergers and acquisitions involving many of the biggest bookmakers in Ireland and the UK, brought about mainly as a result of the new gambling taxes, but so far William Hill have not followed that path raising concerns among some investors in the sector. James Henderson has been chief executive of William Hill since August 2014 but according to some analysts is yet to convince investors that he is the right man for the job. Judging by a recent newspaper interview however he remains confident that William Hill is heading in the right direction in spite of a surprise profits warning issued last week. William Hill were of course not the only bookmaker to suffer from the success of so many favourites at Cheltenham, which is estimated to have cost the industry up to £60 million collectively, so perhaps Mr Henderson is right in his belief that bad results like that are just part of the game. As casino games fans we were also interested in Mr Henderson’s defence of the much maligned fixed odds betting terminals in the same interview. Apparently William Hill have about 9,300 of these machines spread across their 2,370 betting shops. His approach to the defence of these machines is to try to debunk what he says are the myths being reported, including the claim that gamblers can lose £18,000 an hour. Apparently the average stake on these machines is only £5, and with the average time spent playing one of these machines at 11 minutes the average loss is just £7. Add to that the fact that the win return to the player is 97.3% and he rates the chances of anyone losing £18,000 as millions to one.