Graham Calvert Full Story

Graham Calvert, a greyhound trainer, originally from a farm in Fence Houses, County Durham in North England.
He used to make around £30,000 per month with his job as a greyhound trainer, and made up savings of up to £700,000.
He had a wife, Adele (25 years old), and 2 children: Lila (4 years old) and Imogen (7 years old).
Everything was fine for Mr. Calvert until he started gambling. After gambling his wife had begun to get divorced from him, he lived separately from his children, and he even lost his greyhound training license.

Mr. Calvert had begun to gamble at 2005. He had a gambling addiction, which nowadays becoming more and more popular among all kind of peope, teenagers and even managers of major companies.
In May 2006, he opened an account with William Hill, one of the well-known bookmakers in UK/World. He used to gamble with them big amounts of money. He even placed 20 bets of £30,000 just in one day. After many loses (made total bets of around £300,000) he asked William Hill to Self-Exclude himself from their "service".
Self-Exclude is an option for any "customer" to ask his bookmaker to not let him place more bets because normally of the reason he feels that he's out of control and can't lose more money.
Graham Calvert, was self-excluded from William Hill for 6 months as agreed between him and them.

2 months later, Graham Calvert opened a 2nd account with William Hill and continued to place bets with them. The 2nd account was opened on his name, not on any other person's name, what's not supposed to happen if he's self-excluded. With the 2nd account Graham Calvert placed the biggest bet ever in the history in Golf! He did risk £347,000 and placed them on the Americans to win the 2006 Ryder Cup. Unfortunately for Calvert, the Europeans won the cup and his money was taken away from his bank account into William Hill's bank account.
Graham Calvert tried to stop his gambling addiction by askng William Hill to self exclude himself and they haven't done it properly.
That's the reason that later on he chose to take a legal action against them.

On February 18, 2008 the case was opened in the London's High Court. Newcastle-based solicitors were the team of lawyers/legal advisers who helped Mr. Calvert with his case. Peter Hornsey, the head of his legal team, said: "The case is a crucial test of the gaming industry's social responsibility policies."
William Hill knew what's going on, they knew he had gambling problems and nevertheless they let Mr. Calvert to keep on placing bets with them. Just for the record, if you make a search on gambling forums you can find a quite few other "customers" from the other side whose account got banned as well, only this time due to the fact they earned money from William Hill.
William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said it's the customer responsibility to cease gambling, and it's simply not their fault that he lost a lot of cash for their favor.

On March 12, 2008 the judge Mr. Justice Briggs ruled that although William Hill didn't take the right steps to stop Mr. Calvert from betting with them while he was self-excluded, nonetheless he would still probably go and place bets in other places and ruin his life but that will take longer time than it took with William Hill. In other words, the judge said that's the faith of Mr. Calvrt was already written and therefor William Hill isn't held liable for his loses.
In addition to the 2 millions he lost, the judge demanded from Mr. Calvert to pay William Hill a few hundrend thousand of pounds as well, for court expenses.

This page was created on: April 24, 2008.
This page was last updated on April 24, 2008.