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Posted

Hi,

When are you going to pay out NHL regular season bets? My other sportsbooks paid out within ~2 hours of the season cancellation, Unibet's been stalling for 2.5 days now and customer service says they have no idea when these will be paid out. Seems like a pretty easy case to settle, why is this taking so long?

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Posted

Really would be nice to get a response what's going on. All I'm getting out of support is "There are currently big problems in our department that is trying to handle this and because of this it will still take a very long time to get the bets settled. However, we don't know what the problem actually is".

This is bizarre. The regular season was cancelled a week ago. Ever since then all you have to do has been to do one of two options:

1) Void all season bets
2) Pay out season bets according to the standings at the time of the cancellation

I'm sure you have rules in place that would determine which way to go. All your competitors seem to have pretty much just voided everything.

How can this take several weeks, as it sounds based on what your support is saying? What exactly is this major problem they are refering to but are refusing to explain? This is a very simple case...

Also, it's been blatantly obvious that regular season is done since like mid-March, so as a side note it's also really not the greatest look that apparently you didn't even have a plan in place. Every other site clearly took care of this well in advance since they were able to refund players in a matter of hours. I could understand a delay of a couple of days, but it's not a good look that after a week you can't even get a proper response from customer service, these messages get ignored, and players requesting large balances back don't get any communication, just get a message essentially saying "We will hold onto your money until who knows how long, we have problems but we can't tell you what they are". IMO if you are holding people's balances of thousands of euros hostage for several weeks you need to pay some sort of interest, because I'm sure many are in need of those monies right now. And a bit of communication would also be nice.

Posted

Hey @ChuckBassPoker,

Sorry this has gone by me for some reason. 

I will reach out to the people who know more and will get an update on how this will be proceeded. I'm not in a position to say if it will take hours, days or weeks as I have no solid knowledge of the subject on how it'll be dealt with. I do agree however that communication is key, especially when we're talking money.

I will let you know when I know more. :) 

Posted

They have started the refunds now but this is already being handled differently from other bookies and it doesn't look good.

So far I'm finding my season bets that were about to hit voided, but the bets that were not about to hit settled as losses. Wtf? When it's a single event canceling the whole season, how can you possibly treat different bet categories differently and settle them in favor of the house? Clearly you should either settle all bets based on the standings at the time the season was cancelled, or then void everything.

Still got more than half of my bets unsettled but so far this is looking very very bad. I read the entire 20-page long Unibet betting t&c and there's no mention of any rule allowing you to do this. Would you care to post an explanation and explaining how this can be justified?

Posted

Hey @ChuckBassPoker,

Could you give me coupon ID for the bets and I'll ask for explanation. It wont obviously explain the whole situation in it's entirety but hopefully they are able to provide me with some sort of explanation. I'm yet to receive an answer to my previous question, which was regarding the whole cancellation/voiding of the season bets. 

Posted

I think it's clearer like this:

There are several types of season bets (outrights). I have, for example, bets of the following categories

-Team x regular season points over/under
-Team x vs team y regular season head to head (which team gets more points)
-Player x regular season points over/under
-Player x vs player y regular season points head to head (which one scores more points)
-Top goalscorer
-Top pointscorer
-Top pointscorer of specific team
-Top pointscorer of specific nationality
Etc

And they have settled the bets clearly in Unibet's favor, I have over half of them still unsettled but the pattern is pretty clear.

For example, I have the following bet: "Team x points over/under 95.5 = under". This was like 92% to hit. They have voided the bet.

Then I have another bet: "Top pointscorer of team x over the regular season". My player was 1p behind when the season was cancelled and roughly 45% to win. They have settled the bet as a loss.

So using these two bets as an example, let's say I bet 100 euros each. For bet 1 my EV at the time of closure is almost a full double-up and for bet 2 it's a slight loss. So on average my 200e bets would return something like 270 euros. Well, you obviously can't settle them according to EV, because there's no way to know for sure what would have happened if the season didn't get canceled. I'm completely fine with you just voiding the bets, sh-t happens, so that I get my 200 euros back. Or, settling them both based on the standings at the time of the season ending, which in this case would also just return my 200 euros. But what you have done instead is void the almost surefire winner, and THEN settle the bet with a very good chance of winning as a loss. So now instead of breaking even I'm down 100 euros, because you settled one bet and voided another even though they both got cancelled for the same reason (once in a lifetime COVID season cancellation).

I don't have just 2 bets, I have dozens of them, but this same thing has happened with every single bet so far. If my bet is winning it gets voided and if it's losing it gets settled as a loss. I don't think it would be fruitful for me to give you 50 coupon IDs, because they would just say "we settled this bet like this cos the season was over".

This is why there needs to be a proper statement explaining these guidelines because right now this is against t&c or any information I can find anywhere on your site. Since the season got canceled, I don't think you can just randomly decide which bets to void and which bets to pay out given they are all outright bets of the exact same season and they all got cancelled for the exact same reason (covid). Clearly the right thing to do is to either void them all or settle them according to standings. I don't care which one you do (I'd get back about the same either way), but this cherry-picking is really rigged and costly.

Fwiw every other bookmaker just voided everything, which IMO is the right thing to do. The only exception is Bet365 who voided everything except for a few player bets where they took a big loss by paying out wins and voiding missed bets. I most certainly don't expect this kind courtesy, I'm happy to just get the stakes back or alternatively just settling based on what the situation was at the time of cancelation, but this just ain't right. Feel free to pick your poison, and I completely understand Unibet wanting to settle as many bets as possible (because the overall player pool is obviously losing money on average), but you can't have it both ways. Either void or settle, but not both.

edit: While this last part isn't specifically Unibet's problem, I'll add why you doing this random settling bs is also annoying your players in other ways besides us losing a ton of money thanks to the cherry-picking. I'm sure I'm not the only one playing on multiple sites.

Before the season was canceled, I was standing on something like +6000 euros EV on my bets across 8 bookmakers. When it got cancelled I was like fffffuuuuuuuuuuuu there goes a really great profitable season, now I'm just getting my stakes back and it was all for nothing. For example, I had a bet "Top Swedish Goalscorer" where I picked two players from two different sites. Betsson had Mika Zibanejad (who was the runaway winner at the time of cancelation) at 15:1, but they just voided it so instead of getting back 15x my stake I got my stake back. Really sucks but hey, it is what it is and in a vacuum it's the only reasonable way to settle these things. However, I have my 2nd horse of the same bet, Filip Forsberg, bet on Unibet. Now you have settled my bet as a loss, so that instead of my two bets of 1 unit returning 15 units I'm not even getting my own back, I'm losing one to Unibet and getting my winning bet voided from another company. And, to make it worse, then I also have a winning bet on Unibet in a similar category, and it gets voided... see why this is so bad?

The more I think about it, the more obvious it is that you should just void every bet, just like every other bookmaker in the world has done. But you know, if you want to settle them based on the standings, that's fine with me. I'd actually book a small win that way. But this cherry-picking combined with the week-long holding period is really bad, and there needs to be a proper official statement with references to where in t&c it says this kind of thing is allowed.

  • Like 1
Posted

Agree, it is a lot clearer like this. I didn't know there were so many bets involved, it does not make any sense for me to send them forward one by one. What I'll do instead tomorrow, is forward this whole thread along with the questions I sent earlier. Thank you for taking the time to write it out, and essentially making my job so much more easier.

I'm not in a position to say anything about the bets nor the T&C or the action of the bets (cancel, void, settle etc) at least yet, but I'll follow up on this when I get the answers. :)

Posted

Thanks, ReCorpH!

To the sports betting team eventually reading this - I woke up to half a dozen more clear void bets being settled as losses and not a single winning bet settled as a win. It's a disgusting feeling, and you're the only site that's done something like this. I'm pretty sure I'm tagged as a nice losing whale in your system thanks to certain high stakes blackjack / slot adventures, but if this is how you do business I won't be making the mistake of ever wagering a cent on either sportsbetting or slots on Unibet again. Plenty of other options out there where this was handled properly.

Posted

@ChuckBassPoker We're going to be following up on this, what you're describing doesn't sound great, I fully agree. We're looking to get some information from our sportsbook about these procedures, this is a sensitive topic and decision as you mention, so I want to be sure that I don't speak out of line - I hope that makes sense for you as well, though I apologize for the inconvenience.

/Jeppe

  • Like 1
Former Community Manager
Posted

Thanks, Jeppe!

Finally had one bet settled in my favor. I think I'm now running something like 1-9 against, but it's a start.

Really I think the only way to actually do this would be to either void everything or settle everything based on standings at the time of the cancellation of the season, what you're doing now still looks like an awful way to deal with this and I would have the same stance even if I was credited with more wins.

Posted

Any update what on earth is going on?

I still have bets unsettled such as a division winner bet where the NHL awarded them the title 10 days ago... the Vegas Golden Knights probably have already lifted the banner in the roof of their rink yet you still haven't paid out the winnings (other bookmakers have, well over a week ago).

Yet at the same time you have wasted no time robbing me of tons and tons of equity marking very close player outright bets as losses where there are (and never will be) no results because the regular season got cancelled.

I really don't want to go on bigger non-Unibet messageboards because in general I love Unibet and you have always been extremely fair - I've had my share of being scammed by various companies over the years. But this is just horribly handled and I'd like to know when you're planning to rectify the situation, pay the punters their money and come up with a system that isn't totally unfair and randomly settling everything in your favor. To my knowledge no other bookmaker has handled this the way you have, and this really isn't a look that's going to convince anyone to keep placing bets on your site.

Posted

Hey @ChuckBassPoker,

Unfortunately it's not something we can say without having the correct information about it, only thing I can do is apologise that getting that information takes longer than it should. But rest assured, we are asking for the said information so we can provide it to you, but I'm afraid I can't promise it'll happen tonight. 

Posted

I mean it really is quite simple. People were betting on an 82-game season, that didn't happen because of covid = void all season bets. That's what every other bookmaker has done and it's the easiest, fastest, and fairest solution. It'd take you like 20 minutes to just simply void every regular season outright bet with the word "NHL" (and "NBA") mentioned in the title.

If you want to get greedy and make money even on a season that didn't happen, then the only ones that you can use are where the NHL actually gave results. They did announce that the Bruins won the President's Trophy (most points this season) and the division winners. IMO even for those the best way to do it would be just void everything, but settling those would be reasonable. And of course you can settle bets that were mathematically impossible, such as some of the "will team x make the playoffs?" where they were mathematically eliminated, over/under bets where the over was already reached, etc.

Settling super tight 82-game season player outrights after 60-something games where no one could possibly know what would've happened is just flat out wrong. Especially when more or less everything is settled in your favor obv.

To paint a picture, I had an over/under total goals scored bet on another site. The line was 39.5 goals and I had the under. The player had 20 goals and he was injured for the remainder of the season even before covid. In another words, I was a 100% lock to win the bet. Still it got voided, but I thought that was pretty fair and standard.

But when Unibet starts settling every single player prop bet as a loss where the races were all completely live and in some cases basically 50-50, that's not just unfair but a lot worse than that.

As you can see from the NBA thread, people really just want their money back and anything else is creating confusion and is a surefire way to lose customers. That's what you should also have gotten ready for about 2,5 months ago when it was already 99% obvious the NBA and NHL regular season wouldn't return, so you could've just done what other bookies did and pay people their money the second it became official. I really don't think "the situation with the re-scheduling is rather unprecedented" (which you gave in the NBA thread as an explanation) is a good explanation at all, you had 2.5 months to prepare and somehow you've come up with the most unfair system possible screwing over the players and nearly two weeks after the cancelation news (NHL) became official you still haven't settled or voided half of those bets.

Also, communication-wise you should've mass emailed everyone who had NHL bets and informed what's happening when you started voiding/settling those bets. That way customers wouldn't have to wake up to dozens of obvious non-loss bets marked as losses trying to reach out to support to find out wtf is going on. At this point I don't think there's much else left to do but void everything that isn't settled yet, and compensate players about bets that should've been voided in the first place for their unfair losses. And then snap void everything for the NBA to make sure this mess doesn't happen again.

Posted

Two weeks have passed, winning bets still haven't been settled, bets that are not supposed to be losses have been settled as losses, still no response from customer service, no response via Twitter, no progress report, no refunds, no compensation, nothing.

I really hate being that whiny guy but I think we can all agree this is beyond unacceptable. 

  • Like 1
Posted

Hey @ChuckBassPoker,

I 100% agree. I was not sure how to reply to this now, as I don't want to be repeating the same mantra of "I'm looking in to it" but honesty is the best policy. I have no updates for this yet. I will give them to you once I have some. My sincerest apologies that it takes this long. 

Posted

Another week has passed. Yesterday I tried speaking with live chat, who said they can't do anything else but give me the generic customer service email, and when I explained I've been in touch with you guys via Twitter, email, chat and Unibet community without any sort of response for 3 weeks now, they were like oh well nothing we can do.

The Vegas Golden Knights were crowned Pacific Division Champions on May 26th. Here's the NHL grand boss crowning them 3 weeks ago: https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/goldenknights/golden-knights-win-2nd-pacific-division-title-in-3-years-2036324/

The banner has already been lifted. Other bookies paid out this bet in May. Yet this same bet on Unibet (coupon ID 2397862524) is still unpaid.

Yet at the same time you've wasted no time declaring bets that do not have results and will never have any sort of official results as losses. Such as: 2136260322, 2134980987, 2132138612, 2140136752, etc etc the list goes on.

What exactly is this "more information" you're still waiting for? There is no more information to be had. The announcement was made on May 26th. There will be no more announcements, all you have to do is settle these bets fair and square and it really shouldn't have taken more than 24 hours in the first place. If in doubt, just void everything and that's it.

I'm eagerly anticipating a statement about how you intend to compensate us for this 3 week waiting period and for the wrongly settled bets. Not to mention that it would be nice to, you know, see our money one day for the bets that we actually hit according to NHL rules.

  • Like 1
Posted

Exactly. And what about NBA season over/under for teams and division winner, all should be voided long time ago because 82 regular season games will not be played. Standard rules of any sportsbook. When you gonna fix this issue? August? After regular season is over? 

Posted

It's now been about a month and this has not progressed at all.

Today I finally got a response from your customer service. Translated from my mother-tongue it reads:

"We're sorry, but we are still waiting for official results for this event".

After 29 days of waiting, and roughly 20 days after you have incorrectly settled bets from the same event as a loss when it should be a void/push, you have now decided that actually you don't even have results yet. No wonder those bets got settled wrong since you apparently didn't even settle them based on, you know, the actual results. How are you allowed to settle bets without results? Are you just completely clicking buttons and confiscating customers money when you feel like it?

I'm done. You guys owe me a few hundred euros, I guess I'll one day see them. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than just finally getting what I'm owed to ever bet again on your site though.

I would guess that my account in your records has a status of "wanted customer". I had no betting limits, I have history of 500€/hand blackjack, online casino adventures, 12 years of raking money for you at online poker, lots and lots of incredibly stupid sports bets. I have no other choice but to move elsewhere, I have really tried everything. I have contacted you via this forum, Twitter, email like 2395235 times, live chat. I've begged and begged to be connected to a higher-up who could sort this out in a second. This has cost me hundreds of euros worth of my time alone. At this point it's not even about the money, it's about the ridiculousness of this whole process, it just can't take a month to sort out bets, and after countless emails you just CAN''T possibly send a robotic email saying "we don't have results for this event". I have still yet to receive any sort of explanation or any kind of halfway meaningful communication about this. If you can take liberties of not settling winning bets worth a few hundred euros within a month yet at the same time reserve the right to incorrectly settle bets of the same category and keep the money, how could I ever want to place high stakes bets in your sportsbook?

This is all just bizarre. I have no other option but to move my business elsewhere, so I withdrew my balance today.

PS. You still owe me the money for those bets though.

balance1.JPG.928604fd71b0dc6723c218ae398b1b34.JPG



Edit: I guess I'll clarify since this is a really long thread. I have two sorts of issues:

1) (Minor) There are NHL season outright bets still unpaid 28 days after the season was declared completed (stopped after 66-67 games, resuming from playoffs if the COVID situation lets them, but either way the regular season is complete and the division winners etc were crowned). The statement from the head of NHL on NHL.com literally reads "For the purposes of record keeping and NHL awards, the 2019-20 regular season has been deemed to be completed.”

2) (Major) Yet you have actually settled (seemingly randomly) quite a few NHL season bets of this exact same category, even though you yourself claim to not have results for those events. The betslip #s can be found a few posts above as well as the explanations why they are wrong.

As you can see, 1 and 2 are very conflicted, as you have both failed to settle bets 28 days after we have results, AND have settled other bets of the exact same category as a loss when they are in fact not losses, based on what you have settled them I have no idea because you claim to not even have the results yet, and no one from your company has responded to anything and it's been a month. All I know is that you have screwed up both 1 and 2 when it should be humanly impossible to do both.

Posted

@ChuckBassPoker Sorry man, I've been going through the different bets. Am I correct that there's only one unsettled divison winner standing at the moment? 
I see a few of what I think are conference bets as well, but am not sure that I'm translating them correctly?
The rest looks to be settled as either won or lost, but let me know if I'm missing any and I'll raise them for settlement manually through the arguments made in this thread. 

/Jeppe

Former Community Manager
Posted

Hi Jeppe:

Unsettled:
2397862524 - win
2493520339 - loss
2132545569 - loss
2076998272 - loss

Incorrectly settled (there are and never will be results for these, see your own betting rules or ask any other betting site for reference):
2136260322
2140136752
2132138612
2132136663
2140135667 The Barzal-Pettersson is a push, the other falls in the latter category of this post, it technically should be a void too but that was like 0% to hit so whatever
2134980987

The last one especially is a mega fail on your part and is an absolute slam dunk void. I'll use the Gusev one as an example. The bet is about who scores the most points for NJD during an 82-game season. 82 games were not played --> there are no results. We did not bet on a 66-game season, and the NHL has not declared any results for these bets, and there never will be any. Your own betting rules (I read the entire like 30-page document) says that this is a push. It's also against the spirit of the bet -- Gusev was playing his first season in the NHL after absolutely crushing the KHL. It was known that he would take some time to take off and thus his 2nd half of the season would be much better. He was playing abysmally at the beginning, his first 15-20 games he got nothing going, but predictably he took off around christmas and was on pace to win this bet by a landslide. He was like 60%+ to win, but yeah unlucky me it becomes a push because the season was not finished. If this bet had been open on the day before the regular season prematurely ended, Gusev's odds would have been like 1.70. You settled it as a loss tho which is against your own rules and complete joke. You have basically just confiscated money from a dozen bets placed on an event without results and turned them into losses, and in several cases if anything the bets were closer to wins than losses.

Bets where it's a bit less clear, because they do actually "crown" and recognize the best pointscorer and goalscorer of the league even on a season of less than 82 games. Again this is against your own rules and what every other site did though, but if this was the only issue here and the rest were settled fairly, I would begrudgingly have been ok with having these settled as losses:

2133337681 - the 3/4 settled bets should all be pushes, not loss (the 4th is correctly unsettled)
2130935853

I wrote in length about the bets in categories about the best Swedish goalscorer/pointscorer etc earlier in this thread so feel free to dig up the explanation there. Basically virtually all of these bets should be voids, I would also have no problem if you voided the winning division bet as long as you voided everything, as that would be the standard thing to do anyway. But instead you have turned every push into a loss which is completely wrong.

I would also like to remind you once again about what your own customer service told me this week - about 15 days after you settled these bets incorrectly as losses: "We don't have the results for these events". I think that says about all about how this has been handled and how the losses need to be turned into voids. I'm fairly sure that settling bets without results is not a thing that can happen, and if it happens in a manner where every bet is settled against the customer, the correct wording is "scam".  I have no problem believing that this was a summer intern completely messing things up and I'm by no means suggesting that this was you (as a company) intentionally confiscating these funds. I have no issue at all against Unibet as a company. But what I also know is that trying to explain this case over and over has cost me so many hours of my time that I'm expecting some sort of compensation here. This for example took me another hour to write and I normally don't work for free. I could have spent this hour doing a lot of things that would have paid me 30-40 euros, and any of those options would have been much less tilting and tedious. Especially since this was not exactly the first hour I've been forced to spend trying to get my money back here over and over and over.

Posted

Updates?

 

It's been well over a month since all of these bets were supposed to be settled, and we're closing in on a month since you started settling void bets as losses and you still haven't returned the money. This is completely absurd

  • Like 1
Posted

Yeah, I'd really like to save myself and everyone else the trouble of going through MGA but the lack of reasonable communication here probably leaves me with no choice.

Received another response from Unibet, the latest twist is this:

They sent me a link to NHL.com's stats and said that based on these stats they have results for the 82-game player head-on-head bets (which cannot be found in the link), but that they can't use the same results to pay out division winner bets (which is literally the only confirmed result regarding my bets that actually can be found in the link). I'm basically just being trolled by Unibet customer service at this point, which would be kind of funny if the company didn't owe me so much money.

This was approximately the 23rd time messaging back and forth, a month later we are still in square one. I've begged and begged to get connected to someone who actually works in sportsbetting instead of customer service agents because I assume these could be taken care of in 2 minutes but apparently this isn't allowed. Instead they prefer to keep customers money for 35 days and counting and settle bets without results.

If there's anyone from Unibet reading this, would you mind telling me if you ever intend to pay out these bets or should I just contact the MGA?

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