William Hill nixes long shot bet from rugby punters

Gary Smeaton and Kris Shenton walked into their local William Hill outlet earlier this year with spirits soaring. After all, the two UK punters were getting ready to live out every sports bettor’s fondest dream. The two men held a long shot winning ticket on rugby futures that was going to pay out $30,241 on a $100 wager.
They’d bet that the Salford Red Devils would finish in the top five of the Super League with an 8-1 record. That wager was paired with an additional bet that Jackson Hastings would receive the Man of Steel Award (an rough equivalent of an MVP). Their luck held through the season when both propositions came to pass.
But their luck was about to run out.
When Smeaton and Shenton reached the counter they were told that William Hill would not be paying them $30,241 but rather their ticket was only going to be worth $2,197 due to an obscure sports betting term called, related contingency. The related contingency is a scenario that states if one portion of a prop turns out, the other is much more likely to happen. In this scenario, the clerk (or computer) is not supposed to even accept the wager in the first place, saying the clerk “must have been half asleep.”
William Hill issued an official statement saying, “This bet has been struck as a result of human error and as such has been corrected. At no point was the double on offer before the start of the season. Unfortunately, we realise this is disappointing for the customer and we can only apologise.”
But there’s more to the story. It turns out that the Man of Steel Award is not necessarily awarded to a player on the best team, since it’s done by a secret ballot. Any player could, technically, win the award no matter how their season turned out. The two men say they’re going to fight the decision and they may actually have a pretty good case.