200% deposit bonus: £50 of credit leaves £30.00, where staking £50 costs £2.00

1

Why two hundred per cent names no figure until a deposit does

Two hundred per cent is a ratio and a ratio has to be applied to something. The thing it gets applied to is money the reader has not handed over yet, so the figure printed across the top of it is a claim about a future payment rather than about any quantity a cashier is parting with. Until a figure goes in the deposit box there is nothing on the table to price, which is why this bill opens by choosing one: £25.00 supplied by this publisher, a sum small enough to be ordinary and large enough to reach the kind of maximum part four deals with.

From £25.00 everything else drops out. The credit is twice the payment, £50.00. The balance on screen is the two together, £75.00. The condition that comes with the credit is written as a multiple of the credit, and ten of those is £500.00 of staking to be got through. Nothing in that chain was published by anybody: it is arithmetic on one assumed deposit, and a different deposit scales all of it without changing the shape. Put £5.00 in and the credit is £10.00, the turnover £100.00, the finding £6.00. Put £250.00 in and the finding is £300.00, if no maximum intervenes, and a maximum usually does.

So a reader comparing two hundred per cent against one hundred is not comparing two sums at all. They are comparing two rules about their own wallet. The rule with the bigger number in it produces more credit from the same payment and, by exactly the same factor, more staking to be done before any of it turns into money. Part six counts that out, because the comparison is clearest when the obligation is measured in deposits rather than in credit: at one hundred per cent, ten deposits of staking; at two hundred, twenty.

One distinction has to hold through the whole bill and it is worth stating before any figure. The £25.00 is the reader’s money. It can be withdrawn, it carries no condition, and it was never given to them by anybody. The £50.00 is not theirs and becomes theirs only if a condition is satisfied. Printing £75.00 as the value of the offer puts the two in one bucket, and the bucket is a third full of the reader’s own cash. This bill prices the £50.00 and keeps the £25.00 to one side, every time either appears.

2

Fifty pounds of credit against five hundred pounds of turnover

The house expression for a balance with a condition over it is E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g). Reading it as a sentence: a credited balance is worth its own size, cut by whatever the staking it owes is expected to lose, and the staking it owes is the multiple divided by the weighting a qualifying game carries. B here is £50.00 of credit, the deposit being no part of it. W is ten, the most a British licence permits an incentive to require of bonus funds a licence condition. The return is 96 per cent, which this publisher applies as an industry figure and attributes to no title stated, not read off anything. The weighting is taken at full, since none is published and the silence is read in the reader’s favour.

That gives the free finding in one line. Ten turnovers of £50.00 is £500.00 of staking; four hundredths of £500.00 is £20.00; and £50.00 with £20.00 taken off it is £30.00. Expressed as a share, the condition eats two fifths of the credit and three fifths come through, which is the same three fifths that would come through on £5.00 or on £5,000.00, because size cancels out of the expression.

The number worth dwelling on is £500.00 rather than £30.00. Five hundred pounds of staking is twenty times the payment the reader made and ten times the credit they were given, and it is the quantity of play a reader has to produce before any part of £50.00 can be taken away. A reader who stakes 20p a round this publisher’s own stake is looking at 2,500 rounds of play to discharge it. That figure, not the headline, is what a two hundred per cent match actually asks for.

Two warnings go with £30.00. It is a mean and not a result: most attempts at £500.00 of staking off £50.00 of credit end with nothing surviving, and the mean is lifted by the minority that end well. And ten turnovers is a bound borrowed from a regime these offers sit outside, so a condition heavier than ten leaves less than £30.00. Part seven prices the same £50.00 where the bound does not apply.

3

The same fifty pounds staked by the reader, once over

Price the second side now, which is the side that makes this bill something other than a description of an offer. Let the £50.00 be the reader’s own money and let it go through the same play one time, with nothing advanced and so nothing owed. There is no multiple over it. There is no maximum on what it can win. No weighting argument can arise, because nothing has to be discharged. All that is left is the return, taken once.

Fifty pounds through the same play, four hundredths of it going to the margin, is expected back as £48.00. The cost of the exercise is £2.00, written as minus £2.00 because the money went out and £48.00 came back. Against the £30.00 on the free side the distance is £32.00, which at 20p a round is 160 rounds, and a reader who counts in rounds and pays in money should have the distance in both.

£50.00 of credit worth £30.00 when a cashier supplies it and minus £2.00 when a reader stakes it, £32.00 apart, which is 160 further rounds of play

Set the paid figure beside the free one and the proportions tell the story. Four pence in the pound costs £2.00 across £50.00 of staking and £20.00 across £500.00, and the only difference between the two sides of this bill is how much staking each has to produce. Nothing about the return is harsher on credit than on cash. The condition is the whole of the penalty, and it is a penalty of £18.00 in this instance, being the nine turnovers beyond the first.

It follows that taking the credit is worth doing and taking the headline seriously is not. A reader who deposits £25.00 and refuses the match holds £25.00 of spendable money and expects to lose £1.00 playing it through once. A reader who accepts holds £75.00, of which £25.00 is spendable and £50.00 conditional, and expects £30.00 of the conditional part to survive. The match is worth about £30.00 and costs nothing in money, so refusing it would be odd. Believing it is worth £50.00, or worse that the offer is worth £75.00, is the error the arithmetic exists to prevent.

4

A maximum written as a sum, and the deposit at which it bites

A percentage and a maximum are different kinds of promise and they interact in a way the headline hides. Suppose the maximum credit is £50.00, which is the figure this bill has been working with. At two hundred per cent that maximum is reached on a £25.00 payment. At one hundred per cent the same maximum would need £50.00 to reach. So the larger percentage does not buy more credit than the smaller one where a maximum is in force: it buys the same credit for half the payment, and above the deposit that reaches the maximum it buys nothing more at all.

The third column is the one nobody prints. Two hundred per cent is honest at £10.00 and at £25.00, becomes 125 per cent at £40.00, and has shrunk to a third by £150.00, and none of that is a change in the terms. It is the same term meeting a larger payment. A reader wanting the advertised ratio has to deposit at or under the point where the maximum bites, and that point is the maximum divided by two: £25.00 against a £50.00 top, £50.00 against a £100.00 top, £12.50 against a £25.00 top.

Which turns the usual advice on its head. On an offer of this shape there is no reward for depositing more. Beyond £25.00 the credit is frozen at £50.00 and the finding stays at £30.00 while the reader’s own exposure climbs pound for pound, so the extra money buys only itself. A ratio printed across the top of an offer is at its most truthful at the smallest qualifying deposit, which is the opposite of how a headline of that size is usually read.

One British duty bears on this directly and bears on it as a matter of advertising rather than of gambling. A maximum is a condition of consequence, and a condition of consequence belongs where a reader will meet it rather than wherever is convenient off the rule sheet. Who qualifies, what has to be paid in and what has to be turned over are all on the advertising regulator’s list of the conditions that count, and a top on the credit belongs on it just as squarely. A reader who cannot see the maximum from the headline cannot tell whether the ratio in front of them is 200 per cent or 50.

5

A third of the balance belongs to the reader and is not priced

At two hundred per cent a combined balance is one part payment and two parts credit, so £75.00 on screen is £25.00 of the reader’s money and £50.00 of somebody else’s. Everything in this bill prices the second figure. The first is the reader’s property before the offer existed and remains so after it, and including it in a valuation of the offer would be like counting the price of a ticket as part of the prize.

The inclusion happens anyway, and when it does the exaggeration is exactly the size of the payment. A reader told the offer is worth £75.00 is being handed a figure a third of which they supplied. A reader who then compares £75.00 with the £30.00 this bill finds is comparing two things of different kinds, and the honest pair is £50.00 of credit against £30.00 of expected survival, a shortfall of £20.00. The £25.00 goes in a separate column, where its own expected cost of £1.00 over a single turnover can be looked at on its own.

British licence conditions treat the two halves differently as well, which is the strongest confirmation available that they are not one quantity. A licensee holding the deposited £25.00 holds customer money and has to say in its terms whether the £25.00 would survive the firm going under, at what level of protection and by what means, with the statement made at the first payment and renewed whenever the arrangement changes off the rule sheet. The ratings available to describe it run from no protection at all with no segregation up to high protection. None of that applies to the £50.00, because credit a condition has not yet released is not customer money.

There is a second asymmetry with real money in it. A licensed cashier may not use a term capping what a reader takes out of what they deposited, so the £25.00 is returnable on demand. A cap on what credit can win is a different thing, is not caught by that prohibition, and may sit in the same document without contradiction. Both can be in force simultaneously. So of the £75.00 on screen, one third is protected against withdrawal caps by rule and two thirds are not, and a reader who has added the halves together cannot see where the line falls.

6

Counting the obligation in deposits instead of in credit

A condition written as ten times the credit sounds like a fixed burden and is not one. Because the credit is a multiple of the payment, the staking owed is a multiple of the payment too, and the second multiple is the one a reader should carry in their head. At two hundred per cent the staking owed is twenty payments. At one hundred per cent it is ten. The ratio of staking to credit never moves, which is the point: the headline percentage does not buy a kinder condition, it buys a bigger one in exact proportion.

Read the last column and the family of percentage matches becomes one thing with a dial on it. Every line of that table surrenders two fifths of its credit to the condition and keeps three fifths, so the finding on the second line is £30.00 and on the fourth it is £60.00, and a reader choosing between them is choosing how much play to produce rather than how good a rate to get. Twenty payments of staking off one payment of money is the honest description of a two hundred per cent match at ten turnovers, and it is a description nobody puts on a front page.

The practical consequence is about stamina rather than value. £500.00 of staking at 20p a round is 2,500 rounds, and a condition usually comes with a window to finish inside. A reader who cannot produce 2,500 rounds in the time allowed does not get £30.00. They get nought, and the £25.00 they deposited has in the meantime been exposed to the ordinary cost of play, which over £500.00 of staking is £20.00 whoever the money belonged to.

7

Weighting, and the turnover at which fifty pounds comes to nothing

Nothing in the expression knows what percentage produced the credit, because the credit enters as B and divides straight out of the surviving share. What remains is a share decided by two things and no others: how many turnovers get demanded, and how much of a staked pound is counted. On a full count that share runs out once twenty-five turnovers are asked, so twenty-five is the line for a two hundred per cent match and for every other percentage too, which is the one fact worth carrying from one of these offers to the next.

Weighting moves that break point a long way, and it moves it downwards. Work the expression again, E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g), with the weighting set to thirty pence in the pound, a contribution rate the British regulator reproduced while consulting on these conditions a rule sheet reading. Four hundredths times ten, divided by three tenths, comes to more than one, so the surviving share is negative and the formula floors it at nought. In staking terms, ten turnovers of £50.00 at that weighting needs £1,666.67 put through rather than £500.00, and twenty-five turnovers becomes seven and a half.

That is a larger effect than any plausible change in the headline. Moving from two hundred per cent to four hundred doubles the credit and doubles the staking and leaves the finding at three fifths of the credit. Moving the weighting from full to thirty pence leaves the credit alone and takes the finding to nought. A reader deciding between offers on the strength of the percentage is reading the least important number on the page, and a reader who cannot find the weighting cannot price the offer at all.

8

A practice balance of fifty pounds, and what comes out of it

A third way of putting £50.00 on a screen needs no arithmetic whatever. A practice balance reading £50.00 pays nought. Not a trimmed version of £30.00, not £30.00 held back behind a condition, and nothing a cashier has decided against publishing: nought, because no route exists from a practice balance to a bank account. A practice balance set to five hundred pounds pays nought as well, which settles as plainly as anything could that the figure on one carries no content.

Put a practice balance through the instrument above and its free column reads nought on every row, so the distance becomes identical to the paid column and the whole finding is the minus £2.00. Those noughts are the answer rather than a missing answer. An afternoon spent turning a practice £50.00 into £900.00 has established what the buttons do and nothing at all about what the same play costs when the money is real, since cost is the one quantity a practice balance has no way of carrying.

Three screens can read £50.00 and mean £30.00, minus £2.00 and nought. Nothing visible separates them. What separates them is which of three arrangements the reader is in, and that lives in the terms and never in the balance, which is the argument for reading the first and distrusting the second.

9

What a headline leaves out, and the total this bill will not strike

Two quantities this bill needs are published nowhere, and both get named rather than invented. The first is the maximum. Part four worked a £50.00 top because a figure was needed to show how a top behaves, and £50.00 is this publisher’s own choice ours, and said so. Where the maximum is not in front of the reader, the credit on a £25.00 payment might be £50.00 or £20.00 or £10.00, the match actually paid might be any ratio at or below the headline, and no single total can be struck. The honest output in that case is the method and the range, not a figure dressed up as a finding.

The second is the turnover requirement. Two hundred per cent describes a family of offers rather than one document, so nothing states the multiple a particular reader will meet. Ten was used because it is the ceiling a British incentive may not exceed, and an offer of this shape carries its licence somewhere other than Great Britain, so the ceiling is a courtesy rather than a constraint. Where the multiple is unpublished this bill prices £50.00 across a range and strikes nothing, because a plausible figure invented to complete a sum cannot be checked by anybody and a stated gap can.

A word on the kind of figure £32.00 is. Ten turnovers is as much as British rules let a licensee be required to meet, and no document at this key states a number, so across lawful conditions the distance never comes to less, while five turnovers opens it to £42.00. Nothing bounds a cashier beyond that regime, where the gap tightens instead to £12.00 at twenty turnovers and to the £2.00 one crossing costs at twenty-five. Printed as a floor, the finding says credit comes out ahead of paying by that much or better, and an error in that direction costs a reader nothing.

The finding reduces to four lines. Two hundred per cent describes the reader’s payment and not the offer, so £25.00 in makes £50.00 of credit and the £75.00 on screen is a third the reader’s own. Ten turnovers leave £30.00 of that credit, the same £50.00 staked by the reader costs £2.00, and the two stand £32.00 or 160 rounds apart. A maximum written as a sum decides the real ratio and bites at half the deposit a one hundred per cent match would need. And the turnover at which the whole thing comes to nought is twenty-five, which is where it sits at any percentage whatever.