£30 free no deposit: £18.00 of it survives, £1.20 the cost of staking £30

1

A balance of thirty pounds, which is not thirty pounds

A figure on a cashier’s screen is a claim about a relationship rather than a quantity of cash, and on an offer of this shape the relationship is one-sided. Thirty pounds has been entered against the reader’s name. Nothing has moved from the reader to the cashier, nothing has moved from the cashier to a bank, and the entry becomes money only when a stated volume of play has been produced. Until that happens the figure describes an undertaking, and an undertaking is not the same kind of object as a pound.

The published definition of the condition says as much in its own terms: a turnover requirement is the obligation to make wagers totalling a particular value in order for funds to become withdrawable from the rule sheet. Read that carefully and the sequence is clear. The funds are not withdrawable at the outset. They become withdrawable, and what makes them so is a total rather than an effort, a proportion or a period. Part four is about how absolute that is.

So this bill has three states of £30.00 to keep separate, and only one of them is money at the moment a reader meets it. An entry of £30.00 under a condition is worth £18.00 in expectation and is not yet anybody’s property. Thirty pounds of a reader’s own is worth £30.00, is their property throughout, and costs £1.20 to put through one crossing of play. A practice balance of £30.00 is worth nought and can never be anything else. The three sit side by side in part seven’s drawing.

Two quantities get supplied and one gets borrowed, as everywhere here. The return of 96 per cent is an assumption this publisher makes industry-wide with no catalogue standing behind it assumed, not taken. The stake is 10p a round also assumed, which exists to express money in rounds. Ten is the turnover count, that being the limit British rules set on what a licensee may require, which makes it the most charitable figure to be had: an offer described this way carries no Great Britain licence, so the limit binds nobody, and a condition above ten leaves less than £18.00. Part eight prices the entry where the limit does not hold.

2

Thirty pounds entered, and the three hundred it owes

The valuation runs on E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g). B is the entry, £30.00. W is the number of turnovers demanded, ten a ceiling from the rule sheet. The return is the figure fixed in part one, and g is a full pound, nothing being published about weighting and silence taking the reading that helps a reader most.

Working it in pounds: thirty pounds put round ten times calls for £300.00 of play; the margin on £300.00 at four hundredths a pound is £12.00; and £30.00 with £12.00 off it is £18.00. At 10p a round the £300.00 comes to three thousand rounds. Three fifths of the entry comes through, that being the proportion ten turnovers leaves at this return however large the entry is.

Three hundred pounds is ten times the entry and it is the number that decides everything else on this page. It is a volume rather than a rate, so no part of it can be substituted by playing more carefully, more slowly or at a different stake: three thousand rounds at 10p and six hundred at 50p discharge the identical £300.00. And because the entry itself is only £30.00, nine tenths of the required volume has to be funded out of whatever the first tenth wins, which is the mechanism behind part four.

The usual two hedges attach to £18.00. It is an average the arithmetic produces across many repetitions, and a single run at £300.00 of play off a £30.00 entry finishes at nothing far more often than it finishes at £18.00, with a minority carrying the average. And ten turnovers is a borrowed figure, being a limit on a British licensee, so at twenty turnovers the entry is worth £6.00 and at twenty-five it is worth nought whatever the screen says.

3

Thirty pounds of the reader’s own, crossed a single time

The second price is what gives the first any meaning. Take the thirty pounds to be the reader’s own, crossing the play a single time. None of a condition’s apparatus then applies: there is nothing to work off, no total to reach, and the money belongs to the reader at every instant of it, before the crossing, inside it and afterwards.

Thirty pounds through play on the assumptions of this page comes back as £28.80 in expectation, so the crossing costs £1.20, which this bill records as minus £1.20. Beside the £18.00 the entry comes to, the findings stand £19.20 apart, and £19.20 at 10p a round is 192 rounds of play.

a £30.00 entry values out at £18.00, thirty pounds of a reader’s own costs £1.20 across one crossing, £19.20 divides the findings and 192 rounds of play lie in the gap

Divide £12.00 by £1.20 and the answer is the turnover count, which is no accident. Each staked pound is charged four hundredths whoever owns it, and the charge asks no question about ownership. Volume is what changes: £30.00 of play against £300.00 of it, and the nine further crossings cost £10.80 between them. A condition is an obligation to buy play, not a charge on winnings.

There is a second difference between the columns and it is not about pounds at all. The paid side is liquid at every point. A reader who crosses £12.00 of their own £30.00 and stops holds the remainder plus whatever the play returned, and can ask for it. The free side is liquid at no point before the end: a reader who produces £290.00 of the £300.00 and stops holds an entry that is still an entry. Part four puts numbers to that.

4

A condition is a step and never a slope

Partial compliance with a turnover condition earns a proportional share of nothing, and that is the sharpest fact about an entry with no payment behind it. The requirement is a total: wagers amounting to £300.00. A reader who has produced £299.00 of play has produced ninety-nine point seven per cent of a total and has the same claim as a reader who produced nothing, because the funds become withdrawable on reaching the total rather than in step with progress towards it.

Three noughts and then a figure is what a step function looks like in a table, and the step is why the £18.00 in part two is an average rather than a prospect. The common route through that table is not reaching the fourth row at all: a £30.00 entry has to fund £300.00 of play out of £30.00 plus winnings, so the balance has to keep replacing itself nine times over, and most attempts run out somewhere in the first two rows.

Which gives a precise correction to a familiar way of thinking about these offers. Partial progress has no value, so there is nothing to protect by stopping and nothing to bank by going half way. A reader who intends to abandon a condition part way through should abandon it at the start, since the play produced in between costs the margin on itself and buys an entitlement to nothing. On this page the margin on half the condition is £6.00 and the entitlement at that point is nought.

The step also explains why the stake per round has no bearing on the valuation while having a great deal to do with reaching the end. Three thousand rounds at 10p and six hundred at 50p discharge the same £300.00 and cost the same £12.00 in margin, so £18.00 holds either way. What differs is how many separate chances the balance gets to replace itself, which makes reaching the fourth row likelier at the smaller stake and makes the fourth row no larger.

5

The moment an entry turns into customer money

British licence conditions draw a line in exactly the place part one drew it, which is the best confirmation available that the line is real. Where a licensee holds money for its customers, each of them has to be told in the terms what becomes of it should the firm go under, which of four ratings applies and by what arrangement, at the first payment and again whenever that arrangement shifts off the rule sheet. The four ratings begin at none at all without segregation and end at high.

Which money counts as held for customers is defined, and that definition is where this page turns on its hinge. Deposits that have cleared and await play are in it, so are winnings a customer has left in the account, and so are bonuses which have crystallised and gone unpaid off the rule sheet. One that has not crystallised falls outside. So an entry of £30.00 under a live condition is not money held for a customer, and the same £30.00 once the £300.00 has been produced is.

Read the first and second rows together and the £300.00 of play acquires a second meaning. It is not only the price of the £18.00; it is the act that moves £30.00 from one legal category into another. Before it, a reader is a person with an expectation against a company. After it, a reader is a person with money in an account, and on a licensed site that money has a protection rating attached to it and a six-monthly reminder if the rating is the worst of the four.

Off that licence neither the rating nor the reminder exists, and the crossing from the first row to the second is a matter of the cashier’s own bookkeeping with nothing published about it. That is the loss this page records: not the £12.00 the condition costs, which is arithmetic, but the absence of any stated account of what the £30.00 is while it waits and what would happen to it if the company behind the entry stopped trading.

6

What follows if it is not paid, and who decides

Suppose £300.00 of play gets produced and the £18.00 does not arrive. The question is then about procedure rather than arithmetic, and the honest answer is a comparison of two published frameworks instead of an assertion in either direction.

A British licence fixes the clocks and fixes who hears the matter at the end of them. A reader gets a window counted in months to bring a complaint, a licensee owes acknowledgement in days, no more than eight weeks for the entirety of it, and the closing letter has to point the way to an independent body which only the regulator may approve off the rule sheet. Eight such bodies stand on the published list and five of them cover every remote sector. So the £18.00 has a named destination and somebody other than the cashier at the end of it.

Offshore the frameworks are not empty and not equivalent. Curaçao publishes one, and on paper its windows and its clocks run close to the British figures, with dispute resolution compulsory and the operator paying for it off the rule sheet. What differs is authorship. An operator there may fix the terms the process runs on, including whether the outcome binds a player at all and whether a small claim qualifies to be heard, and that regulator states it will not decide an individual complaint itself.

For a reader holding an £18.00 finding the statement is therefore in three parts. A route exists, which rules out the claim that nothing can be done offshore. Its clocks resemble the British ones, which rules out the claim that the delay is the difference. And the terms of the route may be written by the party the complaint is against, which is the difference and is the one worth carrying. On a sum of £18.00 the practical weight of that is considerable, since a minimum value set for a claim would exclude it entirely.

7

A practice balance of thirty pounds, and its nought

The third state of £30.00 is a practice balance and it is worth nought. Nought is not a reduced £18.00 and not £18.00 waiting on a longer condition. Value cannot leave a practice balance by any route at all, so the figure printed on one is decoration and says as much at £30.00 as it says at five hundred pounds, which is nothing.

Take practice down the four columns above and nought fills the free side at every row, which drops the distance to the paid figure of minus £1.20. The noughts are the finding. An evening spent carrying a practice £30.00 up to £500.00 has taught a reader the controls and settled nothing about the £12.00 that £300.00 of real play costs, the quantity measured on this bill being a cost and practice being where costs do not arise.

Practice has one further use on a page about entries, and it is a clarifying one. A practice balance is the pure instance of a figure belonging to nobody, and that is what makes it the proper comparison for an uncrystallised entry rather than setting the entry beside cash. The entry is worth £18.00 and practice is worth nought, so the two are not the same. Neither of them is £30.00, which is the error the headline invites.

8

The second condition that nobody publishes

One question this page cannot answer decides how far the £18.00 can be trusted, and it is this: when the entry wins, are the winnings money or are they a further entry. Nothing published states a rule converting winnings from an advance into another advance, and no standard ceiling on what an advance may produce is published either recorded as absent. So the £18.00 is computed on the simplest reading, which is that discharging £300.00 of play makes the balance money, and a reader who finds a term saying otherwise has found a figure this bill did not have.

Two further figures are assumptions and both are flagged where they are spent. The turnover count is ten, taken off the rule sheet as the furthest a British licence lets a condition go, so a heavier one leaves less than £18.00 and the figure is no forecast: twenty turnovers put the entry at £6.00, twenty-five put it at nought, and past twenty-five the valuation floors there. The weighting is a whole pound, and at the thirty pence the British regulator put down in consultation E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g) turns the £300.00 into £1,000.00 of play and the £18.00 into nought.

No single total is struck past £18.00 for that reason. A page naming a figure net of a ceiling it had invented, or net of a second condition nobody has published, would be printing something indistinguishable in appearance from the arithmetic and resting on nothing. Three named gaps and one struck figure is the right proportion for an offer described by a phrase rather than by a document.

£19.20 wants the same label as £18.00. British rules allow a licensee no more than ten turnovers, and nothing published says what an entry of this shape asks, so nothing lawful takes the distance under £19.20 while five turnovers would open it to £25.20. Past that ceiling, which binds nobody at this key, the gap closes to £7.20 at twenty turnovers and £1.20 at twenty-five, the £1.20 being one crossing of the entry. A floor reports at least, and that cannot be mistaken for an entry being generous.

Five lines of finding. Thirty pounds entered with no payment behind it is an undertaking and not a sum of money, worth £18.00 in expectation at ten turnovers against £1.20 for the same £30.00 crossed as money of the reader’s, which puts a gap of £19.20 or 192 rounds between them. The condition is £300.00 of play, three thousand rounds at the stake assumed here, and it pays on the total rather than on progress: a quarter done, half done and £299.00 done all entitle a reader to nothing. The crossing to £300.00 is also the crossing from an entry outside the customer-funds duty to a balance inside it. If the £18.00 is then not paid, a route exists whose clocks resemble the British ones and whose terms the operator may help to set. And whether winnings from the entry are money or a further entry is published nowhere, which is why the valuation stops at £18.00.