Rounds tied to a single title: £17.28 at the ceiling, and nothing at all under a 40 per cent weight

1

A count fastened to one machine, and what cannot be said about it

The key this bill answers names a count, a promise, a denial that money is wanted, and then a particular machine. Three of the items in that list are the ordinary furniture of this section. The fourth is new, and it changes what a page like this one is permitted to do, so the restriction is set out before any figure appears rather than buried in a note.

This publication does not build arithmetic on a named machine or a named studio. No return is stated for a title, no finding is sourced to one, and the name in the key will not be doing any work below. That is not squeamishness. A return belongs to a particular build of a particular game as a particular operator has it configured, and a page quoting one from memory would be handing a reader a precise figure with nothing behind it. Where a reader wants the return for whatever they are actually about to play, a licensed site has to make information about the chances of winning easy to get at before anybody commits, and four things are named as able to do that job: a statement of the mechanics together with how prizes get allotted, the house margin, the return, or the chance of the winning events RTS requirement 3C. The four are separated by or. A reader is owed one of them, and a percentage is not necessarily the one they get.

What this bill uses instead is declared and general. A round goes at 20p, which is this publisher’s own figure, set here above the 10p several neighbouring bills use so that two pages on the same count of a hundred and fifty do not pretend to be one measurement. A turn on an ordinary machine is taken across this domain to give 96 per cent back, which is likewise a stated assumption of the house and not a reading of anything. Both figures scale the finding in direct proportion and neither of them is the subject of this page.

The subject is the third letter in the instrument, and a reader who has never looked at a play-through closely has almost certainly never met it. The condition is not simply a multiple applied to a balance. It is a multiple applied to a balance and then divided into by the share of a stake that counts towards it. The British ceiling binds the multiple. It says nothing about the share, and this bill is about what the share can do to a figure even when the multiple is at its lawful heaviest.

The ceiling itself is the one quantity here that belongs to nobody on this domain. Britain has, as of 19 January 2026, forbidden any licensee to demand play-through beyond tenfold whatever it put into the account Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1, and the consultation response that carries it is explicit that the limit reaches the multiple and no other term of the arrangement. Offers on a key of this shape do not print multiples of their own, so the free column stands at ten times, making the £17.28 a floor: a lighter demand leaves more and widens the distance. A cashier without the Great Britain licence that would bind it is under no ceiling whatever.

2

Thirty pounds of face and the £17.28 the ceiling leaves

Start with the face, which is arithmetic and nothing else. A hundred and fifty turns at 20p stake £30.00. The offer puts up every penny, and on a 96 per cent return the turns give £28.80 back into the account. The £1.20 that stayed behind is the margin on £30.00 of play, and it turns up once more as the whole price of buying the hundred and fifty in the column beside this one, the 4 per cent being taken whoever puts the stake up.

The condition then acts on the £28.80 through E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g). Give it £28.80 of balance, a ceiling of ten, 96 per cent, and a share counted at the whole, and it answers £17.28. The cash working: ten times £28.80 is £288.00 that must pass through the machine before the balance may be taken out, 4 per cent of £288.00 is £11.52, and £28.80 less £11.52 leaves the £17.28.

The round count hidden in that is 1,440. At 20p a turn, £288.00 of ordered staking is 1,440 further turns, on top of the hundred and fifty the offer handed over. So the advertised count is about a tenth of the count a reader actually plays, and the balance stays shut until the last of the 1,440 rather than opening by degrees as they go.

Two further figures belong here because the later parts lean on them. The balance of £28.80 can itself fund £720.00 of staking before a 96 per cent return has eaten it, which is 3,600 turns at 20p. And a condition of twenty-five times, which is what the ceiling was raised against rather than anything a licensee may now set, would order exactly that £720.00 and leave nothing. Those two coincide for the same reason they coincide on every bill in this section: the point where the order equals the balance’s whole funding capacity is the point where the finding reaches nought.

So at full weight the arrangement is legible and not especially alarming. Thirty pounds of face, £28.80 of balance, 1,440 turns of work, £17.28 at the end, against £1.20 to buy the same hundred and fifty with no work attached. The rest of this bill is about the word assumed in that paragraph, which is weight, and about how little of the £17.28 survives once it is relaxed.

3

The letter in the formula that nobody ever reads

Here is what the share does, stated plainly before any figure is attached to it. A play-through is satisfied by contribution and not by staking. If a pound put through a qualifying machine counts as a pound towards the condition, contribution and staking are the same thing and the share may be ignored. If a pound counts as less, the reader has to stake proportionately more to contribute the same amount, and the ordered staking rises by the reciprocal of the share.

Put numbers on it with this bill’s balance. Ten times £28.80 is £288.00 of contribution required, whatever the share happens to be: that part does not move. What moves is how much staking it takes to produce £288.00 of contribution. At the whole it takes £288.00. At three quarters it takes £384.00. At a half it takes £576.00. At three tenths it takes £960.00. The condition in each case is the same ten times. The work is not.

Now carry that through the return, because staking is what the house takes its margin from and contribution is not. The margin on £384.00 is £15.36, which leaves £13.44 of the £28.80. The margin on £576.00 is £23.04, leaving £5.76. The margin on £960.00 is £38.40, which is more than the balance ever was, so there is nothing left and the arithmetic is held at nought rather than allowed to go below it.

The pattern is worth saying in words as well as in money, because of all the lines here it is the one most worth carrying away. Halving the share does not halve the finding. It doubles the staking, and since the finding is the balance less a fixed fraction of the staking, it takes the finding down much faster than proportionately and eventually through the floor. A reader who knows the multiple and not the share knows one of the two numbers that decide what an offer is worth, and on this bill it is the less important one.

There is a quiet consequence in that for the ceiling itself. A limit on the multiple caps the contribution demanded and leaves the staking that produces it unlimited. So a lawful ten times, applied where the share is small enough, can order more play than a thirty-times condition at full weight would. The regulator capped the term that is written in the advertisement. The term that does the work in these figures was left where it was.

4

Forty per cent, where this bill’s finding stops existing

Every bill in this section carries a point at which its finding reaches nought, and on the others that point is a multiple. Here it is a percentage, and it can be derived in one line. The finding vanishes when the margin on the ordered staking equals the whole balance, which happens when the share falls to the multiple times the house take, that is ten times 4 per cent. Forty per cent. Below it, a condition set at the lawful ceiling leaves a reader nothing at all.

Follow the right-hand column down and the collapse is anything but gentle. Taking a quarter off the share costs £3.84. Taking the next quarter off costs £7.68. Taking a tenth off after that finishes the job entirely. The last row is also the row where the ordered staking has reached the £720.00 that the balance could fund in total, which is the same coincidence as in part two arriving by a different road.

It is worth saying what is and is not being claimed by that table. No offer is being accused of setting any particular share, because no offer on this key publishes one that this publisher could read, and a figure nobody has printed is not a figure to assume. The table is a map of what a reader’s finding does as the share moves, and its use is this: a reader who opens the terms and finds a percentage can take their answer straight off the row, and a reader who finds no percentage at all now knows what the silence is capable of concealing.

The row at two fifths deserves one more sentence, because it is the whole argument of the bill compressed. At that share, every protection the ceiling offers has been honoured. The multiple is ten, which is lawful. The arithmetic is done correctly. And the reader collects nought. A ceiling that binds one term of a two-term condition is a ceiling on half of the thing, and the half it does not bind can carry the whole finding away without breaking any published rule.

5

The same hundred and fifty with the reader paying

The right-hand column is one subtraction and it is the steadiest thing on the page. A hundred and fifty turns at 20p stake £30.00 and hand back £28.80, so the cost of the hundred and fifty is £1.20. Nothing whatever hangs off the result: there is no multiple above it, no share to divide into it, and no percentage anywhere that can make the £1.20 into a different number.

That immunity is the point of printing the column, and on this bill it is sharper than usual. Every figure in the free column moves when the share moves, from £17.28 down to nought, which is a range as wide as the finding itself. The paid column does not move at all, because a reader staking their own money is never asked how much of it counts. They keep what the turns return and the house keeps its margin, and the transaction is finished when the last turn stops.

Put the columns together and £18.48 separates them, or 92.4 rounds at 20p, so long as a whole stake counts. Where it counts at a half the distance is £6.96. Where it counts at two fifths the distance is £1.20, which is to say the free offer has become worth exactly nothing more than not taking it, and the entire remaining difference between the columns is the £1.20 the reader did not have to spend.

a tied hundred and fifty worth £17.28 at the ceiling where a whole stake counts, set against £1.20 to buy them, £18.48 of distance or 92.4 rounds, and no distance left once the share falls to two fifths

6

Why a tied count cannot go looking for a better weight

Everything above would be a general caution about play-throughs if the count in this key were loose. It is not. The key fastens its hundred and fifty rounds to one machine, and that single structural fact converts an ordinary variable into one the reader cannot touch.

Consider what a reader with an unfastened balance can do. If the terms weight categories differently, they can move their staking to whichever category counts most, finish the condition on the least staking available, and keep the most of the balance. The share stops being a fixed term of the arrangement and becomes something the reader optimises against. On the figures above, the difference between finishing at the whole and finishing at a half is £11.52 of finding, which exceeds a third of what the whole offer has as face value.

A count attached to a title has none of that latitude. The rounds turn where they are told to turn, and the balance they leave is usually fastened to the same place for at least as long as the condition runs. Whatever the share is for that category is the share the reader gets, for the whole of the 1,440 turns, with no second category to move to. So on this one key the share is not a variable the reader manages. It is a term of the contract they are handed, and the only question is whether it is written down anywhere they can find it.

There is a second, smaller consequence of the tie that belongs beside the first. A reader who cannot change machine also cannot change stake beyond whatever that machine offers, and the stake is the other quantity that sets the size of everything here. This bill prices a 20p round because it had to price something; a reader whose machine starts at 10p is reading a bill whose figures are all halved, and one whose machine starts at 25p is reading figures a quarter larger. The ratios survive that change untouched. The sums do not, and a reader should carry the ratios rather than the sums.

None of this is a criticism of any particular machine, which is a thing this publication has no view about and takes no figure from. It is a statement about a contract shape. When an offer names the game, the reader loses the one lever that would let them manage the unpublished half of the condition, and the finding becomes entirely a function of terms somebody else wrote.

7

What is published about weighting and what is not

This part separates what can be sourced from what cannot, because a page that has just spent four parts on a quantity nobody prints owes the reader an account of exactly how unprinted it is.

What is published is the cap and its scope. The multiple may not exceed ten times the credited funds, from 19 January 2026, across all licences but those for machine technology and gambling software, and the regulator defines a wagering requirement as wagers of some stated total that must be made before money can be taken out off the consultation response. The limit sits on the multiple, and the response says as much in terms.

What is also published, and is the hinge of this bill, is that weighting came through the same process untouched. The consultation record contains a worked example in the respondents’ section describing a hundred pounds of bonus at ten times where each pound staked contributes thirty pence, and the regulator noted the point without acting on it off the consultation response. That thirty pence is a respondent’s description of its own practice and must not be read as the regulator’s finding about the market, and this bill does not use it as one. What it does do is sit below the two fifths computed in part four, which means that at the rate a respondent put in front of the regulator, a condition at the lawful ceiling leaves a reader nothing at all. That consequence is this site’s own arithmetic on a quoted rate.

Taken down the middle column the asymmetry is complete. One of the four quantities has a ceiling over it and the rest have none, and the one with the ceiling is the one an advertisement is likeliest to mention. Taken down the right-hand column the position is worse still: three of those quantities are published nowhere on offers of this shape, and the fourth comes in whichever of four alternatives the licensee prefers.

So this bill strikes no total for a weighted condition and prints none. It gives the figure at full weight, which is £17.28 and is the most the arrangement can be worth at the lawful ceiling, states the share at which that figure disappears, which is two fifths, and tells the reader that the share itself was not found in anything this publisher could read. A number nobody has printed is not a number to invent, and the honest output of a page in that position is a bound and a threshold rather than a figure.

8

A hundred and fifty demo turns, where no share matters

A third price goes on every sheet this site prints, the one where nothing is paid out, and here it has an unusual sort of usefulness. It is the only version of the arrangement in which the share is irrelevant, because a share is a fraction of a contribution towards a condition, and a demo has no condition, no contribution and no balance for either to act on. The finding is nought, the cost is nought, and neither is an estimate.

Run it through the columns and the free side is nought at the face, nought after any condition and nought at the end, while the distance closes on the £1.20 the paid column cost. The two noughts available in this section remain different kinds of thing. The nought at the foot of the table in part four is an outcome of a term, and a different term produces a different number. A demo’s nought cannot be moved by any term at all, because there is no route out of it for money to take.

What makes the demo worth four paragraphs here is that it answers the one question the tied count raises and nothing else can. A reader cannot discover the share from a demo, and cannot discover the multiple either, but the smallest turn the machine will take is visible there, and a stake is what converts every ratio on this page into a sum. If a machine’s smallest turn is 10p rather than the 20p priced here, the reader can halve every money figure above for themselves in a few seconds, and they will have done it without an account, a deposit or a form.

What the demo cannot tell them is the thing this bill is about. There is no weighting in a demo to inspect, no terms page attached to it, and nothing collectable at the end to be divided into. So it settles the stake and nothing else, and it is printed here as a control rather than as an offer.

9

The whole account, with both unknowns named out loud

The arrangement has two unknown terms and this bill has handled them differently, which is deliberate and worth restating before the summary.

The multiple is unknown and has been replaced by the published ceiling, which is lawful, cited, and the heaviest demand that may be made of a licensee, so the £17.28 is a floor and the £18.48 of distance is the narrowest honest version of it. The share is unknown and has not been replaced by anything. It has been read at the whole, which is the kindest reading available, and the page has printed the threshold below which that kindness stops mattering because the answer becomes nought.

The account of a tied hundred and fifty therefore runs like this. The face is £30.00 at the 20p this publisher prices a turn at. The balance they leave is £28.80. At the lawful ceiling the condition orders £288.00 of staking, which is 1,440 further turns, and £17.28 is what remains for a reader who completes them where a whole stake counts. Buying the same hundred and fifty costs £1.20 and ends there. The distance is £18.48 or 92.4 rounds. And every one of those figures is contingent on a share of a stake that no offer on this key has published, which this bill will not invent, and which at two fifths or below takes the entire finding to nothing while leaving the ceiling perfectly observed.