100% deposit bonus: £25 matched is worth £15.00, against £1.00 to stake the same sum

1

Where the arithmetic starts when there is no count to multiply out

A count of free rounds becomes money by multiplication. So many rounds, so much staked on each, and a face value drops out of the pair without anybody assuming much. A matched deposit resists that, because no count sits inside it and no stake is attached to it. One hundred per cent states a rule about a figure the reader has not picked yet, and a rule is not a sum. The reckoning on this bill therefore starts a step earlier than it does where a count is published: it starts the moment somebody decides what to put in, that being the moment a percentage turns into pounds.

The reversal decides what has to be supplied and what can be read. Where a count is published, the count is given and the stake per round is the thing a publisher must assume. Here it runs the other way about. Nothing about the sum is published, because the sum does not exist until a reader acts, and the quantity this publisher has to supply is the deposit. £25.00 is the deposit worked throughout a figure this bill states, picked because somebody might genuinely hand over that much rather than because it tidies the sums. Everything printed below follows from it, and since the chain is linear, a £50.00 deposit doubles each figure in it and a £12.50 deposit halves them. One worked example therefore covers the range rather than a point on it.

The reversal also changes what the word free is doing. Where no deposit is asked for, the money arriving in the balance was never the reader’s, and the only live question is how much of it a condition takes back out. On a match the balance holds two quantities of unlike kinds. One of them was advanced by a cashier and has a condition fastened to it. The other crossed the counter from the reader, belongs to the reader, and has no condition on it whatever. Running the pair together is the commonest way a matched offer is made to look bigger than it is, and the two are kept apart on every line this bill prints.

Three quantities have to be settled before the formula will do any work. What arrives as credit, which is £25.00 against a £25.00 deposit. How many turnovers that credit is asked for, which is where a licensed offer and an offshore one part company. And how much of each pound staked a qualifying game discharges, which is the figure left out most often and the one with the heaviest effect on £15.00. Parts three and six take those in turn, and part eight says what happens when the second or the third of them is simply not stated anywhere.

2

What one hundred per cent describes, and whose money it describes

A percentage on a cashier’s front page is a multiplier waiting for something to multiply, and the thing it multiplies is the reader’s own deposit. Saying that plainly matters, because a headline written as a percentage reads like a statement about how generous an offer is and is in fact a statement about the size of a payment the reader has not made yet. One hundred per cent says this and no more: whatever goes in, the same again arrives as credit. Naming no sum, it promises no sum.

So the headline figure compares with nothing until a deposit is named. Two cashiers advertising the same percentage are not putting up the same thing if one takes £10.00 at the minimum and the other £50.00, and neither is putting up a fixed amount of money. A maximum written as a sum cuts the match off at a point the percentage never mentions: one hundred per cent with a £100.00 top stops being a match above a £100.00 deposit and turns into a flat £100.00 credit with a large payment standing in front of it.

Read the last column down and a match looks like a proportional reward for a proportional payment, which it is. Read the third one beside it and the obligation climbs at exactly the same rate, which is the half a percentage hides. Three fifths of the credit survives on all four lines, because the surviving share is set by the number of turnovers and by the return and not in any degree by how much credit there is. A bigger headline buys no better rate than £25.00 gets. It buys more credit at the identical rate, and the £250.00 of required turnover becomes £2,000.00 by the bottom line.

The honest reading of a percentage is therefore as a description of the reader’s own payment. One hundred per cent on £25.00 is £25.00. It is also £250.00 of turnover under the gentlest condition a British regime would let an incentive carry, and because credit and deposit are equal at this percentage, £250.00 happens to be ten deposits as well as ten credits. Nobody advertises the second figure, and the second figure is what the arithmetic is made of.

3

Twenty-five pounds of credit taken across a multiple of ten

With the credit settled at £25.00 the free side becomes one application of the house formula. E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g) prices a balance that has a turnover condition standing over it, and four letters carry the whole of the work. B is the sum advanced, £25.00 on this bill. W is how many turnovers get demanded of it. The return, written RTP, is the fraction a play hands back, 96 pence in each pound here. And g is the weight a qualifying game carries, a pound of staking discharging a whole pound of the condition where that weight is full. On a match, B is the advance by itself: the deposit lying beside it was never advanced and so never enters B, which is the one rule on this bill doing the most work.

Putting values in: B of £25.00; W of ten, that being the most a British licence lets an incentive demand off the rule sheet; the return at 96 per cent, an industry-wide figure this publisher supplies rather than a reading taken from any named title ours, and said to be ours; and g at full weight, because a contribution share nobody has published is taken on this bill at the most favourable value it could have, and the line spending it says that is what has been done. So E is £25.00 times six tenths: ten turnovers at four pence in the pound take four tenths of the advance, six tenths of £25.00 is £15.00, and £15.00 is the free finding.

The long road gets to the same place and is the road a reader can walk. The condition is £250.00 of turnover, being £25.00 put through ten times over. Four pence of every pound staked never comes back, so £250.00 of turnover is expected to cost £10.00. Deduct that from the £25.00 that arrived and £15.00 remains. Four pence in the pound charged across £250.00 rather than across £25.00 takes two fifths of the advance, and that is the whole mechanism by which a sum printed as £25.00 comes to £15.00.

Two cautions belong beside the figure. First, £15.00 is an expectation and not a payout. The spread behind it is wide, the commonest single outcome on a credit crossing a condition that size is nothing at all, and the mean describes many attempts rather than one. Second, ten turnovers is the friendliest reading available anywhere. It is the limit a British licence sets for an incentive, and a cashier of the sort this bill is about does not hold one, so ten is a bound borrowed from a regime the cashier sits outside. Part six prices the same £25.00 at the multiples that bound actually permits.

4

The identical twenty-five pounds put up by the reader instead

Now price the other side, which a sibling publication has no second column to print in. Take the same £25.00 and let it belong to the reader, staked once across whatever play the credit would have been spent on. Nothing was advanced, so nothing is owed back. No multiple stands over the £25.00, no published top clips what it may win, and no weighting argument arises at all. The entire cost is the return, charged a single time.

Stake £25.00 where four pence of each pound fails to return and £24.00 is expected back, so putting it through costs £1.00. That is the paid finding, and as a position it is minus £1.00, money having left the reader and not come back. The figure is small, and its smallness is the result rather than a footnote to it. The credit is worth so much less than the sum printed on it not because the return is severe. Four pence in the pound is not severe. It is because a condition makes the reader meet that return ten times over on an advance handed to them once.

Put £15.00 against minus £1.00 and the distance is £16.00. At 25p a round this publisher’s own stake that distance is 64 rounds, and since a reader counts in rounds while paying in money, it is worth having in both currencies. What the pair settles is narrow and useful. A matched £25.00 beats nothing, comes to about three fifths of what the front of it says, and the paid alternative at the same sum costs around a fifteenth of what the free side is worth. None of that can be seen from a percentage.

£25.00 of credit worth £15.00 when a cashier advances it and minus £1.00 when a reader stakes it, £16.00 apart, which is 64 more rounds in hand

One further comparison shows the shape of the thing. Deposit £25.00 and decline the match: £25.00 of spendable money, and £1.00 expected to go in playing it through once. Deposit £25.00 and take the match: £50.00 in the balance, half of it spendable and half of it conditional, with £15.00 of the conditional half expected to survive. Taking the match is worth £15.00 on those numbers and costs the reader no money at all, which is why it is usually worth taking. What it is not worth is the £25.00 printed on it.

5

Two sums in one balance, and why adding them flatters the offer

A cashier advancing credit against a deposit ends up holding two quantities for one reader, and they behave nothing alike. The deposited £25.00 is the reader’s money and can be asked for back. The credited £25.00 was never the reader’s, cannot be asked for back, and turns into money only by satisfying a condition. A screen reading £50.00 is reporting a single number about two unlike things, which is the same mistake as adding £25.00 to a tally of rounds and calling the result one quantity.

The mistake matters because it runs one way. Adding the pair always makes an offer look larger and never smaller, and the amount of the exaggeration is fixed by the percentage: at one hundred per cent the combined figure is half deposit and half advance, so £50.00 overstates the advance by precisely £25.00. A reader holding that £50.00 against the £15.00 found above is holding a figure that includes their own payment against a figure that includes none of it. The comparison worth making is £25.00 of advance against £15.00 of expected survival, a shortfall of two fifths, with the deposit then considered separately on its own merits.

British licence conditions push the same way from another angle. A British licensee holding that deposited £25.00 owes the reader a written account of what becomes of it should the firm fail, which of four ratings applies to it and how the protection is arranged a licence condition, handed over at the first deposit and again whenever those terms move. Nothing of the sort is owed about the advanced £25.00, since an advance is not customer money until it has become withdrawable. One half of the £50.00 is covered by that duty and the other half is outside it, which is a second reason the halves are not one quantity.

A further duty runs in the same direction. No term in a licensed contract may put a cap on what a reader draws back out of money they deposited, so the £25.00 that crossed the counter is theirs to ask for whenever they want it, in one go or in instalments. A ceiling on what an advance may win is a separate creature, falls outside that prohibition, and can sit in the same terms without contradicting it. Both hold at once. Which half of the £50.00 a clause is written about therefore decides whether the clause is permitted at all, and a reader who has merged the halves has no way of telling.

6

The multiple at which a matched sum stops being worth taking

The useful property of the formula is that no percentage appears in it. Credit goes in as B and B factors straight out again, so the surviving share of an advance is one minus the turnovers times four hundredths, divided by the weight, and nothing in that expression knows whether the advance came of a match at one hundred per cent or at four hundred. Set the expression to nought and solve: the answer is twenty-five turnovers at full weight. That is the break point, and it stays put when the headline percentage moves.

Which is a stronger statement than it looks. A reader meeting two matched offers at different percentages has not been handed two arithmetic problems. They have one problem about the number of turnovers and a separate, easier problem about how much money they feel like putting in. Under twenty-five turnovers a match is worth having: three fifths of its face at ten, two fifths at fifteen, a fifth at twenty. Exactly at twenty-five, £25.00 of credit comes to nought. Past that the expression goes negative and the formula floors at nothing, which means the advance is worthless rather than harmful. A condition on advanced money reaches no further than the advance, and the deposit beside it is not exposed to the multiple whatever the multiple is.

Sixty on the bottom line is not a figure this publisher picked. It is what the British regulator said some licensees were demanding before the ten-turnover cap replaced them from the rule sheet, and no other market multiple behind this bill was published by a regulator rather than by a company describing its own practice. A cashier outside the British regime is not bound by the cap that replaced it, so sixty is the kind of figure to expect in small print rather than an outlier to be waved away.

Weight moves the break point and moves it hard. Work the formula again, E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g), with g set to the thirty-pence-in-the-pound weighting printed on the regulator’s consultation page off the rule sheet: four tenths divided by three tenths exceeds one, so E floors at nought and the break point drops from twenty-five turnovers to seven and a half. Ten turnovers of £25.00 where a staked pound discharges only thirty pence of the condition is £833.33 of turnover, and the £25.00 then comes to nought against the £250.00 and the £15.00 at full weight. Weight, not the headline, is usually where a matched offer is decided.

7

A practice balance reading twenty-five pounds, and what it pays

There is a third way of putting £25.00 on a screen, and it is the one case needing no subtraction. A practice balance reading £25.00 pays nought. It is not a smaller figure than £15.00, not £15.00 with a condition over it, and not something a cashier has declined to print: it is nought, no mechanism existing anywhere that moves money out of a practice balance. Set the same balance to five hundred pounds and it still pays nought, so the figure printed on one carries no information at all.

Run this bill’s own instrument against a practice balance and the free side of it side reads nought from the first line to the last. The distance then collapses onto the paid figure of minus £1.00, and what an evening of practice establishes about a paid £25.00 is nothing whatever. Those noughts are not holes in the arithmetic. They are the arithmetic. A reader who has turned a practice balance from £25.00 into £400.00 has found out what the buttons do and has settled nothing about the cost of the same play with money in it, because cost is the one quantity the exercise cannot contain.

The practice case is also the fastest way to see why a match cannot be judged off the number on the screen. Three balances can read £25.00 and be worth £15.00, minus £1.00 and nought respectively, with nothing visible between them but what a reader has agreed to. The figure is the least informative thing in front of them, and the terms fastened to it are the whole of the offer.

8

The figure this bill has not got, and the total it leaves unstruck

One quantity the sums above want is published by nobody, and this bill names it rather than supplying it. A match at one hundred per cent is a shape and not an offer, so no document anywhere states the number of turnovers a reader will actually meet. Every figure in part six was either read off a rule binding somebody else or worked as this publisher’s own arithmetic, and not one came off the terms a particular cashier is running today. Where the turnovers are unpublished this bill prices £25.00 across a range and strikes no single total, because a multiple invented to round a sum off would be worse than the hole it filled: a hole can be checked, and £15.00 resting on a made-up ten cannot.

A second gap sits beside it and is narrower. Nothing published settles whether the British cap reaches a condition written over the deposit as well as over the advance. The cap speaks of bonus funds, and no worked example of a condition covering both has been issued off the rule sheet, so this bill goes exactly as far as what has been published and then halts. Where terms do take the deposit in, the £250.00 of turnover becomes £500.00 and the £15.00 falls to £5.00, which a reader has to find in the small print rather than guess at either way.

One thing about the distance belongs stated plainly. Ten turnovers is the heaviest condition a licensee may lawfully be put under, so no condition a British licence permits leaves the gap narrower than £16.00, and halving the count to five opens it to £21.00 instead. The ceiling reaches no cashier outside that regime, and beyond ten turnovers the gap closes rather than widening: £6.00 at twenty, and at twenty-five the £1.00 a single crossing costs. So £16.00 is a floor across every lawful condition, while the count a cashier actually asks stays the figure this part names as unpublished.

What comes through all of that is a finding worth four lines. A match at one hundred per cent describes the reader’s deposit and not the offer. The advance alone is B, the deposit beside it never is, and printing the two as one figure is how the offer gets flattered. Under the gentlest condition a British regime would allow, £25.00 of credit is worth £15.00 while the same £25.00 staked by the reader costs £1.00, which puts the findings £16.00 or 64 rounds apart. And the point at which the whole arrangement stops being worth taking is twenty-five turnovers, which is where it sits whatever percentage is printed on the front of it.