Two hundred rounds behind a ten pound door, with two sums that must never be added

1

Two hundred rounds at ten pence, and the £20.00 they stake

Two hundred is the largest count behind a door anywhere in this section, and like any count it prices nothing by itself. A stake and a return have to be fetched first. Neither one is published by the cashier, and no primary source defines what a free round is worth off the rule sheet, so this page supplies both and marks every sentence that spends them.

Ten pence a round this bill’s own figure; 96 per cent over a long run of results, an industry-typical level and no particular machine’s published number this publisher’s assumption. Two hundred at ten pence stake £20.00. Return 96 pence out of each of those twenty pounds and £19.20 lands, leaving 80p behind as margin. The 80p is not a fee charged at the end of the two hundred; it is withheld a little at a time, across two hundred separate results, and by the two-hundredth it has all gone.

Because the count is large, two features of the arithmetic become visible that a count of ten or thirty hides. The first is that the expectation starts to mean something. Two hundred results is a long enough run that the realised outcome will usually sit nearer £19.20 than a run of ten would sit near 96p, so a figure of this kind is a better description of a session here than it is on the small counts in this section. The second is that the obligations other sections price become enormous at this size, and part eight puts numbers on that.

What stays the same whatever the count is the shape of the sum: three numbers multiplied once, which here are two hundred, ten pence and 96 per cent, giving £19.20. No other figure is needed, because the key says that nothing is required of the proceeds, and the last three words of the key are therefore the most load-bearing thing on the page. Part nine is about reading them properly.

One row of that table is worth isolating. At five pence a round, two hundred rounds carry a face of £10.00, which is the deposit exactly. A reader whose rounds are worth five pence has been given a count whose face matches what they put in, and a reader whose rounds are worth ten pence has been given twice it. The stake value is therefore the single figure that decides whether the arrangement is generous or ordinary, and it is the one figure a reader is least likely to be shown.

2

Why the ten pounds stands apart from both findings on this page

A deposit is not a cost. A deposit is money moved rather than money spent, and no cap may be put on withdrawing a deposit balance under a British licence off the rule sheet. So a reader who deposits ten pounds, claims the two hundred rounds, plays them and then withdraws has moved ten pounds twice and spent none of it. Treating that ten pounds as the price of the rounds would be a category error, and it is the commonest one made about offers of this shape.

This matters for the arithmetic because two unlike quantities would otherwise get added. The £19.20 is an expected balance arising from somebody else’s stake. The ten pounds is a transfer of the reader’s own funds. Subtracting one from the other produces £9.20, a figure that describes nothing: it is not what the rounds are worth, not what they cost, and not what a reader is up or down after the exercise. The two are kept apart in the instrument above for that reason, and its second row says in a single line that the deposit puts nothing at stake.

There are two honest things to say about the ten pounds instead. The first is that it is a condition of entry, and a condition of entry has a cost only to the extent that it cannot be reversed. Where the deposit can be withdrawn, the cost of the condition is whatever a reader loses by having the money in an account rather than in a bank for a few days, which at any plausible rate is pennies. Where the deposit cannot be withdrawn until it has been staked, the cost is real and is priced in the next part.

The second is that depositing is the moment a reader becomes a customer, and that carries consequences this page can state but cannot price. A cashier that has a card number and an address has something it did not have before. A cashier operating outside the British licensing regime is not bound by the rules on identity verification before play, on deposit limits and their cooling-off periods, or on the checks that follow a pattern of spending off the rule sheet. Those are not arithmetic and they are not nothing, and a page pricing only the rounds would leave a reader thinking the deposit was free in every sense rather than merely in the accounting sense.

£20.00 of face across two hundred rounds, worth £19.20 free and costing 80p bought, against a ten pound deposit that belongs in neither figure and is counted in neither

3

What ten pounds buys on its own, counted out in rounds

The clearest way to size the offer is to ask what the deposit would do if a reader simply staked it. Ten pounds at ten pence a round is a hundred rounds. Those hundred rounds stake ten pounds through the reels for £9.60 back, costing 40p in expectation and leaving £9.60 of balance with no demand of any kind on it. That is the alternative the two hundred rounds have to beat.

Hold the two side by side. Ten pounds deposited and then staked buys a hundred rounds for 40p. Deposit ten pounds and claim the offer instead: two hundred rounds staked by somebody else, £19.20 of expected balance, the ten pounds still sitting in the account, and nothing owed. The second is plainly better, and it is better by a quantity worth naming: two hundred rounds of play that cost the reader nothing, and £19.20 of expectation that would otherwise have required £20.00 of the reader’s own stake to generate.

The exchange rate is therefore twenty rounds for each pound deposited, and a reader can carry that figure to any offer of this shape and compare. Twenty rounds a pound at ten pence a round is two pounds of face for each pound in, which is the arrangement here. Where the stake is five pence, twenty rounds a pound is one pound of face for each pound in, and the offer is merely returning the deposit’s worth in play. Where the stake value is not published at all, the exchange rate cannot be computed and the page says so rather than guessing at it.

The third row is there because it is the realistic one and because it shows where the arrangement actually leads. A reader who deposits ten pounds will usually stake the ten pounds as well as playing the two hundred free rounds, and at that point they have three hundred rounds of play behind them and £1.20 of total margin paid. The offer has not made the margin disappear. It has bought two thirds of the play, and the reader is paying the house rate on the other third.

4

Nothing asked of the balance, so the whole balance is the finding

This network takes a balance with a condition on it through E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g). W stands for the multiple, g for the weighting, RTP for the return and B for whatever landed. E is what remains once the condition has been crossed, with nothing as its floor and any published cash ceiling as its lid.

The key here says no wagering requirements, so W is nought. A product with a nought in it is nought, so the second term inside the bracket vanishes, the bracket shuts at one, and E equals B. Nineteen pounds twenty, in other words off this offer’s own terms. The expression has done no work, and its doing no work is exactly the result worth printing: a page that needs four readings before it can state a figure is a page whose figure rests on four things that can go wrong, and this one rests on two.

Note what that does to the weighting, the term causing most of the trouble elsewhere. A contribution rate under full weight raises the staking a demand needs and so raises what the demand costs. With nought upstairs the denominator cannot matter here: enter full weight, or three tenths, and £19.20 sits still. Where nobody prints a contribution rate, the weight is taken at full on this domain, and the taking is printed next to the figure it changes; on this page that printing is a formality.

The size of the count makes one further point available. Two hundred rounds with nothing owed is the largest unconditioned balance this section reports, and it is therefore the page a reader should hold against the keys that do carry an obligation. Two hundred rounds on the other side of the free line, with a ten-times requirement attached, would come to £11.52, and at twenty-five times to nothing at all. The distance between £19.20 and £11.52 is what three words in this key are worth at this size, and that distance is bigger here than anywhere else in the section simply because the count is.

5

The identical two hundred rounds funded by the reader instead

Now the second price. Two hundred rounds on the same machine at ten pence each, funded out of the reader’s own balance. £20.00 goes across the reels as stake, £19.20 is expected back, and the reader finishes 80p down. That 80p is the entire cost of two hundred rounds, and it is the figure the free count has to be read against.

Eighty pence for two hundred rounds surprises most readers, and the surprise comes from confusing stake with cost. Two hundred rounds require £20.00 to be available, because each round takes ten pence before it gives anything back, and a reader whose balance is £15 can only reach two hundred rounds if the early ones go well. But the money is not spent; it is cycled, and the only part of it that does not come back is the margin. Over two hundred results the margin is 80p.

So the honest statement of what this offer hands over has two halves that sound contradictory and are not. Measured as a cost avoided, two hundred free rounds save 80p, and nobody opens an account for 80p. Measured as a holding acquired, they produce £19.20 of expected withdrawable balance, which is a quarter of the deposit again and then some. Both figures are correct. They answer different questions, and the span between them is what part six works out.

One further asymmetry belongs here. On the funded side the reader bears the whole variance of two hundred results, and that variance is large: the realised outcome ranges from the £20.00 gone to several times £20.00 in hand. On the free side the reader bears the upside of the same variance and none of the downside, because the stake was never theirs. That is the real difference between the two arrangements and no single figure carries it, which is why this page prints an expectation and says plainly that an expectation is what it is.

6

Twenty pounds of span, and the three returns that confirm it

One finding is positive £19.20 and the other negative 80p, so the span across them is £20.00. A reader who expected £19.20 has overlooked that the findings sit on either side of nought, which makes the span a sum rather than a difference.

Then the reason these nine keys are the measure the other seventy-six are taken against. £19.20 and 80p are the two pieces the return cuts £20.00 into: ninety-six hundredths of £20.00 is £19.20, four hundredths of it is 80p, and those two fractions are a whole one between them. Two multipliers land on the face, the return and what the return leaves, and those two make one. A face times one is the face, so the answer carries no trace of the return at all.

Check it rather than believe it. Put the return at 93 per cent: the free two hundred come to £18.60, the funded two hundred cost £1.40, and £20.00 is the pair. Put it at 95 per cent: £19.00 against £1.00, and £20.00 again. Put it at 98: £19.60 against 40p, and £20.00 once more. The columns all move and the span sits still. A reader who rejects the 96 per cent on this page may put any figure they like in its place and reach the identical finding.

Read the gap column downwards, in the instrument this bill opens with, and the conclusion comes off the page rather than out of an argument. It opens at £20.00, the stake the funded side has to find. The deposit row adds nothing, risking nothing on either side. The staking row adds nothing, £20.00 going across in both columns. The return row adds nothing, £19.20 coming back in both. The play-through row adds nothing, no demand existing anywhere on the page. A column that opens at £20.00 and takes no further entry closes at £20.00.

Two hundred rounds is also the version of the finding worth carrying off the page, since it survives any change of stake. The span in pounds wants the ten pence; the span in rounds wants only the number already in the key. A count asked nothing of its proceeds puts a reader its own count ahead of a reader funding the same play, at any price per round whatever.

7

A practice two hundred, and the pair of noughts it returns

Two hundred rounds can be had with no deposit at all in a practice lobby, so the comparison belongs here even though this key wants money at the door. A practice round moves nothing to anybody. What it accumulates is a display, nothing turns a display into money, and a display reading two thousand pounds carries the value of one reading nothing.

Priced on the shape of this page, a practice two hundred fills the free column with noughts. Nought at face, the stake not being money. Nought in the balance, no withdrawable balance being involved. E nought, reached with the expression unopened. And nought for cost, deposit included, none being asked. Exact noughts, every one of them.

That gives a clean three-way comparison, which only this section can print. A practice two hundred: nought in, nought out, nothing learned about money. A funded two hundred: £20.00 cycled, 80p spent, every penny of the proceeds the reader’s. And the two hundred behind this key: ten pounds moved rather than spent, £19.20 of expectation, nothing owed. The practice version is free in the sense of costless and worthless. This offer is free in the sense that somebody else staked it, which is the only sense in which free and valuable can both be true at once.

It also sets the scale of what the deposit is buying. The step from a practice lobby to this offer is a step from nought to £19.20 of expectation, and the ticket for it is ten pounds a reader keeps. A reader who thinks of the deposit as the price is comparing the wrong pair of figures; the deposit is a condition, and the price of the rounds themselves is nothing at all.

8

What a multiple and a weighting would take off £19.20

A large balance is where a demand does the most damage, so pricing the absence matters more here than on the small counts. Take part four’s expression with W no longer nought. Ten times at full weight makes the bracket six tenths, so £19.20 falls to £11.52. Fifteen times gives £7.68 and twenty times £3.84. Twenty-five times is not a figure out of anybody’s rules: it is where four pence repeated enough times swallows a pound, so a balance crossing it is expected to be worth nothing however big the count.

Two sourced figures put the range in proportion. Ten times is the ceiling where a British licence is held off the rule sheet, so £11.52 is the harshest licensed treatment this balance could get. And the regulator moved against a market where multiples as high as sixty had been asked off the rule sheet, which at this return is well past the point of exhaustion. Neither figure reaches the cashier behind this key, both of them riding on a licence it does not hold.

Weighting is the quiet multiplier behind every row. A demand is cleared by play that qualifies, and a game carrying a third of the weight clears a third of a pound for each pound sent through. The only contribution rate the rule sheet holds is thirty per cent, which a respondent quoted to the regulator off the rule sheet, and at that rate a ten-times demand behaves worse than thirty: the bracket turns negative, the floor applies, and £19.20 is expected to be gone. A multiple and a weighting are two figures, and a count printing neither can be given no honest price.

The rightmost column of that table is the one a reader feels. Ten times over £19.20 calls for £192.00 to be put through, or one thousand nine hundred and twenty rounds at ten pence each. Each of those rounds would take two and a half seconds at the British minimum off the rule sheet, so the demand is eighty minutes of continuous play even at that floor, and sixty times would be eight hours. Nothing of that kind stands behind this key, and the measure of what the key is worth is the eighty minutes as much as the £7.68.

9

What the last three words of this key have to carry

Every figure above rests on three words at the end of the key, so those words have to be found in the written terms rather than in the banner. Where the terms state that proceeds from the two hundred rounds are added to a withdrawable balance with no staking required, £19.20 stands and the span is £20.00. Where the banner says it and the terms are silent, the multiple is unknown, E cannot be computed, and this page names the missing figure and strikes no total. A borrowed number would read as checkable and would not be.

Four lines of terms can reduce £19.20 without touching the count, and on a balance this size three of them bite harder than they do elsewhere in the section. A maximum win caps the proceeds, and because two hundred rounds produce a long tail of outcomes, a cap set anywhere near £19.20 removes a large part of what the count is actually for. A deadline on using the rounds matters more at two hundred than at thirty, because two hundred rounds take time, and at the British floor for a single round two hundred of them run to over eight minutes of play, so a window of a day or two is generous while a window of an hour is not. A wagering requirement on the deposit rather than on the proceeds is a different condition wearing similar words, and whether a requirement to stake a deposit as well as a bonus is caught by the British cap is not settled by any primary source off the rule sheet. And a floor under withdrawals, which bites hardest on the small counts, is the one condition that £19.20 is usually large enough to clear.

There is also the question of whether the deposit itself must go through the reels before leaving. That is the single term that would turn the ten pounds from a transfer into a cost, and it is the term a reader should look for first, because the whole of part two depends on its absence. Where staking the deposit once is a precondition of withdrawal, entry costs not nothing but 40p, being the margin over a hundred rounds at this stake, and the arrangement is still strongly in the reader’s favour. Where the deposit must be staked many times over, the cost rises in proportion and the page prices it rather than the rounds.

So the discipline is the one the whole section runs on. Two published figures, a stake and a return, both stated here as this publisher’s. One promise, read in the terms rather than the headline. Everything else named where it is missing. On those conditions the finding is £20.00 of span across two hundred rounds, which is the face value exactly, and the ten pounds at the door is counted in neither column.