Who counts the steps here

1

One subject, and why it was worth a domain

Search for a prize won in an instant and a dozen publications are waiting with the same answer in slightly different clothes: how much goes in, how much comes out, how long the wait is. All of that describes the two ends of an arrangement, and none of it describes the middle, which is where a reader actually gives up.

So this publication counts the middle. For each search phrase it walks the sequence of separate things that have to be done before a single penny of a promise is money somebody can spend, prints what is left standing after each of them, and names the first of them that is nobody’s to take but a stranger’s. Two numbers come out, and neither is printed by anybody else working these phrases. One is a count. The other is the position in the sequence at which a reader stops being in charge, with the money still waiting there.

2

What a guide here actually does

A guide is built around one sheet of four columns, and how to read that sheet is set out at length on the page about counting a chain. In short: a row per thing that has to happen, in the order such things happen; one column running downwards from what was promised to what could be carried off; and, against each row, whether the row costs money or merely holds everything up until somebody agrees to let it past.

Around the sheet goes the working. Where an obligation has to be satisfied, the obligation is put through one expression and the result is printed. Where a step is real and nothing has been published behind it, the silence is reported rather than patched. Where a figure is this publisher’s own assumption rather than anybody’s published number, the sentence spending it says so, and the two assumptions that do most of the work are named and defended on the method page.

What a guide is not is a review. There is no verdict at the foot of it, no score, no recommendation to take one thing rather than another. A count is not advice, and anybody who dislikes the assumptions can work the arithmetic again on their own.

3

Two fact sheets, never mixed, and a third that does not exist

Behind the prose sit two sheets of checked readings, and they are kept strictly apart. One holds regulation: statute, licence conditions, technical standards, the advertising code, the self-exclusion scheme’s own terms, enforcement with figures and dates attached. The other holds facts about named companies. Regulation is not a fact about a company, nor is a fact about a company a rule, and a page that borrowed from one sheet to make a point that belongs to the other would be dressing up a guess.

Games and the houses that build them get no sheet of their own, and that absence is deliberate. Nothing on this domain states a return for a named title, nor a hit rate, nor a volatility, nor any other number of that sort, and no figure anywhere is traced to one. A few of the search phrases carry a maker’s name because that is what people type, so the name turns up in a heading and an address, and nothing whatever is hung on it. A title somebody recognises on a screen is no evidence at all about the counter running it off the rule sheet, claim 131, which is a point this publication can make and a figure it cannot supply.

Every claim taken off a sheet is cited in the sentence that spends it. A number with no reading beside it is a number this publisher has invented, and there are not supposed to be any.

4

Four things nobody on this masthead does

Nobody plays anything. There is no account, no deposit, no withdrawal and no stopwatch behind any sentence on this domain, and a page claiming otherwise would be claiming an experience nobody had. Every figure is arithmetic laid over published wording and two declared assumptions.

Nobody scores anything. There are no marks, no stars and no ordering by merit in the prose. Counting how many obstacles stand in a sequence is a different act from judging whether the sequence is worth walking, and this publication does the first and declines the second.

Nobody fills a gap from memory. Where the published record is silent, a guide says it is silent. That makes some pages shorter and all of them duller than the alternative, and it is the only version worth reading.

And nobody here writes anything that would help a person reach a counter they have shut themselves out of. Where a source describes the way round a protection, what gets printed is the consequence and not the route.

5

Dates, staleness and being wrong in public

Each guide carries the date its terms were read, at the head of the page and again in the colophon at the foot. That date is not decoration. A multiple can be rewritten overnight, a condition can appear where none stood, and a rule can commence; any of those moves a figure, and none of them sends a notice. A reading taken in one month is a reading taken in that month, and a page that pretended to be permanent would be the least honest thing on the site.

Errors will therefore happen, and the useful thing to do with one is to send it in. A figure that cannot be rebuilt from the assumptions beside it, a step counted that nobody has to take, a step missed that everybody does: all three are corrigible and the route is at Send us a line. What pays for the work is set out separately under what pays for the work, because a reader weighing a figure is entitled to know who benefits from being read.