How a chain is counted on this site

1

The two questions a guide is built to answer

A dozen other publications carry the same eighty-five search phrases this one carries, and all of them price the ends of an offer. This site puts a question none of them puts. How many separate things have to be done, one after another, before any fraction of what a headline promises turns into spendable money? And which of those things is the first to be settled by somebody over the counter?

The second question is the one worth the trouble. A walk of nine things a reader can finish unaided is a different animal from a walk of three where the second one belongs to a stranger.

2

Four columns, and the one to read downwards

The sheet on every guide is a table of four columns, and the four headings are the same wherever a reader meets them: what has to happen, who takes this step, what it leaves standing, printed where. Nobody varies a heading: the arithmetic checks find their own columns by that wording. Under them sits one row for each thing that has to be done, in the sequence the things occur.

The third column rewards being read downwards rather than across. Its top figure is the face value of what was promised, its bottom figure what a reader could carry off. Between the two it drops, and each drop is entered on the row responsible for it and on no neighbouring row. Some rows hold it dead level, and those turn out to be the interesting ones.

The last column says what stands behind each row: a headline, a written term, a British rule read across to an offer it does not govern, or nothing at all.

3

The three things a row can be

A row holds one of three things, and almost all there is to learn about the sheet is the business of keeping the three apart.

The first kind takes a slice. Reels take a slice, since a balance put through them comes back short by a known proportion, and an obligation to stake a balance repeatedly takes one too. A row of this kind is nobody’s decision: the house’s own sums arriving when they were always going to arrive, and a reader having no steering on a reel does not make the outcome a choice anybody made. This is the kind of row on which the third column steps down.

The second and third kinds take no slice at all. A row of either admits the whole sum that reached it or none of it, nothing in between being available, and the sheet says so by carrying the figure down unaltered and naming in the row what the sum now waits on. A row of that shape is called a gate here, and in the drawing its bar is not shortened by so much as a pixel: it keeps its full reach and carries a thick upright struck through it, so that nobody reads a gate as something that cost money.

What divides the second kind from the third is whose hands a gate is in. Some gates are the reader’s own: opening an account, picking one offer off a shelf, filling in the form that asks for a payment. Each happens when the reader decides it happens. Others are not the reader’s: a cashier weighing up documents, a cashier settling a payment or refusing to, a requirement whose size nobody has published and whoever drafted it will fix.

On that division the whole finding rests. Each guide closes on the earliest gate in its chain held by somebody other than the reader, printed with the sum still standing there. Not a row that took a slice, nobody having decided it. Not a gate the reader holds, those being available at a reader’s convenience. The row carrying the finding is ringed in the drawing and is the only ringed row on a sheet.

4

Why a gate is never written as a fraction

One way of making a site like this untruthful is far easier than the rest, and setting it down is the only way a reader can check it has been avoided. Imagine a gate entered as a modest deduction, four per cent off the sum rather than the whole of it or none. Such a page would be informing its reader that having documents looked at costs four per cent of whatever is standing. The looking costs no per cent. It costs nothing, or it costs everything that was standing.

What makes that untruth worse than an ordinary slip is that no reader could catch it: a column easing downwards looks precisely like a column easing downwards, whether every drop in it is real or three were put in to improve the shape. So a slice shortens the figure, a gate holds it where it was, and no row may do both.

5

One expression, and the two readings of B

Wherever a balance has to be staked over again before any of it may leave, one expression does the work, set in one form across this network and no other:

E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g)

E is what a reader can expect to be left holding. B is what reached a balance to begin with. W is the multiple: how many times over the sum has to be staked. RTP is the proportion a game is taken to hand back across a long run. And g is the proportion that staking on a particular game counts for towards the obligation, read at full weight wherever nothing is published to the contrary.

B is read in two ways and mixing them up is the error most easily made. For a count of given rounds it is the number of rounds times the stake times the return, rounds having to pass through a game before anything reaches a balance. For a sum of credit it is the credit on its own, flat, because a credit is handed across as money already and no game has touched it. Putting a return on a credit charges it for a journey it never made, at about four per cent of every figure after it.

A pound reaching a balance, at the return declared below, survives ten times as sixty pence and twenty-five times as nothing.

6

Ten pence and ninety-six per cent, declared and not sourced

Two numbers stand underneath nearly every money figure here, and neither is anybody’s published figure. Both are declarations by this publisher, and each guide repeats the admission in whatever sentence spends them.

The first is the cash a single round is taken to stake, declared at ten pence throughout. No primary source fixes it: searches of the regulator’s own site turn up nothing on what fixes the cash behind a round, on whose decision it is, or on what has to be told to a customer about it off the rule sheet, claim 89. A count of rounds becomes a sum of money here by declaration and by no other route.

The second is the return, and ninety-six per cent is what every guide declares. It is a broad market figure adopted by this publisher rather than anything measured, with no machine’s published number behind it.

Both can therefore be moved and the method survives the move: halve the round and every money figure halves with it, while the number of rows and the row somebody else holds stay put.

7

Three things this method will not do

No sum here is worked out from the name of a machine or the house that built it. Four of the phrases in the cut carry such a name, so it stands in a heading, an address and a search title, with nothing hung on it: no return, no hit rate, no volatility. A title somebody recognises in a window is no evidence about the counter running it off the rule sheet, claim 131.

No step is invented. A condition describing who may take an offer up is not a step, nobody having anything to do about being over eighteen, and neither is a requirement existing only in this publisher’s imagination.

And nothing is priced that cannot be sourced. Where a step plainly has to be taken and nobody has published anything behind it, the row is counted all the same and the third column carries the sum across without moving.