Twenty pounds is a rung, so the ladder takes nothing at either end

1

Three places money can strand, two of them shut

Three places can strand money on a page like this one, and on this page two of the three take nothing at all. Writing them out separately is the quickest way to see why.

The ladder is the first. Which sums can exist at all is decided by six rungs: £10 and £20 at the bottom, then £25, and then £50, £75 and £100. Twenty pounds is one of them, so entry rounds to nothing.

The ceiling is the second, and it is the only one that bites. Ten times the credit makes £200.00 of turnover. At 4p on each pound, £8.00 comes off and £12.00 comes through.

The floor is the third. Where a cashier pays out from £10.00 upward, the surviving £12.00 clears it with £2.00 to spare and no purchase is needed, so the floor strands nothing either.

Add those three together and the answer is £8.00, all of it from the middle one. A face that sits on a rung and survives above a floor has only one leak, and arithmetic rather than denomination is what opens it.

Two leaks shut, one open, £8.00 through the open one

Each cycle costs 10p, each staked pound gives back 96p, and a staked pound counts whole towards an obligation. A British licence caps wagering at ten times. Forty times is the figure used here for a cashier the register leaves out. Each of those lines is stated rather than discovered, and every number below follows from them.

One further figure is worth having early, because it explains the shape of the whole page. The surviving £12.00 is itself not a reachable total on that ladder: £10.00 falls short of it and £20.00 is the next total at or above, so buying £12.00 of anything would cost £20.00 and strand £8.00. The reason that £8.00 never appears as a cost is the £10.00 floor, which makes the purchase unnecessary. Change the floor and it appears.

2

Twenty pounds through five multiples

An obligation in this market is a multiple of the credit rather than a sum of money, so pricing a face honestly means running it through the multiples that get used.

Cycles turn into seconds at a published minimum of 2.5, so the 2,000 cycles behind £200.00 of turnover occupy 5,000 seconds, being 1 hour 23 minutes 20 seconds. That minimum governs slots, and the standard that carries it shows no commencement date.

Do the same conversion on the other rows and the time column reads as follows. Four thousand cycles come to 10,000 seconds, or 2 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds. Five thousand come to 12,500 seconds, or 3 hours 28 minutes 20 seconds. Eight thousand come to 20,000 seconds, which is 5 hours 33 minutes 20 seconds.

Survival divided by time is £8.64 an hour, which is the figure every page on this site arrives at, four fixed inputs leaving it nowhere else to go. Twenty times takes it down to £1.44 an hour, and from 25 times upward the figure is nothing an hour for as long as anybody sits there.

£8.64 an hour at ten times, £1.44 at twenty, nothing from 25 up

Twenty-five times is £500.00 of turnover and £20.00 of expected cost, which is the credit exactly, so the survival column arrives at zero. That multiple is not chosen for neatness. One divided by 0.04 gives 25, the inverse of a 4 per cent edge, and the figure would be 25 whatever face it was applied to.

Forty times asks £800.00, costs £32.00, and leaves an obligation £12.00 heavier than the £20.00 standing behind it. In seconds that is 8,000 cycles and 20,000 seconds, or 5 hours 33 minutes 20 seconds, with an expectation of nothing at the far end. Reading those two figures side by side is the plainest version of what a wagering ceiling is for.

3

Twelve pounds against three floors

No rule anywhere sets a payout floor, which is the one figure here that has to come from somewhere else, so the three below are declared cases rather than market findings.

Twelve pounds against a £10.00 floor needs nothing doing. Against £20.00 it is £8.00 short, and the cheapest cover is a £10.00 rung, which strands £2.00. Against £25.00 it is £13.00 short, where £10.00 will not reach and £20.00 must be bought, stranding £7.00.

Note which way that runs. A larger shortfall strands less, because the rung bought is more fully used, and the worst position on a denomination ladder is being nearly there. The £2.00 row is the cheap-looking one and it is the wasteful one: £8.00 of a £10.00 purchase does work, and £2.00 of it does not.

Playing the £12.00 on rather than buying a rung changes nothing an expectation can see. Four pence leaves every pound of turnover, so £12.00 across once costs 48p and £12.00 across ten times costs £4.80. Variance alone reaches a floor above a balance, and it charges that rate for trying.

Two published rules keep the exit itself honest where a British licence is in force. One forbids a licensee from putting a cancel option in front of a customer who has already requested a withdrawal. The other forbids a maximum on the amount leaving a deposit balance at a time, subject to reasonableness about size and about frequency.

The floor is the figure no rule supplies. It lives in a cashier’s own published terms, and in nothing that a register, a standard or a code contains.

4

Why the two figures at the head are equal

The summary at the top of this note shows £8.00 drawn down and £8.00 stranded, and a reader is entitled to ask whether that is a coincidence or a mistake. It is neither.

On most pages here those two figures differ, because drawdown and stranding have separate causes. Drawdown is what the obligation spends: turnover multiplied by the 4p a pound that the return percentage implies. Stranding is what the exit refuses to hand over: a rung bought and only partly used, or a balance held back under a minimum.

On a face that lands on a rung and survives above a floor, the second cause produces nothing, and the figure printed as stranded is the drawdown itself. Eight pounds is spent and never comes back. Describing that as residue rather than as cost is the honest reading, because the reader never had the use of it.

£8.00 spent, £0.00 rounded away, £0.00 held under a floor

Shift any single input and the two figures separate again. A £20.00 floor puts £2.00 of rounding back and the stranded figure becomes £10.00 against £8.00 of drawdown. A face of £15.00 instead of £20.00 cannot be reached on the ladder at all, since no £5 rung exists, so a £20.00 purchase would be needed and £5.00 would strand before a cycle ran.

Twenty times instead of ten moves the drawdown to £16.00 and leaves £4.00, which is below a £10.00 floor by £6.00, so a £10.00 rung would be bought and £4.00 of it wasted. That is £20.00 of stranding against £16.00 of drawdown, and the gap between the two columns is the floor’s work rather than the ceiling’s.

Four combinations are therefore worth holding in mind, and each is a different page on this site. A rung-exact face above a floor leaks once. A rung-exact face below a floor leaks twice. A face off the ladder above a floor leaks twice. And a face off the ladder below a floor leaks three times, which is the expensive corner.

5

Whose criminal offence it is

Faces of this size are frequently advertised from outside the British register, and a page that prices the loss owes its reader the statute rather than an impression of it.

Facilities for gambling, provided with no operating licence behind them, are a criminal offence. The Gambling Act 2005 says so at section 33(1): an offence is committed by a person who provides such facilities unless a listed exception applies, and the first of those exceptions is an operating licence authorising the activity, with the activity carried on inside the licence’s terms.

Penalties sit at section 33(4). Imprisonment is capped at 51 weeks, a fine at level 5 on the standard scale, and both may be imposed together. Six months is how the 51 weeks reads in Scotland.

Section 33 is written about the provider from first line to last, and the Act nowhere makes a customer’s participation in remote gambling an offence of its own.

That does not make an unlicensed cashier a safe place to put £20.00 of face. What section 33 settles is where a criminal offence lands. What a reader loses by using a cashier the register does not carry is protection, which is a separate ledger and the one this page prices.

Geography is no escape. Under section 36(1) it makes no difference at all where the facilities are provided, the United Kingdom and anywhere else counting alike. Section 36(3) then reaches remote gambling on two footings. Either some of the remote gambling equipment behind the facilities stands in Great Britain, or none of it does and Great Britain is where the facilities get used.

A knowledge test rides on that second footing. Under section 36(3A) the provider must know, or be in a position where it should, that British use is either occurring or in prospect.

Subsections (3) and (3A) displaced the original subsection (3), the instrument being the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014. For specified purposes the effective date was 1 November 2014. Before that date, equipment on British soil was the sole hook by which section 33 could catch remote gambling.

So the shape of the law is this, and it is worth having clearly. A licence is required of whoever provides the facilities. Where the provider sits is immaterial. Use in Great Britain brings it inside the Act, with knowledge of that use being the test on the second limb. And nothing in any of it is addressed to the person putting £20.00 through a cycle.

6

Advertising it is an offence of its own

Advertising is an offence in its own right, and section 330(1) is where it sits: a person who advertises unlawful gambling commits one. Gambling is unlawful for that purpose where, for it to happen as advertised and no offence under the Act be committed, a licence, an exception, a registration, a permit or a notice would or might be needed, and the arrangements are not in place.

Three limits sit alongside that offence, and all three are worth stating precisely rather than summarising.

Section 330(8) turns one display into a series of offences: a display, or a making accessible, offends afresh on every day any part of it happens. Commencement was 1 September 2007. The page records the section as current to changes in force by 14 October 2026.

That last provision is the one with teeth, because a web page is a display that persists. A single banner left up for a month is not one event on the statute’s reading of it, and the arithmetic of that needs no gambling model at all.

Nothing on this site decides whether any particular advertisement is caught, and nothing here should be read as saying so. What the section does supply is the reason a page like this one carries its figures in pounds and its rules by citation: an offer whose headline is the whole of the figure is an advertisement before it is anything else, and the law has a view about advertisements.

Section 82 of this site’s fact sheet records a related gap, and recording it is better than filling it. What the British regulator says about the position of an affiliate, as against the position of a licensee or an advertiser, could not be found stated on its own pages. So no claim about that position appears here.

7

The card that is barred outright

One payment instrument is barred outright where a British licence is in force, and the rule is short enough to carry in full.

Licence condition 6.1.2 is one line long. Payment by credit card, for gambling, is not something a licensee may accept. Nor can a money service business be put between the card and the licensee: the condition names that route and closes it.

A prepaid voucher sits at the opposite end of that same question. A credit card draws on money not yet held. A prepaid instrument is money already held, bought at one of six fixed denominations and spent down from there. Which is why a site built on faces and residues is a site about denominations in the first place.

Nothing on this page is a route round any of that. Where a reader has registered with the scheme, or has asked a bank to block gambling payments, a prepaid voucher gets them past neither, and no page here will pretend otherwise.

Being exact about the condition’s reach is worth a paragraph. It does not rank payment methods, and it does not call a prepaid instrument safer than a card. It bars one instrument at a licensed cashier, names a date, and lists the licence types inside and outside its scope. Everything beyond that is this site’s arithmetic rather than the regulator’s.

£20.00 of face, £0.00 of it borrowed, and £8.00 of it spent by the ceiling

8

Duty follows the player, not the licence

One published fact about the offshore position is precise enough to be worth the space, and it has nothing to do with whether a licence is held.

Publication of that guidance was 14 August 2014, and 1 April 2026 is the last update it carries.

Registration and payment fall on a business sited abroad that offers remote gambling, spread betting excepted, to anybody usually resident here. Where such a business is not in a group, a UK representative carrying HMRC approval generally has to be appointed. The exemption is a base in a jurisdiction the guidance lists, Gibraltar, Norway and the EU member states being the instances given.

A British player’s money, taken by a cashier sited abroad, therefore falls within British gaming duty regardless of which register carries the cashier’s name. That statement is precise and it is sourced, which puts it well ahead of a vague one about legality.

One thing it is not is a charge on a reader. An operator’s profits from remote gaming are what duty is charged on, which makes 40 per cent the operator’s figure and no deduction from £12.00. What the published tax position says about a reader’s own winnings is narrower than most pages claim: betting and gambling are recorded as not constituting trading in themselves, which leaves winnings outside trading income. A rule declaring winnings untaxed is a different thing, and no such rule was found. Nothing here is tax advice.

Offers of this kind are commonly run from outside the British register. Such a business holds no Great Britain licence, and so nothing in parts 5 to 8 of this page is about it. Six items make the difference concrete, and none of the six is a matter of opinion.

A ceiling of ten times does not apply, so £8.00 of drawdown becomes £20.00 of drawdown and the £12.00 goes. A minimum of 2.5 seconds between slot cycles does not apply, so 5,000 seconds of pacing becomes whatever the software is set to. Credit cards are not barred, so licence condition 6.1.2 and the line it draws under borrowing to gamble are simply absent.

Identity verified before any play is not required, so the check that keeps an under-18 out arrives later, if at all. A complaint has no 56-day clock and no adjudicator a British regulator has approved, which parts 6 and 7 of other notes on this site price in detail. National self-exclusion scheme membership does not follow either, the scheme itself stating that it cannot stop access to a service whose organisation lies outside it.

Two figures close the note. The face: £20.00, which the ladder reaches exactly and which nothing rounds away. The residue: £8.00, every penny of it spent by a ten times obligation, with the ladder and the floor taking nothing on top. That is as cheap as a face in this section gets, and it is still £8.00 of a £20.00 credit gone before anybody reaches a cashier.