A hundred cycles is four minutes ten seconds of entitlement

1

A count measured in seconds

Price a hundred cycles at 10p and the face is £10.00, which is one multiplication. The useful second multiplication is the one almost nobody does: a hundred cycles is also a quantity of time.

Two and a half seconds separates one cycle of a licensed slot from the next, as a minimum, under RTS requirement 14D. A hundred cycles therefore fill 250 seconds, being four minutes plus ten. That is the whole of the entitlement, measured as a sitting.

100 cycles x 2.5 seconds = 250 seconds of entitlement, worth £10.00

Set those two figures beside each other and a rate appears: 4p of face per second. At 96 per cent returned, the expected winnings across the 250 seconds are £9.60, which is 3.84p a second. Both figures are small and both are exact, and they are the units everything else on this page is measured in.

The 10p is declared rather than reported, and so is the 96 per cent. What a free cycle is worth is fixed by no published rule: no minimum, no maximum, and no duty on anybody to print the figure. Both assumptions run through every page on this site, so that one headline can be laid against another on a single scale.

2

What one unplayed cycle costs

A count is divisible in a way a sum is not. Ten pounds of credit is spent or it is not. A hundred cycles can be half spent, and the unspent half has an exact price: 10p each, 96 per cent of which was expected to come back.

That makes the commonest residue in this category the simplest to price. Every cycle left unplayed when a window closes removes 10p from the face and 9.6p from the expectation.

Nothing in that table involves losing. Every row assumes the cycles played went exactly as the arithmetic says. The forfeited column is purely about cycles that never happened, which is why it is the cleanest residue on the site: no variance, no edge, no dispute.

It is also the residue nobody prices, because a headline counts what is credited rather than what gets used. A promotion reading one hundred is accurate about the issue and silent about the take-up, and the difference between those two is money.

Each unplayed cycle removes £0.10 of face and £0.096 of expectation

One comparison closes the part. A reader who plays ninety of a hundred cycles has done 90 per cent of the available work and holds 90 per cent of the available expectation, which is unremarkable. A reader who plays ninety and then meets a ten times requirement on the winnings holds £8.64 less £3.46, so £5.18. Forfeiting ten cycles cost £1.00 of face and 24p of survival. The requirement cost £3.46. Both are residue and only one of them gets written about.

3

Forty minutes is the threshold

A play-through turns a face into turnover, and turnover turns back into time at a fixed rate. That chain produces a threshold which a window either clears or does not, and the threshold is exact.

Ten times on the £9.60 that a hundred cycles average asks £96.00 of turnover. Priced at 10p, that comes to 960 cycles. At 2.5 seconds apiece those cycles fill 2,400 seconds: 40 minutes.

So a window of less than 40 minutes cannot accommodate a ten times requirement at the published minimum pace, however willing a reader is. The credit is not refused. It simply expires with the requirement unmet, and the whole £9.60 goes.

The right-hand column is the finding. It is not a recommendation about how long to play. It is the shortest span in which a requirement is arithmetically possible, which means a window beneath it guarantees forfeiture of the whole credit before anything has gone wrong.

Ten times is the strictest multiple a British licence allows: the provision is numbered 5.1.1 among the social responsibility code provisions, its third limb at paragraph (a), effective from 19 January 2026, reaching every licence bar two, one covering gambling software and one covering gaming machine technical work. Away from that licence a cashier is free to write forty, and forty times needs 160 minutes rather than 40.

That ratio is worth holding on to. Quadruple the multiple and the time quadruples with it, because turnover, cycles and seconds are all proportional to one another. A window written at 24 hours accommodates any of those multiples easily. A window written at half an hour accommodates none of them except the bare credit.

A thirty-minute window against a forty-minute obligation forfeits £9.60

4

Ten a day for ten days

A hundred cycles do not always arrive together, and where they arrive in instalments each instalment carries its own deadline. The arithmetic changes shape rather than scale.

Take ten cycles a day across ten days, with each day’s allocation expiring when the day does. A day comes to £1.00 of face, 96p of expectation and 25 seconds at the minimum pace. The whole arrangement is worth the same £10.00 as the single allocation, and it is worth that only to a reader who appears on all ten days.

One pound a day is the unit, which makes the instalment arrangement unusually easy to price: the face realised equals the days attended. A reader who misses three days of ten has forfeited £3.00, and no term was broken, no balance was refused and nothing was disputed.

Something else happens to the seconds, and it is the part worth noticing. Twenty-five seconds is the whole of a day’s entitlement at the minimum pace. An arrangement that requires an appearance to collect twenty-five seconds of play has a cost structure entirely unlike the play itself: the walk to the screen is longer than the session.

Where a requirement attaches to each day’s winnings rather than to the total, the figures divide too. Ten times against 96p calls for £9.60 of turnover, being 96 cycles and 240 seconds. So a day worth 25 seconds of entitlement carries 240 seconds of obligation, a ratio of 9.6 to one, identical to the ratio on the single allocation.

Each day: 25 seconds of entitlement, 240 seconds of obligation

5

Why speed cannot beat a clock

Part 3 made a threshold out of the minimum pace. The obvious response is to play faster, and under a British licence that response is unavailable. Three published rules close it off, and they fit a table better than a paragraph.

The third row carries the largest figure. Four reel sets running at once would put 960 cycles inside 600 seconds rather than 2,400, so a 40-minute threshold would become a ten-minute one. The ban on concurrent play is therefore what makes the threshold in part 3 mean anything at all.

The first row has a boundary worth stating, because it is narrower than it looks. What cannot be offered is a cut in the time a result takes to show. Scratch-all and reveal-all stay permitted. Outside it too: a bonus round or feature round where no further stake goes on, plus a game whose stake disappears unless the player acts to finish.

Not one of the three rows turns up in the eight areas made mandatory for Curacao licensees. So past the British licence a reader facing a short window can indeed play faster, and the threshold in part 3 stops being a threshold. That sounds like relief and works as the opposite, since the interval between cycles is the only place a decision can be taken.

A fourth rule belongs here without a row of its own, since it bears on the screen instead of on the clock. A stake-sized return gets no win sound and no win animation. Three alternatives are offered instead: the total awarded, winning lines shown briefly, one short sound on crediting. Across 960 cycles at 10p the great majority of outcomes are returns beneath the stake, so that rule shapes almost the whole 40 minutes.

6

The rule against calling a leaver back

A count paid in instalments has a particular relationship with a reader who has decided to stop, and there is a published rule about exactly that.

The requirement is broad and its guidance is specific. Four kinds of encouragement are out of bounds for a gambling product. Chasing a loss. Raising a stake. Raising a sum already settled on. Carrying on once a wish to stop has been shown.

Row four is the one that touches this page, and it touches it hard. An instalment arrangement works by prompting an appearance. A prompt sent to somebody who has already walked away is what the guidance names, and the example it gives for the prompt is a free game.

Price that and the figure is modest, which is the point rather than a weakness. A day of this arrangement comes to £1.00 of face with 96p of expectation behind it. The prompt that fetches a reader back is therefore worth under a pound to them and considerably more than that to whoever sent it, since the reader who returns for 25 seconds of entitlement usually stays for longer.

No such provision appears anywhere in the eight mandatory areas Curacao publishes. Two lines are all that rulebook says about bonuses. Terms are to be clear and communication transparent. Aggressive bonus promotion is not to push gambling to excess. There is no counterpart to the chasing rule, no ten times ceiling, and nothing about fetching back somebody who has stopped.

A day’s instalment is worth £1.00 of face and 25 seconds of entitlement

7

Four things nobody publishes

This page rests on a window, and the window is the least documented figure in the whole category. Saying so precisely is more useful than guessing, so here are the four gaps that bear on it.

Prominence is the duty that does exist. Significant conditions go clearly and prominently into promotional material wherever omitting them would mislead, and the worked list names a time limit on claiming or on using an offer.

So the position is this. How long a window may be is nobody’s business to set. Whether it is stated prominently is somebody’s business, and the consequence of failing that is published: an advertisement whose significant conditions lack enough prominence will be seen as misleading.

One enforcement outcome shows the shape of the problem. The sum: £170,000. The decision bears a date of 3 July 2025. Taichi Tech Limited is the business, and Fafabet is the name it trades under. Bonus rules for new casino promotions had reserved a discretion over closing an account and over taking winnings away. The regulator treated the fair and open condition as breached, called such terms short of transparency, and required an audit from a third party acting independently. A fine and a striking out are different outcomes, and only the first of the two is published here, so this page does not call such a clause void.

Read that beside part 3 and the two mechanisms are worth separating. A discretion to forfeit is a decision somebody takes. A window shorter than 40 minutes forfeits £9.60 with nobody taking any decision at all. The second needs no clause, draws no penalty, and is harder to see.

8

Duties priced on a hundred cycles

Counts of this size are published where no British licence applies, so the protections priced below are the ones a reader is trading away. Each row is fastened to a licence issued in Great Britain, and a cashier holding none answers to no row of it.

Three rows carry this page’s own figures. The pacing minimum is worth the difference between a measurable obligation and an unmeasurable one. The ceiling is worth 120 minutes of the 160. And the prominence duty is worth the entire £9.60 in the case where a window is shorter than the obligation and the reader finds out afterwards.

Two rows are about the instalment arrangement in part 4, and both have the same shape: a duty not to manufacture an appearance. Topping up without a fresh choice is out. Fetching back a customer who has already walked away is out, and the lure named in the guidance is a free game. On an arrangement worth £1.00 a day those duties cost an operator more than they are worth to a reader, which is a fair description of most of this list.

One row has no price against it and it is the last. Taking part in the national scheme follows the licence rather than the domain. The scheme draws its own boundary too. Participating operators are inside its reach. Beyond that reach, where no participation exists, the scheme says it cannot prevent anybody getting to the services involved.

Three figures close the account here. A printed face of £10.00, which is 250 seconds at the published minimum. A drawdown of 40p, the edge on the face before any requirement attaches. And £9.60 of residue in the case this page exists to describe, where a window shorter than the obligation forfeits the credit entire and nobody refuses anything.