The rung

1

The question this section answers

What does the instrument itself cost? Not the game, not the terms, not the exit, but the simple fact that money arrives in fixed sizes and a reader’s wishes do not.

A prepaid face is sold at six figures and nothing between them. Want a sum that is not one of those figures, or a total that cannot be assembled from them, and the purchase has to be larger than the wish. The difference is stranded at once, and the striking thing about it is that nothing has happened yet. No reel has turned, no term has applied and no multiple has been served. The residue in this section exists at the moment of purchase.

Fixed quantities, as elsewhere on this site: a 10p press, 96 pence coming back per pound, a weighting of one. Six steps make the ladder, starting at ten pounds, stepping to twenty and to twenty-five, then to fifty, then seventy-five, then a hundred, with more than one purchase allowed, which matters more than it looks and is the whole of part 2.

Counters out here hold no Great Britain licence, and three of the duties that go missing with it belong to an entrance. One obliges a licensee to name the identity documents a customer might be asked for, say when, and say how to send them, all of it ahead of a first deposit. A second puts a financial limit in front of a reader as the standing default, either on registering or when a first payment is made. A third bars one instrument outright and has barred it since 14 April 2020. Part 7 takes them in turn.

2

Every sum these six steps can build

Six denominations, bought in any combination and any quantity, reach a surprisingly thin set of totals. Work it out rather than assuming it.

Below sixty pounds the reachable totals are these: ten, twenty, twenty-five, then thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five and sixty. Ten totals across sixty whole pounds, which is one pound in six. Above thirty pounds every multiple of five can be built, because twenty-five and ten and twenty between them cover every residue of five. Below thirty there are exactly three totals, and fifteen pounds is not one of them.

Fifteen pounds is the one gap that matters, and it matters because it sits in the middle of the range a reader of this site is most likely to want. Nothing in the set adds to fifteen: ten leaves five to find and no five exists, twenty overshoots, and twenty-five overshoots further. So every wish from eleven pounds to nineteen is met by a twenty pound purchase, and the stranding across that range runs from £9.00 down to £1.00.

One further property of the set deserves naming. Because the steps are all multiples of five, no total that is not a multiple of five can ever be built. A reader wanting £18.00 or £33.00 or £47.00 is rounding up by definition rather than by bad luck, and the rounding is at most £4.00 once the total is above thirty.

Ten buildable totals below sixty pounds, out of sixty

3

Two worst points on the ladder

The cost of a gap is the purchase minus the wish, and the cost that matters is that difference expressed as a share of the purchase. Run every whole pound from one to thirty through the set in part 2 and the shape that comes out has two peaks.

Ninety per cent is the first peak and it needs no explanation: below the bottom step there is no step, so the gap beneath the first rung is the whole of that rung. A reader wanting one pound buys ten and nine of them go nowhere useful.

Forty-five per cent is the second peak and it is the interesting one, because it is caused by an absence rather than by a floor. Eleven pounds is one pound above a buildable total and nine pounds below the next one, and the reason the next one is so far away is that fifteen cannot be assembled. Fill that hole and the worst case across the same range would fall to about 27 per cent. The missing denomination costs more than any of the denominations that exist.

After thirty pounds the ladder gets fine and stays fine. Every multiple of five is buildable, so the worst rounding is four pounds, and four pounds as a share of a purchase keeps shrinking: 13.33 per cent at thirty, eight per cent at fifty, 5.33 per cent at seventy-five, four per cent at a hundred. The instrument is expensive at the bottom and cheap at the top, which is the opposite of how most charges on this site behave.

4

Three parties who can set a rung

Not every rung belongs to the instrument. Three different parties can impose a step, they do it for different reasons, and a reader who confuses them will look for the fix in the wrong place.

Instrument rungs are the subject of parts 2 and 3. Counter rungs behave differently: a smallest payment of £20.00 does not round a purchase at all if the purchase was already twenty pounds, so it only bites where it stands above what a reader wanted. And terms rungs are the quietest of the three, because a threshold in an offer looks like a choice rather than a limit. Want £45.00 where the match rate steps up at fifty, and the pull upward is £5.00 that a reader will describe as their own decision.

Stacking is where the arithmetic gets unpleasant, and the rule is simply that the highest of the three binds. A reader wanting £11.00, at a counter asking £20.00, under terms that improve at £25.00, is buying twenty-five pounds: the instrument wanted twenty, the counter wanted twenty, the terms wanted twenty-five, and £14.00 is surplus to the wish it started from. Fifty-six per cent, which beats either peak in part 3.

5

Thirteen notes, sorted by who rounds

These notes divide by the party that does the rounding, which is the division part 4 says a reader needs.

Three are about sums beneath the bottom step, where the instrument does everything. £1 deposit casino is the ninety per cent case, the worst on the ladder. £3 minimum deposit casino UK takes an advertised floor that divides into the bottom step three times and leaves a pound no fourth visit can use. £5 deposit casino stands at the midpoint of that step, surplus and wish being equal, and the same figure proves to be a licensed stake ceiling too.

Seven cover rails, where whoever runs the counter owns the rung instead of the instrument. PayPal casino moves any sum to the penny, which leaves every rung on that page belonging to somebody else. Visa casino pays exactly and brings a dispute route that stops where the credit begins. Mastercard casino is one scheme mark covering two instruments, of which one is unusable. Apple Pay casino and Google Pay casino are wrappers with no denominations of their own, inheriting the sum from the card inside and the floor from the counter. Skrill, Neteller and Trustly casino weighs three rails against a single clause buried in the bonus rules. And MuchBetter casino is the page where a flat charge and a percentage charge cross, which is the arithmetic the section on leaving uses throughout.

Two are about instruments that carry their own denominations into the counter. Paysafecard casino is the purest case on the site: a code that keeps whatever the counter did not need. Pay by phone casino is the one where the surplus goes somewhere unusual, into the gambling balance itself rather than staying on the instrument.

And one is about a rung that cannot be bought at all. Credit card casino prices the only instrument a licensed counter is forbidden to accept, where the residue is therefore the whole of the face.

6

The same instrument, seven questions

This heading asks the second of the seven questions this site puts to a prepaid face. The table sorts the rest, with the figure each supplies to the arithmetic above.

The way out is the closest relation. A payout floor is a rung at the other end of the transaction, and the two are often the same figure: set a bottom denomination of ten pounds beside a smallest payout at that same figure and one reader’s money gets rounded at both ends, upward on the way in and to nothing on the way out.

7

What the rules fix at the entrance

Three published duties bear on the moment money goes on, and all three are British. They do not touch the arithmetic in parts 2 and 3, which is the instrument’s own, and that is worth saying plainly: no rule anywhere requires a denomination ladder to be fine-grained.

The first two rows matter most to a reader of this section, since between them they move a question to the front which would otherwise turn up at the back. Where the documents a reader may be asked for have been named before any money goes on, nothing about them can be sprung at a payout. That is the entrance duty doing work at the exit, and it is the clearest example on this site of why the order of two rules matters more than either rule alone.

Rows three and four turn a limit into the default instead of something a reader must hunt for. Periods offered have to include a day, seven days and a month. A gross deposit limit, by which is meant a ceiling on what goes in across a period, has to be put as prominently as any other kind at the least. Set one and it binds. Decline one and the declining has to be deliberate.

Rows five and six are the absolute case. One instrument is simply refused for gambling at a British licensed counter, and the bar covers a payment passed through a money service business too, so the obvious indirect route is caught by the same words. The scope is every remote licence and most non-remote betting ones, leaving out the technical, software and host licences. Where no British licence is held, none of that applies, which is why the note on that instrument prices the whole face rather than a rounding.

8

What this section leaves unpriced

Throughout this site the ladder is a working assumption of its own, right for a prepaid instrument and set by no published rule. There is no regulated list of denominations, no minimum granularity and no duty on anybody to sell a five pound face. So every figure in parts 2 and 3 is arithmetic on a stated ladder rather than a report about a market, and a reader whose ladder differs should redo the division: the share stranded is always the gap divided by the purchase.

Two further gaps are deliberate. No primary source publishes a distribution of smallest payments across counters away from the British register, so the counter rungs in part 4 are examples rather than measurements. And no payout speed appears in any note here, nor any promotion code, both being the most perishable figures in the subject.

One honest limit on part 7. The duties listed there are entrance duties under a British licence and they say nothing at all about which instrument any particular counter will accept. This site does not publish that, in either direction, and does not compare instruments by how they fare where a licence is absent. Comparisons of that sort serve chiefly somebody out to defeat a block, which makes this a line and not a gap.

The facts on the related point run in the other direction and they are short. No company holds a British licence without joining the national exclusion scheme, which is how the scheme is reached, and the scheme reports of itself that companies outside are beyond it. A helpline costing nothing answers at any hour, with the number in the care note below.