The stranded part

1

The question this section answers

Which part of a printed face was never coming off at all? Not the part a game took, which is expectation, but the part a rule held back regardless of how the play went.

That distinction is the point of a separate heading. The spend-down describes money that was staked and lost, which is a cost. This describes money that existed on the screen and could not be reached, which is something else: it never belonged to a reader in any practical sense, whatever the balance said.

Four devices do it. A rounding at the entrance, where a denomination is larger than the sum wanted. A ceiling over winnings, which pays up to a figure and keeps the rest. A floor beneath payouts, which pays nothing at all below a figure. And a forfeiture, where a rule removes the balance for a reason unconnected with play, usually a clock. Each behaves differently as the face grows, which is part 2.

Working assumptions hold across the site: a press at 10p, ninety-six pence given back per pound, a weighting of one, and prepaid steps running £10.00 to £100.00. Ten turnovers is the working multiple unless a note says otherwise, and three fifths is therefore the share a face is expected to leave.

Priced beyond the British register, a face carries no Great Britain licence, which leaves the published position across the devices above uneven in a way worth knowing. Capping what a deposit balance pays out is barred outright on the licensed side. Capping what a credit may turn into is not barred anywhere. A minimum payment is permitted, tested only for reasonableness in its size and its frequency. And one penalty on the record attaches to a forfeiture term. Part 5 pulls the first two apart, since they get confused constantly, and part 8 deals with the penalty.

2

Four devices, one face

Set every one of them against a single £25.00 face and watch the sequence, because the order of acting decides how much each device takes.

Three pounds and five pounds are the stranded figures in that table, and the ten pounds between them is a cost rather than a residue: it was staked and lost, which is how a game works. So a £25.00 face under a £10.00 ceiling strands £8.00 and spends £10.00, and conflating the two sends a reader hunting for the remedy in the wrong half of the arithmetic.

Order matters more than it looks. A ceiling acting on what survives takes its cut after the play-through has taken its own, so a heavier multiple can leave a ceiling with nothing to do. At twenty turnovers the same face leaves £5.00, which is beneath the £10.00 ceiling, so the ceiling strands nothing and the floor strands everything. Two devices, and the one that bites depends on a number in a third place entirely.

Which gives the rule of thumb this section runs on. Devices at the ends of the transaction, the rounding and the floor, hurt small faces. The ceiling hurts large ones. A forfeiture ignores size altogether. Each device is a published figure rather than an outcome, so a reader can establish which of them they stand exposed to before paying anything in.

3

Where a ceiling starts to bite

A ceiling over winnings does nothing at all until the expected survivor exceeds it, and then it takes everything above itself. So there is a face at which it switches on, and that face is the ceiling divided by the share surviving.

At ten turnovers the share surviving is three fifths, which makes the switching point the ceiling multiplied by five thirds.

The last two rows are the quiet ones and they matter to a reader’s reading of terms. A ceiling set above the highest face this instrument can buy is a ceiling that cannot bite, however alarming the clause looks. Both £100.00 and £250.00 are in that position on a prepaid ladder topping out at a hundred pounds, because three fifths of a hundred is sixty and sixty is under either figure.

The first two rows are the live ones. A £10.00 ceiling on the top step holds half the face back, which is more than the play-through took. A £20.00 ceiling holds two fifths. Both of those are larger residues than anything the rounding at the entrance can produce above the bottom step, and neither depends on how the play went.

One general form is worth keeping. Where a ceiling is below three fifths of a face, the share of that face it strands is three fifths minus the ceiling divided by the face. On a £500.00 total face with a £50.00 ceiling that comes to half, and on a £250.00 face with the same ceiling it comes to two fifths. The bigger the face, the closer the strand gets to three fifths of all of it, which is the whole expected survivor.

4

Strike the play-through out and look again

Several notes under this heading carry a headline saying there is no wagering requirement at all. That removes the largest line in the arithmetic and leaves two devices standing, so it is worth asking what a face is worth when the multiple is nought.

Two deductions remain. The edge takes four per cent of the face, which no term can waive because it belongs to the game. And the floor beneath payouts takes everything beneath itself. Put those together and a minimum face appears: the floor divided by 0.96.

Five of those six rows strand the whole face despite carrying no play-through whatever, and the fifth row is the cruel one: a hundred presses print exactly ten pounds, the floor asks exactly ten pounds, and 40p of edge is the entire reason the balance does not qualify. Forty pence, on a face that was advertised as carrying no requirement at all.

Which produces the figure this part exists for. With no play-through and a £10.00 floor, the smallest workable face is £10.42, which is 105 presses at ten pence. Lift the floor to £15.00 and the smallest workable face goes to £15.63, which is 157 presses. Striking the multiple out does not remove the stranding. It moves the threshold from a multiple to a count.

And the residue in the last row is 60p, which is the smallest figure in this section. A reader with 150 presses and no wagering requirement loses the edge and keeps the rest, which is as good as any arrangement on this site gets. The honest summary of a headline promising no wagering is therefore narrow: it removes the largest deduction and leaves the two that bite hardest at the bottom of the ladder.

105 presses is the smallest no-wager face a £10.00 floor will pass

5

A cap and a free balance, both true at once

Two published positions get merged into one constantly, and they concern different sums of money. Pulling them apart is what this part is for, and a minute spent on it repays itself in any set of terms.

So one set of terms can honestly cap what a promotion turns into while leaving deposited money free to be taken out in full, and both of those statements can hold at once. A reader who sees the first and concludes the second has been broken, or who sees the second and concludes the first cannot exist, has merged two rules about two different balances.

The barred shape has a published example, and it is the clearest illustration of what the prohibition covers: a ceiling of one figure for a day paired with another for a week. That is barred because it caps what comes out of deposited money. A clause capping winnings from a credit at £50.00 is a different object and nothing on the sheet behind this site prohibits it.

One caution about the source. No date of any kind appears on the page carrying that prohibition, neither of publication nor of revision, so this site cites it for the rule and never for how current it is. A reader checking whether something has moved should go to the licence conditions rather than to the guidance.

6

Six notes, and the device each one holds

These notes divide by which of the four devices is doing the work, and the division is not the one a reader would guess from the headlines.

One is about the ceiling at full strength. High roller online casinos deals with the faces where part 3’s arithmetic is at its worst, because the share a ceiling strands rises towards three fifths of everything as the face grows.

Three let the floor do what a multiple usually does, each of them carrying a headline with the largest deduction struck out. At fifty presses, 50 free spins no deposit no wager lands in the upper half of part 4’s table, where a floor holds the entire face. At seventy, 70 free spins no deposit no wager lands in the same half, a little nearer the line. Then keep what you win, 30 free spins, no deposit required sets a promise about keeping beside a figure about reaching, which are not the same promise at all.

Two attach a face to one named game, where the room rather than the terms settles the contribution. Of the counts gathered here only one is large enough to pass a £10.00 floor on part 4’s figures, and that is the note on Book of Dead and its hundred and fifty presses. Smallest of all is the note on Big Bass Bonanza and its twenty, averaging £1.92 against a floor five times that size.

7

Seven headings, and where this one sits

Of the seven questions this site asks about a prepaid face, this heading holds the fourth. The rest are placed below, each with whichever device it owns.

The way out is the nearest neighbour and the division between them is worth stating. A floor is listed there because it acts at the moment of a payout request, and listed here because what it holds back is stranded rather than spent. Both are true: the device belongs to the exit and the arithmetic belongs to this section.

8

One penalty, and what it does not prove

The fourth device, forfeiture, has one published enforcement outcome behind it and that makes it the only one of the four with a figure attached to a decision rather than to arithmetic.

Here are the figures. Date: 3 July 2025. Penalty: £170,000. Subject: one clause in an operator’s rules for new casino promotions, under which it kept to itself a discretion over shutting an account and taking winnings back. Finding: unfair terms. Condition: the fair and open one. Also ordered: a third party to audit, independently, whatever controls existed over money laundering and safer gambling.

What follows from that is narrow and a reader should hold it precisely. Money has changed hands over a clause of that shape. The clause itself was not struck out, and nothing on the sheet behind this site calls such a clause void. Meet a discretionary forfeiture term, then, and what has been met is something somebody has paid a penalty for rather than something nobody can enforce.

Away from the British register the position is the usual one. Incentives get two sentences in the offshore responsible gaming policy read most carefully for this site, one calling for transparent terms and one against aggressive promotion, and caps, floors and forfeiture turn up in neither. Naming an absence from a document anybody may open beats reaching for an adjective.

Three figures this section will not supply. No published source gives a standard ceiling on winnings from a credit, so every ceiling in part 3 is a parameter that gets moved rather than a figure that gets asserted. No published source gives a contribution table, which is why part 6 lists the weighting as the thing to check first on two of these notes. And no payout speed appears here for anybody, nor any promotion code. Nor does anything here touch an account a reader has closed against their own future self. Membership of the national exclusion scheme arrives with the British licence, no company holding one without belonging, and the scheme states for itself that anybody outside its membership is past its help. A helpline costing nothing sits in the care note below.