Two numbers both written as ten, standing £1.04 apart at the payment screen

1

A quantity typed without a symbol, and what gets assumed about it

Look at the search phrase as a piece of writing. It carries a number and no unit. People in Britain reading a bare ten in a gambling context supply the missing symbol without noticing they have supplied it, because every price they meet in a week is in pounds, so the number arrives already dressed. A payment screen run from outside the British licence is under no corresponding habit. It prints the number in whichever money the account is denominated in, and the symbol it prints is the first fact about the floor that has ever been stated to anybody.

On the rates this leaf sets out in part three, those two tens are £10.00 and £8.96, which is a difference of £1.04, or a tenth of the figure that was typed. The difference is not a fee, not a penalty and not a mistake by anybody. It is what happens when a quantity travels without its unit, and the entire leaf is an examination of that one gap.

Before the arithmetic goes any further, the other thing has to be said plainly. Somebody searching the words non-Gamstop alongside a deposit figure may be looking for an account their own registration was meant to shut. Support costs nothing and stays confidential: GamCare.org.uk and BeGambleAware.org are both open to anybody, and the helpline GamCare runs on 0808 8020 133 is answered round the clock, weekends and bank holidays included. This page describes no means of reaching an operator a reader has excluded themselves from, and the arithmetic below is not an argument for going anywhere.

A refusal to carry a gambling payment, whoever issues it, is worth treating as a protection rather than an obstruction. Banks, card schemes, wallets and mobile networks all decline such payments under published policies, and a decline of that sort does the same job a self-exclusion does from a different direction. This leaf prices what a reader gives up by meeting one, and at no point suggests a way of not meeting one.

Everything below rests on a single qualifying payment of £10.00, a reference rate of €1.1500 to the pound, a conversion margin of 3 per cent applied to each leg, a forty times play-through, 96p back for each unit staked, and a weighting held at one. Three of those six are fixed site-wide and three belong to this leaf, which picks them to produce a worked example rather than to report a market and names them wherever a sentence spends one.

2

Why a floor is the term whose unit is never advertised

Go through the terms attached to an offer and ask which of them carries a currency symbol where a reader first meets it. A headline sum does, because a headline is written to be read and a symbol makes it readable. A percentage carries no unit by nature. A multiple carries none either, being a pure ratio, and a time limit is measured in days wherever anybody stands. That leaves the floors, and the floors are precisely the terms a reader does not meet until a payment screen has been reached.

So there is a pattern worth naming rather than a coincidence. The terms shown early are the ones whose units are either obvious or absent. The terms shown late are the ones whose units decide what the figures mean. A floor appears at the cashier, and so does the symbol in front of it, which is why the search phrase can be typed in good faith by somebody who will meet a different number entirely.

Two floors matter on an arrangement of this shape and they are usually denominated the same way as each other. The smallest payment the screen accepts decides whether somebody can start. The smallest balance the exit will carry decides whether they can finish. Both are quoted in whatever money the account runs in, and neither is on any banner, so a reader has two unknown quantities rather than one, and the unknown that bites harder is the second.

Travel down the right-hand column and an ordering appears without being arranged. Everything settled before a decision is a quantity whose unit is either universal or unnecessary. Everything settled after a decision is a quantity whose unit does the deciding. Nobody had to design that outcome for it to be reliable, because the terms that need a symbol are the terms belonging to the payment machinery, and the payment machinery is the last thing anybody sees.

3

Two conversion rates, neither of them published anywhere

A cashier taking pounds into an account denominated in something else performs a conversion, and a conversion needs a rate. Assume a reference of €1.1500 to the pound, which this leaf states as a round working figure and not as a quotation from any market. Assume a margin of 3 per cent applied to each leg, which this leaf also sets for itself. Those two assumptions produce every figure in parts four, five and six, and they are restated wherever one of them is used.

Taking money in, the applied rate is €1.1155 to the pound, which is the reference less 3 per cent. Paying money out, the applied rate is €1.1845, which is the reference plus the same 3 per cent, and the direction is what makes the second figure larger rather than smaller. Both rates are arithmetic consequences of the pair of assumptions, and neither is a quotation of anything.

The point of printing them is to show the shape of a thing a reader cannot see. A payment screen displays a number of units to be credited. It need not display the rate that produced the number, it need not display the reference it was taken from, and it need not display the margin between the two. All three sit nowhere in writing, and a reader can recover the applied rate only by dividing what arrived by what was sent, which is a calculation available after the payment and never before it.

That asymmetry is worth stating in one line, because it is the sharpest thing on this leaf. Every other term discussed on this site can in principle be read before committing, even if the reading is buried three documents away. The rate cannot be read at all before committing. It is inferred afterwards from two numbers a reader happens to have, which makes it the only term here that is settled by arithmetic rather than by a document.

€1.1155 taking money in, €1.1845 handing it back, and a reference of €1.1500 nobody prints

4

Ten pounds out and nine pounds forty-two back

Work the simplest possible journey, with no play at all in it. A reader sends £10.00. At the inward rate of €1.1155 the account is credited €11.16. At the reference of €1.1500 that same £10.00 would have been €11.50, so the inward leg has already absorbed €0.35, which is £0.30 valued back at the reference.

Now bring it home untouched. Paying out at €1.1845, a balance of €11.16 returns £9.42. Nothing has been staked, nothing has been lost on a reel, no condition has been triggered and no fee has been charged, and £0.58 of the original ten pounds is gone. That is 5.8 per cent, which is 3 per cent taken twice and compounded, since 0.97 divided by 1.03 is 0.9417.

Ten as the search phrase reads it £10.00 The same ten after both conversions £9.42 Price of a rate nobody printed £0.58

Fifty-eight pence is a small number and the wrong one to stop at, for two reasons. The first is that it scales exactly: a payment ten times larger costs £5.80, and the proportion never improves, because a margin expressed as a percentage has no economy of scale in it. The second is that it is charged on the way out as well as the way in, so a reader who moves money across the boundary twice has paid it twice, and most people who deposit intend to do precisely that.

The honest concession belongs here. Somebody who sends £10.00, spends the balance entirely inside the account and never asks for anything back has paid the inward leg only, which on these assumptions is 30p rather than 58p. That is a real saving and it is bought by never collecting anything, which is a strange way to save money and is nonetheless the commonest outcome. The 58p applies to the branch where a reader actually succeeds in leaving with something.

5

Which of the two tens clears a floor, and which does not

Now put the floors in. Suppose the smallest payment the screen will take is ten units of the account’s own money, which is €10.00, and suppose the smallest balance the exit will carry is twenty of the same, which is €20.00. Each of those is a figure this leaf picks so that the shape can be seen, and nothing citable here records how either is distributed in practice.

A payment of £10.00 arrives as €11.16, which clears a €10.00 floor with €1.16 to spare, so the entry floor is met and nothing appears to be wrong. Valued the other way, the €10.00 floor costs £8.96 at the inward rate, which is £1.04 below the figure the reader typed. The two tens differ by that £1.04 and both of them are correct statements of a floor.

The exit floor behaves entirely differently and is the one worth the attention. A balance of €20.00 is what the cashier wants before anything moves, and €20.00 converted at the outward rate is £16.88. A reader holding the whole of their €11.16 therefore holds 55.8 per cent of the sum needed to leave, and the shortfall is €8.84. Nothing has gone wrong at that point either. The payment cleared the floor it had to clear, and the exit has a different floor, measured in the same units and set at twice the level.

Of the four rows it is the third that repays attention, and it is round in neither money. £18.00 is the smallest whole pound figure that converts to more than €20.00 at the inward rate, which makes it the smallest payment that could in principle be collected again without a single win. A reader thinking in pounds has no way of arriving at eighteen, because eighteen is not a figure anybody advertises, is not a floor anybody states, and exists only as the solution to a division nobody set out.

That is the whole mechanism in one row. A floor denominated in another money converts into an awkward figure in the reader’s own, the awkward figure is never printed, and the reader therefore budgets against a round number that has no standing at the payment screen.

6

The second subtraction, worked in the account’s own money

The first subtraction, in part four, was 58p of currency margin on a ten pound round trip. The second is far larger, is written down somewhere, and has to be worked in the account’s money rather than in the reader’s, because that is the money the condition is denominated in. Saying which money a subtraction happens in is not pedantry here. It is the only way to keep the two from being added together wrongly.

Take the €11.16 standing in the account and suppose a matched offer credits the same again, so the credit under condition is €11.16. A play-through of forty times asks for €446.40 to cross the reels. With 96p returned per unit staked, 4 units in every hundred stay behind, so €446.40 of staking is expected to leave €17.86 with the margin, and the credit closes at minus €6.70, being €11.16 multiplied by one less 1.6.

Credit as the account states it €11.16 Expected close at forty times minus €6.70 What the written multiple removes €17.86

Brought home at the outward rate, €17.86 is £15.08, and that conversion is itself an act the reader cannot price in advance. So the leaf produces its subtraction twice, as every page on this site does, and here the two subtractions arrive in different monies: 58p of spread denominated in pounds, and €17.86 of condition denominated in the account’s units, which becomes £15.08 only after a third conversion that has its own margin inside it.

€446.40 of staking asked of a balance the reader budgeted as ten pounds

Drawing all three rows in a single money is the only honest way to stack them, and stacking them exposes an ordering. Thirty pence is what one crossing costs. Fifty-eight pence is what two cost. A pound and four pence is what the symbol in front of the floor costs, and it is the largest of the three despite being the one nobody charges for, because it is not a fee at all but a difference between two readings of one number.

7

Every term on this page, with its unit marked beside it

Collect the whole leaf into one column and mark not only where each term is settled but which money it is settled in. The second mark is the addition this page makes to the site’s usual sorting, and on this subject it carries more information than the first does.

Four rows of that table are quoted in a money the reader did not choose, and two of the four are rates rather than sums, which means they cannot be met with a round number at all. Three rows are quoted in no unit whatever. Only one row, the first, is in the money the reader was thinking in, and it is the only row the reader supplies rather than receives.

That bottom row travels in the opposite direction to everything above it, which is why it is printed. Where a player’s ordinary home is in the United Kingdom, the business owes remote gaming duty on its profit, and the charge has stood at 40 in the hundred since 1 April 2026, nineteen points above the 21 in the hundred that ran from 1 April 2019, an increase of 90.5 per cent on the earlier level. The obligation is fastened to where the player lives rather than to where the licence is, so it crosses a border the protections do not cross, and part eight sets out what stays behind.

8

What a transparency duty is worth in pence on a ten

Arrangements found by typing this phrase sit outside the British licence. On a leaf about units, the way to count what that costs is to set a pound figure from this page’s own ten against each duty that disappears. Three of them do the relevant work, and between them they govern what a term has to say, how reachable it has to be, and who fields the complaint when a reader is unsatisfied.

The first is the condition on fair and transparent terms and practices, which carries four separate tests. The first test holds the terms and any consumer notice to the fairness standard of the 2015 consumer statute and binds the licensee to what it has written. The second asks for transparency in that same statute’s sense and for the contract terms to be kept easy to get at. The third carries both tests across into any amendment, material ones having to be notified before they start operating. The fourth bars unfair commercial practices, as defined by the 2024 statute on markets, competition and consumers that the limb names, at every point where a licensee deals with consumers at all. Worth on this leaf’s ten: the whole 58p of spread in part four, because a rate that has to be transparent and easily accessible is a rate a reader could have divided out before paying rather than after.

The second is the scope note attached to the same condition, which reaches every operating licence other than the technical and software ones. Scope is worth naming because it is what makes the duty general rather than negotiated: a reader does not have to establish that a particular arrangement signed up to transparency, only that the licence exists. Worth on this leaf’s ten: the £1.04 between the two tens in part five, which is the figure a transparent statement of the unit would have removed outright.

The third is not a duty on an operator but a published limit on the regulator, and it is the one most readers get wrong. The regulator’s own page carries the sentence we are not an ombudsman, and three limits follow from it. Resolving a gambling complaint falls outside its powers. Getting somebody’s money back falls outside them as well. So does deciding who is right about a withdrawal or a technical fault. Its instruction runs the other way, towards the gambling business itself. Worth on this leaf’s ten: nothing at all, which is the point. Even inside the licence the regulator is not the route to a refund, so a reader counting on it as a backstop has miscounted in both directions at once.

The self-exclusion half of the loss follows from a different document and belongs here as well. Taking part in the national scheme was written into the licence in March 2020, for anybody taking business from people living in Britain, and since April 2020 a licensed operator has had to compare its entire customer list with the scheme’s register no less often than once a day. Counted out, that is at least 365 comparisons in a year, and a business without the licence performs none of them, so somebody relying on a registration to shut an account there will find it shuts nothing. The helpline in part one is the better destination than a payment screen.

9

Settling the unit before the sum, and why this phrase is typed

The method this leaf suggests is short and costs nothing. Settle the unit before the figure. Ask which money the account is denominated in, which money the floors are quoted in, and what the applied rate was on the smallest payment that can be tested. Only then compare anything with the number that was typed into a search box, because until the unit is settled the comparison is between two quantities that are not the same kind of thing.

Two of those questions have answers that can be read on a payment screen before money moves, which makes them cheaper than anything else on this page. The third cannot be answered in advance at all, and the honest instruction is therefore to treat the applied rate as unknown and to assume it is worse than a reference rate by some margin, because a cashier that converts at no margin would have no reason to keep the margin unquoted.

Collected into figures, this leaf says six things about one ten pound payment. It arrives as €11.16. It returns as £9.42 if nothing happens to it. It clears an assumed €10.00 entry floor and falls €8.84 short of an assumed €20.00 exit floor. A matched credit of €11.16 carries €446.40 of staking and closes at minus €6.70. The condition removes €17.86, which is £15.08 brought home. And the two numbers both written as ten stand £1.04 apart.

The last word goes to whoever typed the phrase. A good share of the traffic that lands on wording of this kind comes from people whose registration with the national scheme is still live, and for them the currency arithmetic above is beside the point. The useful destination is GamCare.org.uk, BeGambleAware.org or the helpline on 0808 8020 133, and a registration still running is a protection operating exactly as intended rather than a problem to be solved.