A ceiling standing in the place a play-through used to occupy

1

What moves into the place a struck condition leaves

Promotional conditions are written to a pattern, and the pattern has a slot in it for the term governing what happens to whatever the promotion produces. On a conventional offer that slot holds a multiple. Remove the multiple and the slot does not close up. Something else goes into it, and on offers advertising no play-through the something else is almost always a ceiling.

That substitution is the subject of this leaf. It is not a sleight of hand and it is not concealed: the ceiling is written down, in ordinary words, in the same chapter and frequently under the same numbered heading the multiple occupied. It reads like a detail because it is phrased like one, and it decides more than the sentence it replaced on certain outcomes and less on most.

A reader scanning conditions for the word that worries them finds nothing, which is the point of the exercise, and moves on past the sentence sitting where that word used to be. The two sentences are not interchangeable. One reduces every outcome proportionally. The other leaves most outcomes exactly alone and removes the top off the rest. Working out which a given reader should prefer turns on a quantity nobody prints, and parts five to seven are about that.

Sorted into places, the offer looks like this. The count of a hundred and the £5.00 qualifying payment are settled on the banner, along with the denial. The ceiling is settled in the promotional conditions, in the slot the multiple vacated. What one press is worth stays nowhere in writing. How often a hundred presses reach past a ceiling is likewise nowhere in writing, and it is the figure the whole comparison turns on.

One point of honesty belongs at the front. A ceiling is a perfectly reasonable thing for somebody handing out free presses to write. Without one the liability on a promotion has no upper bound at all, and an offer with no upper bound would either not be made or would be made to far fewer people. The question this leaf asks is not whether a ceiling is defensible. It is what a ceiling is worth, to whom, and at which outcomes.

2

A hundred presses, five pounds paid, £9.60 expected

Ten pence a press is the figure this site works with, and nothing anybody publishes fixes it. A hundred presses therefore put £10.00 across the reels. A return of 96 per cent leaves £9.60 of that expected to survive, so the promotion is expected to cost whoever hands it out 40p.

Set that beside the qualifying payment and the arrangement reads well. £5.00 goes in, stays the reader’s own money, and buys £10.00 of turnover and an expected £9.60 of residue. Twice the payment in turnover, and the residue very nearly matching it. Nothing about those figures is misleading and they are the reason an offer of this shape is worth considering at all.

The last row is this leaf’s own illustrative setting and every figure derived from it carries that caveat. Nothing available to this site sets out a standard ceiling on promotional winnings, a spread of them, or any rule obliging one to exist. £50.00 is taken because it is a round sum of the shape that recurs and because it stands a useful way off the expectation, which is the relationship that decides everything below.

Note that relationship now, since it recurs. £50.00 is 5.21 times the expected residue of £9.60, and it is five times the £10.00 of turnover the presses produce. Those two ratios are what a ceiling actually is. A pound figure on its own says nothing: a ceiling only means something set against the size of the thing it is capping.

3

The whole range in which a ceiling does nothing

Begin with the half of the picture that is good news, because it is the larger half and it is usually skipped. Below the ceiling the offer behaves exactly as advertised. Every penny the presses return is the reader’s, nothing has to be staked again, and the sentence in the conditions has no effect whatever.

That range runs from nothing to £50.00 and it contains the expected outcome with a great deal of room to spare. A residue of £5.00 is paid in full. So is £9.60, so is £25.00, and so is £50.00 itself. On every one of those the struck play-through would have taken something and the ceiling takes nothing, which is a straightforward and material improvement.

It is worth printing the comparison at those outcomes rather than asserting it, because the asymmetry is larger than it sounds.

Set the two right-hand columns beside one another and the structure is unmistakable. The ceiling column agrees with the unconditioned column on four rows and departs from it on two. The forty-times column disagrees everywhere and is below nought on every row, because forty sits past twenty-five and twenty-five is where a condition of that kind has taken back everything it was written over.

Expected residue, read off the headline £9.60 That residue with a forty-times condition over it minus £5.76 Worth of the sentence that was struck out £15.36

£15.36 is what the substitution hands a reader at the expected outcome, and the matching figure for the ceiling at that same outcome is nothing at all, because £9.60 is nowhere near £50.00. On the expectation, and on every outcome below five times it, the trade is entirely one way.

4

Where the excess stops existing, and what that costs

Now the other half. Past £50.00 the ceiling stops being inert and becomes total. It does not reduce the excess, tax it or defer it. The excess is simply not paid, and from the account’s point of view it never happened.

Take a residue of £120.00, which this leaf uses as its worked large outcome. Under no condition at all that is £120.00. Under the assumed ceiling it is £50.00. The difference is £70.00, and the £70.00 is not held back pending anything. There is no sequence of further play that recovers it.

A residue of £120.00, as the headline would read it £120.00 The same residue once the ceiling applies £50.00 Excess the conditions do not pay £70.00

The middle bar in that drawing is the honest picture of a ceiling. Most of its length is solid, because most of the money survives, and the hatched part at the end is a clean cut rather than a gradient. The bottom bar is a different animal: it crosses the rule, and the whole of its length is hatched, because at forty times nothing at all survives and the condition is still asking for more.

£50.00 of ceiling over £10.00 of turnover, which is five times the stake

The ruler gives the cleanest way to hold a ceiling in mind. Divide it by the turnover the presses produce. A £50.00 ceiling over £10.00 of turnover binds on any run returning five times what went across the reels. A £20.00 ceiling over the same turnover would bind at twice the stake, which happens often. A £500.00 ceiling would bind at fifty times, which is rare enough to be decorative. The pound figure alone tells a reader none of this.

5

A proportion and a truncation, set over one balance

The two conditions differ in shape before they differ in size, and the shapes are worth naming because the naming does most of the analytical work. A multiple is a proportion. A ceiling is a truncation.

A proportion acts on every outcome by the same factor. At forty times, with four pence leaking from each pound staked, what survives is the residue multiplied by minus 0.6, whatever the residue is. Small outcomes, the expectation and large outcomes are all treated identically in relative terms. Nothing is special about any part of the range.

A truncation acts on no outcome at all up to a point and on every outcome past it, returning the same number for all of them. Below £50.00 the function is the identity. Above it the function is the constant £50.00. There is a kink and the whole of the condition lives at the kink.

The last row explains why a ceiling reads as harmless and a multiple does not. A multiple announces itself immediately, as an obligation standing over money that already exists. A ceiling announces nothing until an outcome happens to be large, and most outcomes are not. A condition that is silent on the ordinary case gets read as a condition about nothing.

There is a further consequence and it cuts against the reader. A hundred presses are not taken for the expected £9.60, which would be a poor use of an afternoon. They are taken for the chance of something larger. A truncation removes precisely that part of the range, and leaves intact the part nobody was playing for.

6

Solving for the balance at which the two agree

Since one condition is a proportion and the other a truncation, there is a residue at which they pay the same, and finding it is a line of algebra worth doing once. A residue B under a multiple W leaves B multiplied by one less four hundredths of W. The same residue under a ceiling C leaves whichever is smaller, B or C.

Set those equal and the crossing residue is C divided by one less four hundredths of W. That expression says something immediately: where W is twenty-five or more the divisor is nothing or negative, so no crossing exists and the ceiling is kinder at every outcome without exception. The forty-times condition this leaf has been pricing is of that kind, which is why its column in part three is worse on every single row.

Below twenty-five the crossing is real and it moves fast.

Every figure in the third column is £50.00 divided by the share in the second. At a modest multiple the crossing sits at £62.50, which is a residue a hundred presses can plausibly reach. At twenty-four times it sits at £1,250.00, which from £10.00 of turnover is a 125-fold return and is not a case anybody should plan around.

So the answer to the question this leaf’s key asks is a function rather than a verdict. Whether a reader should prefer the ceiling depends on how much of the outcome range sits past the crossing residue, and the crossing residue depends on which multiple the ceiling displaced. Against a severe multiple the ceiling wins outright. Against a mild one it wins on everything ordinary and loses on everything exceptional.

The two flat lines in that drawing carry the argument. A condition that does nothing to most of the range is a condition most readers will never meet, and a reader who never meets it has been handed £15.36 against the sentence it replaced. The two lines that fall are the ones the offer was taken for.

7

The weight nobody publishes, and the preference it would settle

Everything in part six stops one step short of a verdict, and the missing step is a single quantity: how often a hundred presses produce a residue past the crossing. With that figure the comparison is arithmetic. Without it the comparison has two halves and no scales.

That figure is not published and this site will not supply one. No primary source sets out the distribution of outcomes for a hundred presses on any build, and the published return figure does not contain it. A return of 96 per cent is a statement about an average over a length of play no hundred-press session approaches. Two builds returning the same 96 per cent can put wildly different weight past £50.00, and nothing a reader can open distinguishes them.

What can honestly be said about the ceiling’s cost is a bound rather than a figure. It is never negative, since the ceiling never pays more than the uncapped outcome. It is exactly nothing on every outcome at or under £50.00. And it equals the whole of the excess on every outcome past it. Those three statements are complete and they do not add up to an expected cost, because the weights are missing.

There is one thing a reader can do with that, and it is better than guessing. Convert the ceiling into a multiple of turnover, which part four did: £50.00 over £10.00 is five times the stake. Then ask whether a five-fold return on a session is a thing worth protecting. For most people considering a hundred presses the answer is that it is exactly the thing they were there for, which makes the ceiling the part of the arrangement worth reading rather than the part worth skipping.

The symmetrical caution applies to the other side. A reader who treats a capped offer as worthless has also got it wrong, because the ceiling costs nothing on the great majority of sessions and the struck multiple would have cost £15.36 on every one of them. Both errors come from the same habit, which is reading a condition without asking what range of outcomes it operates on.

8

Reading a substitution in the place the old sentence stood

The quantity these leaves set out to measure is the gap between a claim and the sentence qualifying it, and here the gap comes out at almost nothing. The ceiling is not filed somewhere remote. It is in the promotional conditions, in the same chapter and often at the same numbered heading the multiple would have occupied, one movement from the offer.

So the measurement that matters here is not how far a sentence sits from the claim. It is what a reader is scanning for when they arrive. Somebody who opens the conditions to check a play-through is running a search for one word, and a search for one word returns nothing in a document where that word has been removed. The search succeeds, the reader stops, and the sentence occupying the slot is passed over on the way to the result.

The third and fourth rows are in the table because they complete the sorting rather than because this leaf prices them. Who holds a licence behind a given address is settled in the public register and by nothing on the site itself. The smallest sum that will be released appears at the cashier, and what paperwork is wanted before it goes appears on the way out. A ceiling sits closer to the claim than any of those and is still the one most often missed, because proximity does not help a reader who has stopped looking.

The practical form of all this is one instruction. Where a promotion advertises that a play-through is absent, read the sentence that stands where the play-through would have been, whatever it says. The slot is informative even when its contents are not what was being searched for.

9

The ceiling a British licence imposes, and the one it leaves alone

Offers of this shape hold no British licence, and the comparison worth drawing on a leaf about ceilings is which ceilings Britain writes. The answer runs against expectation, so it is set out as a contrast rather than as a list of losses.

Take those away and the £50.00 ceiling is unchanged, because nothing in the list forbade it. What goes is the stake limit above it, the running total beside it and the requirement that the controls sit within reach. The condition stays and the apparatus around the condition disappears, which is a more exact description of what an offshore promotion is than any blanket statement about protection.

One further sentence keeps the comparison honest. A capped promotion is not peculiar to offers outside the British licence, and ceilings of this shape appear on licensed ones too. The difference this leaf can state with a source behind it is the surrounding apparatus, which is a narrower thing to assert than what is usually asserted.

10

What to look for wherever a play-through has gone

Four steps, in order, each answerable from the promotional conditions in a minute or two. They work on any offer sold on the absence of a condition, and they produce four figures rather than an opinion.

Find the sentence in the slot. Where the play-through would have been there is now something else, and on offers of this shape it is ordinarily a ceiling. Read it whatever it says, because the search that brought a reader there has already returned its result and the habit is to stop.

Divide the ceiling by the turnover. £50.00 over the £10.00 a hundred presses produce is five times the stake, and five times the stake is a far more useful statement than fifty pounds. A ceiling at twice the stake binds often. A ceiling at fifty times the stake is decoration.

Work out what the struck condition would have cost. At forty times on an expected £9.60 that is £15.36, which is the gap between £9.60 and minus £5.76. That figure is the real value of the denial and it is collected on every ordinary session.

Then ask which range matters. If the session is being taken for the expected outcome, the ceiling is irrelevant and the substitution is worth £15.36. If it is being taken for the chance of something large, the ceiling is the entire arrangement and the £15.36 is the smaller half of the trade. Nobody publishes the weights, so this last step is a question about the reader rather than about the offer.

Run here, the four steps give five figures and nothing else. £5.00 paid in, £10.00 of turnover, £9.60 expected, a ceiling at five times the stake, and £15.36 of condition removed. The sixth figure, the one that would settle whether the substitution was generous, is the weight past £50.00, and it is not available at any price.

The close is therefore narrower than a verdict and more useful than one. A hundred presses bought with £5.00, and nothing standing over whatever they leave, is a good arrangement on every ordinary outcome and a capped one on every extraordinary outcome, and the sentence deciding which is in the conditions, one movement from the offer, standing where the struck sentence stood.