Non-UK casinos: an index of absences, priced at 20p a press

1

96 presses at 20p, and one figure to hold

Start with the money, because the money is small and the list is long. 96 presses at 20p apiece is £19.20 of stake. Put that through a reel returning 96 pence in the staked pound and the mean is £18.43, with 77p kept by the room for turning the handle.

One press at this price leaves 19.2p behind when nothing is demanded of it. Each turnover demanded shaves four per cent off the credit, so the residue per press runs 11.52p at ten turnovers, 3.84p at twenty, and precisely nothing at twenty-five. The tray therefore survives as £11.06, then £3.69, then £0.00.

Any multiple at all may be asked by a cashier holding no British licence, so the lower rows earn their place too. Forty turnovers put the tray £11.06 under water. Sixty put it £25.80 under, which exceeds the £19.20 the thing was worth at face. A sum below the line is funded from the deposit rather than from the award.

So £11.06 is the best plausible figure on this page, and everything after part one indexes what a British licence puts around a press that an unlicensed one does not. Each entry in that index governs how the press behaves rather than how much it pays, which is exactly why readers skip them and exactly why they deserve a figure each.

Two notes on method. Where a rule carries a commencement date this page gives it; where the published standard carries none, this page says so instead of supplying one. And 96 pence in the pound is a house assumption rather than a measurement of any game, which means the crossing values here move with it.

2

Who the statute is written about

A reader typing the phrase usually means a cashier that takes British money without holding a British licence. Two things about the statute are worth having straight before any of the arithmetic.

First, it is criminal, and it is criminal for the provider. Section 33(1) of the Gambling Act 2005 makes an offence of supplying gambling facilities unlicensed, excepting a provider who holds a licence covering the activity and keeps to the conditions set on it. Penalties at section 33(4): 51 weeks inside, a fine pitched at level 5 of the standard scale, or the two together. Scotland reads those 51 weeks as six months.

Second, geography does not help a provider. Section 36(1) treats the location of the facilities as immaterial. Section 33 bites where one piece of the equipment used stands in Great Britain, and bites again where none does but the facilities get used here, the second route turning on a provider’s knowledge, actual or else imputed, of use like that. Substitution in 2014 put both limbs in place, and for specified purposes 1 November 2014 is when they took effect, equipment standing on British soil having been the only earlier route. Advertising takes a section of its own. Advertising gambling that would want some licence, notice, permit, registration or exception it has not got is the offence; every day on which some part of a display runs commits it over again; 1 September 2007 is the commencement; and three limits attach, turning on belief, on knowledge, and on whether the person did no more than carry the communication.

Which gives a reader one practical question in place of several. Not whether a cashier is licensed somewhere, since somewhere is not Great Britain, but whether the duties in part nine attach to it. Fourteen entries in that index attach to a British licence and to nothing else, and £11.06 is what this page is weighing them against.

Then the limit that readers get backwards. Nothing in the Act makes taking part in remote gambling an offence for the customer. The section is addressed to the provider throughout. It does not follow that pressing a reel at an unlicensed cashier is a safe thing to do, because what goes missing there is protection rather than liberty, and protection is what parts three to nine convert into figures. The whole conversion comes to £11.06 against fourteen index entries.

One arithmetic consequence of that worth stating now. A protection is worth what it stops costing you, so the honest way to price a missing duty is to ask what the tray stands exposed to without it. On 96 presses at 20p the exposure is £19.20, against which 77p is the house’s expected take, £7.37 is its expected take across the 922 presses a tenfold condition demands, and £44.24 is its expected take across the 5,530 presses a sixtyfold one demands. Those three sums are the ceiling on what any entry in the index can be worth to this particular tray.

3

Two floors on pace, converted into minutes

Pace is the easiest entry in the index to price, because it converts straight into minutes.

Reels carry the shorter floor, at two and a half seconds. A game’s start and the moment a further cycle may begin are what that interval separates, and beginning one takes a start control released and then depressed, or whatever counts as equivalent. A cycle, in the guidance, starts when the player does. It finishes with the control free once more and with every penny staked or won either gone or made available. Pressure held on a button, on a key or on a screen may not begin the next of them.

Casino games that are not reels carry double, with peer-to-peer poker left out: five seconds, on the same release-and-depress terms and the same definition of a cycle. A date exists for the five. 17 January 2025 is it, taken off the regulator’s page of updates, where a five-second minimum spin speed for casino games is listed. The standard supplies no commencement date for any of its seven lettered requirements, which is why the updates page has to carry it. Nothing on that page names the reel requirement, so the date does not belong to the shorter floor.

Row three is the index entry, and it is worth saying exactly what a pace floor does and does not do. It does not reduce a loss. £7.37 is the expected cost of 922 presses whether they occupy 38 minutes or four. What a floor buys is the interval inside which somebody notices what they are doing, and removing it delivers the identical £7.37 at whatever rate the software manages.

Push the conversion one step further and the entry gets sharper. At the reel floor a tray of 96 occupies four minutes, so the £19.20 of stake passes at £4.80 a minute and 19.2p of expected loss a minute. Halve the interval and both figures double. A floor on pace is therefore a ceiling on the rate at which money moves, expressed in seconds instead of in pounds, and nothing offshore holds one.

£11.06 at ten turnovers, 922 presses to reach it, 38 min 24 s at the reel floor

4

Five rules about how a press behaves

Five further requirements in the same standard govern what a press may do, and none is about money either. Each takes a figure here, since a figure is the only thing that makes a design rule legible.

Autoplay is barred for online gaming, bingo included, under a requirement that cycles be committed to individually. One carve-out appears in the guidance, for blinds that post themselves in poker played peer to peer. Publication of the page carrying it: 2 February 2021. Last update: 21 January 2025.

Speed controls are barred too: a customer may not be given a way of shortening the wait before a result appears. Turbo gets named in the guidance, as do quick spin and slam stop. All remote games fall inside the rule whatever their native speed, while bonus or feature games staking nothing extra fall outside it, along with scratch-all and reveal-all features, and games in which a customer who does not act to end the round loses the stake.

Celebration is the most interesting of the five. Celebration is disallowed where a return fails to exceed the whole of what was staked, and win-related sound or visuals are out for such a return. Three substitutes get suggested: the total awarded shown, the winning lines flashed briefly, something short played on crediting.

Simultaneity is barred for casino outside peer-to-peer poker, functionality making play of several games at once easier being what the requirement reaches. Split-screen and multi-screen arrangements are covered, as is any combination enabling play in parallel.

And one requirement stands over gambling of every kind rather than over casino alone. No product may actively push a customer into chasing a loss, into staking more, into exceeding the sum they had settled on gambling, or into carrying on once they have said that they want to stop. The guidance fills it out: no topping up of funds in a product without the customer choosing it each time, poker buy-ins customer-initiated and automatic re-buys disallowed, no content encouraging losses to be won back, and nobody enticed back after choosing to leave, with a free game given as the example. It notes that familiar features like the blackjack split are not the target.

Row three needs its figure spelled out. On a 20p press any return of 20p or less is not a win at all, and the expected position across the tray is that 77p of the £19.20 stays behind before a condition touches it. A rule against celebrating a sub-stake return is therefore a rule about whether a reader can tell £18.43 from £19.20 while it is happening to them.

Row four converts just as cleanly. A tenfold condition on this tray is 922 presses, and a system allowing two games at a time would serve that in 461 rounds of two. The reel floor would then deliver 922 presses inside 19 minutes 12 seconds instead of 38 minutes 24 seconds, which is how a simultaneity rule and a pace rule hold each other up. Take away one and the other loses half its value, which is worth knowing about a list of duties that reads like a list of unrelated items.

5

The rule every figure here depends on

One requirement in the randomness standard is sharper than anything else in the index, because it is a rule about a machine telling the truth.

Prohibited outright: a design or a feature where a reasonable expectation is that it misleads the customer over how likely some result is. Two kinds get named. In one, a losing event stands in for another losing event dressed as a near thing. In the other, a real device gets simulated while the probabilities that device actually has do not. The guidance leaves nothing to argue over, barring a false display of a near miss and barring the substitution of one losing outcome by another.

Beneath it sit the requirements making an outcome an outcome. Acceptably random is the standard for random number generation and for results, and a game that compensates, which is to say one behaving adaptively, is disallowed. What that bars are interventions shifting the probabilities, by hand or automatically, with outcomes owed a distribution matching the theoretical or expected one. A companion requirement has random numbers used in arrival order, with none discarded for adaptive reasons.

Then stability of the terms during play. Nothing may move while a game runs, not its rules and not its payouts and not its outcome probabilities, and any change owes the customer notice of itself, the guidance wanting the game offline or suspended while it is made. Unacceptable, and named as such: a term under which game rules alter whenever the operator fancies it. Legitimate: a bonus round described properly to the customer in advance.

Then a display requirement. Clearly and accurately is how the result, with the customer’s own gamble beside it, has to appear, and for long enough that a reasonable person would think the time sufficient. Scope: lotteries, betting on virtual events, and gaming with bingo inside it. 7 May 2024 is the page’s last update.

Pricing this set is unusual, because what it protects is not a sum but what every sum here means. Outcomes arriving in line with their stated probabilities is the assumption under all of it. £18.43 out of £19.20 follows from a 96 per cent return. 922 presses follows from a tenfold condition. £11.06 follows from putting the two together. Delete the bar on compensated play and each of those three stops being a statement about a machine and becomes a statement about a number somebody typed into a term sheet. This entry in the index is not worth a sum of its own. It is worth every other sum on the page.

And one quantity makes the point arithmetically rather than rhetorically. Suppose a tray’s true return sat two points under its stated one, 94 pence rather than 96. Residue per press at ten turnovers falls from 11.52p to 7.52p, the £11.06 becomes £7.22, and the multiple that zeroes the credit falls from twenty-five to sixteen and two thirds. Two points of unverifiable return is therefore worth £3.84 on a tray whose best case was £11.06, which is a third of the offer, invisible from outside, and recoverable only by a rule that a stated figure has to be the real one.

6

A band of returns, and the crossing column

Another standard carries four requirements about what a reader is owed before pressing anything, and the last of the four gets misdescribed more than the rest.

Within easy reach before a customer commits: an explanation of the rules that apply, accurate, covering all of them sufficiently, with reasonable steps taken to leave it understandable. Information letting a customer follow a game’s current state has to show as play goes on, a limb from which the guidance excludes lotteries. Content on the potential prizes and payouts, or on how either gets calculated or determined, has to be within easy reach beforehand too. That standard ends at its fourth letter and there is no fifth.

Then the chances requirement. Easily available before the commitment has to be information a reasonable person would expect to let a customer reach an informed decision about their chance of winning. Four items follow it and any single one suffices. Item one: how the game works, described, with how winners and prizes get settled. Item two: house edge, or margin. Item three: how probable a winning event is. Item four: a percentage for return to player, which the guidance would have be the average theoretical figure.

Joining those four is the word “or”, and no other rule here gets its disjunction misread so often. Complied with: by a licensee publishing a house edge. Complied with again: by one publishing how probable a winning event is. No return figure need appear at all. For peer-to-peer games the guidance treats a description of the workings and of how winners get determined as enough, and for bingo along with some lottery and other games a description of how prizes get allocated is enough. No British rule, in short, obliges a licensed site to print a return percentage, and nothing here pretends otherwise.

Which is why no return configured for some named game, or some named studio, appears anywhere on this site. Nothing published supplies such a thing. A band stands in its place, with each rung’s crossing value given beside it.

Read the last column instead of the fourth. Its entries are one divided by the shortfall from a whole pound, so a reel returning 88 pence cannot bear a tenfold condition at all, while one returning 99 pence could bear a hundredfold. The band is the useful object, not any single rung inside it, and a reader unable to find any return figure for whatever game sits in front of them has already learned the thing that matters, which is that the crossing point is unknown, and on that table’s last rung the £11.06 is £11.06 of nothing.

One further column follows from the same arithmetic without a fresh assumption. Divide 25 by each rung’s zeroing multiple and out comes the weighting a room would need before a tenfold condition did no harm. At 99 pence that is a tenth; at 96 pence four tenths; at 92 pence eight tenths; at 88 pence no weighting rescues it. Which means a reader comparing two offers on their multiples alone is comparing the least informative number in either document.

7

Two stake caps, costed at this press price

Two caps on what a single cycle may cost are the newest entries in the index, and they want pricing rather than restating, the restatement being everywhere already and the price nowhere.

A statutory instrument supplies them: the Gambling Act 2005 (Operating Licence Conditions) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, numbered SI 2025 No. 215 and made 25 February 2025. Two pounds below the age of 25, five pounds at 25 and above, is the ceiling its new regulation 5(2) puts on an individual’s total staking inside one game cycle. Every remote casino operating licence picks the condition up under Part 5 of the Act, licences predating the Regulations included. Six weeks of transition come from regulation 6, a flat five pounds applying to all comers through it, which left the younger limit trailing the other by that interval.

Two definitions carry the weight of it. The definition of an online slots game: a casino game, played online, of the reel-based kind. A reel-based game means one in which images that move or change, or else text, get shown by visual representations of reels or through some other means, with the arrangement arrived at settling whether a prize, or another opportunity or advantage, is won.

Reels only, which is the half of the fact most often dropped. Explicit in the guidance: online slots are what the limits reach, no other casino game is, and roulette with blackjack are its two examples of games left alone. Calendar dates come from that guidance too. The larger limit starts on 9 April 2025. 21 May 2025 is where the smaller one starts. In place of a date the instrument offers a formula, the Regulations arriving six weeks past the day of their making. Those two guidance dates are the only calendar dates published anywhere, and nothing here presents them as instrument text.

The last row is the index entry and the first row gives its scale. One capped cycle for an over-25 costs what 25 presses cost here, and the whole tray of 96 pressed at that cap would be £480.00 of stake carrying £19.20 of expected cost. That expected cost is the face value of this entire page, gone in four minutes.

One honest qualification, because the two kinds of rule interact only through time. A cap does not protect anybody from a condition. A tenfold condition on this tray wants £184.32 of turnover, which is 922 presses at 20p, 93 cycles at the two pound cap, or 37 at the five pound one. So a condition taking 38 minutes 24 seconds at the reel floor on a 20p press takes 1 minute 33 seconds at the larger cap, and the cap is the only thing standing between a condition and that pace.

Which produces a figure worth carrying away. Divide the staking owed by the cap and out comes the fewest cycles a condition can be cleared in; multiply that by the floor and out come the fewest seconds. At five pounds a cycle, a tenfold condition on a £18.43 credit clears in 37 cycles and 92.5 seconds. At twenty-five turnovers it clears in 93 cycles and 3 minutes 53 seconds, and at that point the expected residue is nothing, so the speed buys a reader a faster route to zero.

8

What a condition takes off £18.43

A column of multiples makes the whole offer legible in one table. Every unit added to the multiple costs 74p, which is four per cent of £18.43.

Then the exit, where a sum this size is usually settled. Run the arithmetic backwards: a payout floor divided by one press’s residue gives the presses wanted, and the residue is 19.2p with nothing attached, 11.52p at ten turnovers, 3.84p at twenty.

Row two carries the narrowest margin anywhere on this site, and it earns a sentence of its own. 87 presses is what a tenfold condition needs to put £10.00 on the average into a payable balance, which leaves nine presses of slack out of 96. Nine presses is £1.80, so under two pounds of margin separates a payable average here from an unpayable one.

The bottom row is the crossing point in different clothes. Residue per press is nothing at twenty-five turnovers, so no count whatever reaches any floor on the mean, and a headline count stops carrying information at that point.

One qualification on all of it. Averages, not forecasts of an evening. Treat a reel as one prize whose probability is 0.96 over the multiplier, and a single 20p press against a 50-times prize carries a standard deviation near £1.36, seven times over the 19.2p it leaves behind. Spread that across 922 presses and the range is wide. An evening in which the tray clears £20.00 therefore says nothing about the mean, and the mean is all an offer can honestly be priced on.

And one figure for the size of that uncertainty, offered as this site’s own working rather than as anybody’s published number. Pinning a return down to within a single point, on a reel paying a 50-times prize, needs something of the order of 71,000 presses, which at 20p is £14,200 of stake and, at the reel floor, over 49 hours of pressing. A tray of 96 is therefore not a measurement of anything. It is a sample of 96.

9

An index of absences, A to S

Here is the index, arranged by the word a reader would look an entry up under rather than by subject or by date. Each entry is a duty laid on whoever holds a British licence, which leaves a cashier lacking one bound by not a line of it, and not one of the fourteen appears in the offshore rulebook this site has read.

Fourteen entries, and £11.06 on the other side of them. Two of the fourteen carry no sum, and those two are worth the most. An entry under Near-miss is worth every other figure here, since every other figure assumes a machine’s stated probabilities are its real ones. An entry under Scheme is worth whatever a reader’s own decision about themselves is worth, and that is not a quantity any page can print.

Three things would belong in the index if they were duties, and they are not, which is why they sit outside it. A published return figure is not required of a licensee, as part six sets out, so its absence offshore takes nothing away that a British licensee had to give. A commencement date for the pace standard is unpublished, so nobody may assert one. And no return as configured for some named game has been published anywhere this site could reach, which is why part six runs a band instead.

One way to use the index. Take the sum at stake, £11.06 here, and divide it by fourteen. That gives 79p an entry. Nobody is suggesting a duty is worth 79p; the point of the division is that the sum being weighed is small enough that dividing it by the number of protections set aside produces a figure under a pound. Which is this page’s entire argument, made by the arithmetic rather than by the prose around it.

10

The one duty that follows the player

Nearly everything in the index follows the licence. One thing follows the player instead, and it is the most useful fact here about the offshore position.

Remote gaming duty falls on an operator’s profits, meaning stakes taken less winnings paid, and the guidance addresses an operator from its first line to its last while describing no charge on a player anywhere in it. Reach is set by where a customer usually lives rather than by where an operator keeps paperwork: offer somebody remote gambling, with spread betting set aside, where that person’s home is usually in the United Kingdom, and the taxes follow from wherever the offering was done. Registration and payment fall on an operator abroad identically, and one standing outside a group generally appoints an approved representative here unless it sits somewhere exempt, with Norway, Gibraltar and an EU member state given as examples of exempt places.

So British gaming duty reaches a stake taken from a British player with or without a licence here. Rates: 40 per cent from 1 April 2026 onwards. Before it, 21 per cent, running from 1 April 2019. Before that again, 15 per cent. On the betting side, for completeness, fixed-odds and totalisator bets carry 15 per cent, financial spread bets 3 per cent, other spread bets 10 per cent, and a betting exchange pays 15 per cent of what it charges British users in commission. Publication 14 August 2014, last update 1 April 2026.

The player’s own position wants a narrow formulation, and here it is. HMRC’s manual on business income records betting and gambling as not, in themselves, constituting a trade, while noting that organised activity aimed at profiting from the gambling public will normally be trading. Somebody spread betting is normally not carrying on a trade, so no profit of theirs is taxable and no loss relieved, whereas the bookmaker who took the bet is taxable on its profits. Case law sits on a companion page. A taxpayer whose whole living came off starting-price bets on horses was found to be trading in nothing at all, Rowlatt J’s line being that a habit attracts no tax. Having a system makes it no trade. Nor does the fact of living on the proceeds. Expertise, and studying form systematically, are both recorded as falling short. Where a gambler can be trading gets noted too, with appearance money for television as the example and the answer turning on the facts.

Which is as far as this page goes on the subject. Not one published page was located anywhere that declares winnings untaxed in terms. The position above was assembled instead out of manual pages on the question whether gambling is a trade. None of it amounts to tax advice and none of it touches anybody’s individual circumstances.

Then the authorities that are not this authority, since a cashier of this kind usually names one. A Maltese body works to a Gaming Act with directives under it, keeps an enforcement register, publishes a licensee register open to search, and runs a complaints form it presents as the formal route against operators it has licensed. Submissions in English or Maltese get reviewed. Identification may be asked for in order to process a complaint. A recommendation to approach the operator’s support and its management before any of it is given as well. What the page omits weighs as much as what it carries: no limit of time, no restriction turning on residency or jurisdiction, no statement of the body’s own limits, and nothing at all on whether its decisions bind an operator. Residence gets asked on the form, and no eligibility rule anywhere on the page turns on the answer.

An Anjouan body does its publishing from a commercial domain and not from a government one, which is the first thing to know about it. Anjouan Gaming is its name for itself, under a subtitle of internet gaming regulatory authority, with a self-description as the designated authority for licensing and supervising internet gaming operations. An offshore financial authority sits above it, described as established under the laws of an autonomous island within the Union of the Comoros. No ordinance is named on the site. No Act is named. No regulation is named. General reference to Anjouan law stands in place of all three. Licences are said to come in two kinds, one for business-to-business and one for business-to-consumer. A public register of licensed entities is said to be kept. A tool for verifying a licence is said to exist. Pages for player complaints and for authorised adjudication providers are both listed. Fetching the complaints page on 15 October 2026 returned an error. So this page can report that a complaint process is advertised, and can report nothing of its contents: no limits of time, nothing about whether a decision binds, nothing about remedies.

A Kahnawake body, where a site holds its licence, sits in Mohawk Territory in Quebec. Its gaming law is said to empower the commission to make regulations. Five kinds of licence are issued under its regulations on interactive gaming. For interactive gaming, complaints and queries and investigations are said to reach the commission and be reviewed by it under procedures those regulations lay down.

And two absences, each a fact of its own. A search for any Costa Rican government gaming authority turned up material from industry and from law firms, none of it citable, so the record here is that nothing was located on the Costa Rican side to set beside the British rulebook, the British register or the British complaints route, and nothing whatever is said about what the law there demands. Three attempts at a Gibraltar government gambling page came back as errors on 15 October 2026, so no Gibraltar regulator facts appear here. Separately: two licensees incorporated in Gibraltar sit on the enforcement list published by the British regulator, which shows incorporation there and a licence here to be two distinct things, and shows which of the two carries enforcement with it.

All of which puts the comparison where part one put it. £11.06 on one side, fourteen index entries on the other, two of them beyond pricing. No arrangement of these figures produces a sum worth setting a registration aside for, and where a registration is the reason this page is open, the number to call is printed immediately below.