120 free spins for real money, and a machine left holding the entire answer

1

The one number this offer contributes

Every other arrangement this part of the domain weighs has at least two numbers on the offer’s side. A count and a multiple. A credit and a percentage. A payment and a count. Here there is one: a hundred and twenty, and whatever the cashier fixed the price of a turn at. Winnings arrive as money, so nothing has to be cleared before any of it may leave, no ceiling applies to what may be taken out, and no weighting has anything to weigh.

That makes this card the control for the question the whole section asks. Remove everything the offer can do and see what is left deciding how long a balance lasts. What is left is the machine, and the useful thing about putting it this way round is that the machine can then be held to account on its own: every figure below either comes off a published quantity of this title or is named here as a supposition, and there is no clause left to blame for anything.

The answer the control produces is not that the machine says nothing. It says a good deal, and some of it is exact to the penny. What it declines to say is the one thing a reader asks a page like this for, and the measurement that matters is how large the difference is between those two. Entries three and five put numbers on both sides of it.

2

A hundred and twenty turns at this title’s least stake

The title weighed here is Big Bass Floats My Boat, and its published return is 96.07 per cent, agreed between the maker’s own page for it and the regular-mode field a session sends the game both sources, claim 74. That is 0.64 of a point below the figure the original of the family carries, which matters later and not yet. Its range of stakes starts at 0.10, the same floor most of the family is sold from, so this card spends 10p a turn supposed, at that floor and repeats the figure wherever it spends it.

A hundred and twenty turns at 10p put £12.00 across the reel. At 96.07 per cent the expected winnings are £11.53, the reel keeping 47 pence of the £12.00, and because the turns are cash the £11.53 is what a reader is expected to be left holding. No other arithmetic on this card changes that figure, which is the point of a control: the headline figure and the close are one number, and everything after it concerns what the number declines to tell anybody.

Two conversions are worth having before the next entry. Twelve pounds of turnover in a hundred and twenty turns is £144.00 an hour of turnover at the pace a licensed build is held to, so this grant is a twelfth of a licensed hour’s worth of play. And one turn of this title returns 9.607p on average, so the grant is a hundred and twenty draws at just under ten pence apiece, which is the only sense in which it has a unit at all.

3

Four published returns, one answer to the penny

Here is the first measurement. This title does not publish one return, it publishes four, and they are primary: the data a session hands the game carries a separate figure for each bet mode, which is the regular game, the ante-bet game and each of the two bonus-buy options four modes, claim 56. Choosing a bet mode is something a player does at the reel, and those four figures are what the reel publishes about the choice.

Four published figures, four identical closes, and a closing row of nought to the penny. That is the control’s first result and it deserves stating plainly rather than apologising for: the whole of the variation this title publishes about itself, across every bet mode it has, is invisible at the precision money is printed in. Worked at a tenth of a penny the spread is a third of one, the ends being 1,153.1p and 1,152.7p of expected winnings, and a reader would have to be handed the grant a dozen times before the difference reached a single penny.

The break-even column is the only place the four figures separate at all, and even there they cover two tenths of one multiple. That column is also doing something slightly odd on this card, since nothing is being played through: it is a reading of the reel rather than of the offer, and what it says is that any clause past about 25.4 times would have taken more than this grant holds, whichever mode the turns were run in. There is no such clause. The column is there because break-even is this site’s constant and because its near-constancy across four published figures is itself the measurement.

4

What the machine’s own published variation is worth

A third of a penny is a strange answer to arrive at, so it is worth showing what it would take for the four modes to matter. They matter in proportion to the turnover they act on, and a cash grant with nothing asked of it puts the smallest possible turnover across the reel: £12.00, once. Put a condition on the same grant and the same four figures start to separate, because the published return then applies to the staking as well as to the turns.

Read the top row of the drawing and the modes are 3.7p apart at ten times. Read the bottom and they are 8.6p apart at twenty-five, against the four tenths of a penny the table above gives for the grant as it stands, so a condition the grant does not have multiplies the modes by twenty-one. The published variation on this title is therefore not worthless: it is proportional to something a cash grant has none of, and the control removes precisely the term that would have made it visible. That is a result rather than a disappointment, and it is why the drawing closes on a span instead of a total, three bet modes being three accounts of one grant rather than three parts of anything.

The grant’s own closes are the ones the drawing leaves out, and the reason is worth a clause: at 1,152.8p they are wider than a column of a narrow sheet will hold, so they live in the table in entry three instead, where four published returns produce four readings of £11.53.

It also settles one thing this domain has to be careful about. The four figures above attach to a choice made at the reel by whoever is playing, published mode by mode in the game’s own data, and they are the only multi-figure return on this card. Nothing here says anything about the same title being shipped at more than one return, which no primary source anywhere supports: the maker prints a single figure for each title on each of its own pages, and the only sources that say otherwise are review sites which contradict each other and, in one case, themselves.

5

A ceiling that is published and a rate that is not

Now the other side of the measurement, which is the extreme rather than the average. The most one round of this title may hand over is 5,000 times the stake the win limit, claim 74, and the maker’s own page for it states no maximum win, so that figure comes out of the game’s data. At 10p a turn it is £500.00.

Set it against the grant and the dispersion of this arrangement starts to have numbers in it. £500.00 against the £11.53 the grant should yield is 43.4 of them, so a single turn out of a hundred and twenty can carry forty-three grants. Measured the other way, one turn returns 9.607p on average and the ceiling is 5,204 of those average turns, which is forty-three times the number of turns in the grant. Those two ratios are the sharpest published statement available about how uneven this reel is, and both are arithmetic on two figures the maker’s own data carries.

One turn of this title may hand over 43.4 of these grants, or 5,204 average turns of it, and no title here but the original has a rate published for it

And there the published description stops. The rate at which a ceiling arrives is given for exactly one title in this family, the original, whose data carries a hit rate for its own limit; this title’s data carries none, and the maker’s page for it states none. So the size of the extreme is a fact and the frequency of it is not, and the product of the two, which is what the extreme contributes to the £11.53, cannot be worked out at all for the title this card is about.

No spread for this title is published anywhere either. No page the maker keeps for the family prints the word and nothing in a session’s response has room to keep one, so none appears here. Put the two absences together and the control’s second result is this: with the offer contributing one number, the reel will supply the average exactly, the extreme exactly, and the distance between them not at all.

6

The step cash turns remove that every other grant has

Expectation on this site is E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP) ∕ g), and this is the one card where two of its four letters are inert. RTP is the 96.07 per cent this title publishes and B is the £11.53 a hundred and twenty turns at 10p should produce, which leaves W at nought, since nothing is asked, and g idle, a weighting being a thing a requirement does to a game and there being no requirement a term of the grant. With W at nought the bracket is one and E is B.

What that formally expresses is a step other grants have and this one does not. Winnings from a bonus balance have to be turned into money by satisfying something, and the cost of satisfying it is the turnover times the reel’s share. Cash winnings are money on arrival. So the two figures a reader of this site learns to look for, the play-through and the weighting, are both absent here, and the absence is worth exactly what any condition would have cost: on this grant a ten-times clause would have taken £4.53 and a twenty-times clause £9.06, so at twenty times the cash arrangement is worth £9.06 more than its nearest twin.

That is the largest figure on this card and it belongs to the offer rather than to the machine, which is the one place the control reports something about offers at all. It also puts the previous entries in proportion. The condition is worth pounds, the choice of bet mode is worth a third of a penny, and the ceiling is worth forty-three grants at a frequency nobody states. Three quantities, three orders of magnitude, and only the first of them is anything an offer decides.

7

Five minutes exactly, and what a licence holds up

The clock here is the tidiest on the domain. A licensed build will not open the next cycle for 2.5 seconds, asks a player to commit to each of them, and runs nothing on its own the pace floor, RTS 14D. A hundred and twenty turns therefore take 300 seconds at the briskest, so the grant is five minutes long to the second, and nothing on this card lasts any longer, there being no condition to discharge afterwards.

Five minutes for £11.53 of expected winnings is £138.34 an hour, which is the highest hourly figure this part of the domain produces and is true for exactly five minutes. What follows it is not the offer’s business: a reader holding £11.53 in cash at a reel returning 96.07 per cent gives back 0.39p of expectation for every further 10p turn they choose to take, and the £11.53 is gone after 2,933 such turns, which is two hours and two minutes at the same floor. The offer has nothing to do with that figure and neither has any clause. It is the reel and a decision.

8

What the control actually measured

Collect it. A hundred and twenty turns at the 10p this title’s range begins at commit £12.00 and should return £11.53, and with the winnings already in cash the £11.53 is the close. The grant is five minutes long to the second at the pace a licence permits. The four returns this title publishes, one per bet mode, move that close by a third of a penny. Its published ceiling is £500.00, being 43.4 grants or 5,204 average turns, and no rate for the arrival of that ceiling exists for any title here except the original. A ten-times clause would have cost £4.53 and a twenty-times clause £9.06, and this grant carries neither.

So the control’s reading is a set of three magnitudes, and the useful thing is their order. What an offer can do to this grant is worth pounds. What the machine publishes about its own variation is worth tenths of a penny. What the machine declines to publish is worth the entire difference between holding £11.53 and holding one turn’s £500.00, and nothing on any sheet puts a frequency on it. A reader who wanted to know how long £11.53 lasts has been given the average to the penny, the extreme to the penny, and no distribution between the two.

That is not a complaint about this offer, which is the simplest honest arrangement in the section: one number, no conditions, no ceiling on what may be taken out, and a close equal to the yield. It is a statement about where the remaining uncertainty lives. Elsewhere in this part of the domain a card can at least point at a clause and price it. This one has nothing to point at, so what it is left measuring is the machine, and the machine answers two of the three questions a reader has and leaves the third standing.

One last figure, and it is the usable one. The expected close falls by 0.39p for every further 10p turn taken at this title, so an hour of carrying on costs £5.66 of the £11.53 and two hours and two minutes of it costs the whole thing. No clause does that and no cashier wrote it. It is the published return applied to turnover, which is the only mechanism on this card and the only one a cash grant leaves in place.