A dealt round is the smallest thing a person can buy, and its length is set by somebody else

1

The unit a dealt game sells, and why nobody can halve it

Pricing a reel starts from a press, because a press is the whole transaction: money goes on, a result arrives, the next one waits for a thumb. Pricing a dealt table starts from a round, and a round is a different object in one respect that governs everything below. Its length is a property of the table rather than a property of the person at it.

Bets open, bets close, the dealing happens, the result is paid, bets open again. A person can decline to stake on any given round and can leave between rounds, but once money is down the round runs to its end at whatever pace the table runs at. No amount of attention shortens it and no amount of hesitation lengthens it.

This page therefore assumes a round of sixty seconds as its working case, and compares it against four others at thirty, forty-five, ninety and a hundred and twenty seconds. Not one of those five was observed anywhere. Each is set down here to give the sums a backbone, and any sentence carrying a figure drawn from one of them names which.

Granularity is the first consequence and the plainest. On a reel at ten pence the smallest purchase is ten pence occupying the twelve assumed seconds this site gives a press. At a table of sixty seconds with five pounds down, the smallest purchase is £5.00 occupying a whole minute. One unit of the second product is fifty times the money and five times the time.

Second consequence: the hour’s bill is a multiplication the player only half controls. Rounds in an hour come from the table. Pounds on a round come from the person. Multiply the two and the staking appears, so a reader choosing a table has chosen one of the two terms before placing a single bet, usually without noticing that a choice was made.

Take the working case through. Sixty seconds a round gives sixty rounds in an hour. Five pounds on each is £300.00 of staking. Ninety-six per cent being the return this site works to, four pence out of every crossed pound stays behind, so the hour is expected to cost £12.00 and one round carries twenty pence of it.

2

Five round lengths priced at one stake

Hold the stake still at five pounds and move only the length of the round. Nothing else in the arrangement shifts: the same money rides on each deal, the same proportion is retained, the same person sits in the same chair. What changes is how many chargeable events sixty minutes contains.

Column five standing still through all five rows is the first half of this page’s argument. Twenty pence is retained from a five pound bet whether the deal takes half a minute or two minutes, because the retained share answers to the money crossing and not to the clock. A slow table is not a kinder table per bet.

Column four falling by three quarters down the same five rows is the second half. Twenty-four pounds an hour at the brisk end, six pounds an hour at the slow end, out of the identical five pound bet. An hour at the half minute table costs what four hours at the two minute table cost, and nobody at either has done anything different.

The last column puts the same curve into the unit this site measures evenings in. Twenty-two minutes is the pick-up of a handset assumed throughout, and it holds forty-four rounds at the half minute table and eleven at the two minute one. Those two sittings cost £8.80 and £2.20 in expectation, against the 44p a reel sitting of a hundred and ten presses of ten pence is modelled to cost.

Eleven rounds is a short evening by any reading, and it is the cheapest row in the table. Forty-four rounds is four times as much play for four times the money, in the same twenty-two minutes. Whether that is good value depends entirely on whether a reader counts rounds or counts minutes, which is the question part three has to settle.

3

Cheaper by the hour, dearer by the round, and both at once

Part two held the stake still. Hold the hour still instead and the table inverts. Suppose a reader has decided what an hour of this may cost them, and suppose the figure is twenty-four pounds of expected margin, which is £600.00 of staking at the four pence retained in every pound. The question becomes what may ride on a round to reach exactly that.

Put the pair of tables alongside one another and the disagreement is total. On the first, the two minute table is a quarter the price of the half minute one. On the second, the two minute table charges four times as much per round. Neither is a trick and neither is wrong. They hold different quantities fixed, and the quantity a reader holds fixed in their own head decides which answer they get.

Somebody rationing an evening by the clock is on the first table. They have two hours and a five pound bet, and the long round is the cheap one: £12.00 of expected margin across the evening rather than £48.00. For them the dealer’s slowness is a discount that arrives without being asked for.

Somebody rationing by the count of rounds is on the second. They want sixty hands or sixty wheels before bed, and at a long round sixty of them take two hours rather than thirty minutes. If the evening cannot stretch, the only way to buy sixty rounds’ worth of action is to put more on each one, and the table says exactly how much more.

£20.00 a round, to make a two minute table cost what a half minute one costs

Both habits exist and the second is commoner than the first, because a round is what a person experiences and an hour is what a bank statement records. A reader who thinks in rounds will migrate upwards in stake at a slow table without ever deciding to spend more, since each individual increase is a response to a table that feels like it is giving them too little.

Which is the mechanism this page exists to name. A slow table does not reduce spending; it reduces the rate at which a given stake spends, and leaves the stake free to rise to fill the gap. The reduction is real only for somebody who leaves the stake alone, and leaving the stake alone is a decision nobody is prompted to make.

4

Pence a second, the figure that settles the disagreement

One quantity reconciles the two readings and it is stake divided by round length. Call it pence a second. It is what the arrangement actually charges for occupying a person’s time, it is indifferent to which product is being played, and it collapses every table and every reel on this site onto one scale.

Five pounds on a sixty second round is 8.333 pence a second. Ten pence riding on a press of the twelve assumed seconds is 0.833 pence a second. The dealt table is ten times the reel, and that single ratio predicts every comparison below without needing either product’s name.

Rows one and two are the finding worth taking away from the whole page. A pound on a two minute round and ten pence on a twelve second press are the identical arrangement: 0.833 pence a second, £30.00 of staking an hour, £1.20 of expected margin an hour. One of them looks like a careful evening at a table and the other looks like idling with a phone, and the bill is the same to the penny.

Everything else on the table is that row multiplied. Five pounds on the same two minute round is five times the pence a second and five times the hour. Shortening that round to one minute doubles it again; shortening to thirty seconds doubles it once more. Stake and interval are interchangeable in exactly the proportion they appear in the division.

0.833 pence a second, where a dealt table meets a reel

Which gives a reader a test they can run before sitting down, and it needs no tables. Divide the planned stake by the length of a round in seconds. Four pence a second puts £144.00 of staking through an hour for £5.76 retained in expectation. Eight pence a second doubles both to £288.00 and £11.52, and sixteen doubles them again to £576.00 and £23.04. Those are arithmetic rather than advice, and they hold for any product that has a stake and an interval.

Nothing in this part depends on which game is dealt. A wheel, a shoe and a wheel of a different sort all price identically under the division, because the division uses only money and seconds. That is why this page never argues from the game and always argues from the round.

5

A five second floor the dealer never comes close to

British rules do set a minimum interval on casino games that are not slots, and working out what that permits is more instructive than reciting it. Five seconds have to elapse between a game starting and the earliest point at which a further cycle may begin. Slots are governed by a separate figure, and peer-to-peer poker is carved out of this one. The date the Commission’s updates page attaches is 17 January 2025.

Turn it into a ceiling. Sixty minutes divided by five seconds is seven hundred and twenty rounds, which is the fastest an hour of a dealt casino game may lawfully run. At five pounds a round that hour would stake £3,600.00 and retain an expected £144.00. At twenty pounds a round it would stake £14,400.00 and retain £576.00.

Now hold those against the working case. Sixty seconds a round is sixty rounds an hour, which is a twelfth of what the rule permits. Even the briskest table priced on this page, at thirty seconds a round, reaches a hundred and twenty rounds, which is a sixth of the ceiling. The rule is nowhere near the thing that limits a dealt table.

Compare the two floors and the asymmetry is the point. A reel may not restart inside two and a half seconds, so its lawful ceiling is 1,440 presses an hour, four pence a second at ten pence a press, £144.00 of staking an hour and £5.76 of expected margin. The non-slot floor is twice as long, giving half the events, yet the dealt product costs far more an hour because the money on one event is fifty times larger.

Which is the reason a floor on pace is a weak instrument at a dealt table. Doubling the minimum interval halves the events and leaves the stake untouched, and the stake at a table is where the money is. On the working case a reader would have to see the round stretched from sixty seconds to ten minutes before the hour fell to what a reel costs at ten pence.

One honest consequence of that: the slowness of a dealt table is not a protection anybody designed. It is an artefact of a person doing the work, and it would disappear entirely if the work were done by software, at which point only the two and a half or five second floors would be left standing, and those permit 1,440 and 720 events an hour respectively.

6

What the per-spin ceiling does not reach

Part three put twenty pounds on a round without remark, and it is worth saying plainly that nothing in the British stake rules forbids it. What may ride on one game cycle is capped by those rules at five pounds for a player of twenty-five or more and at two for one under that age, and they were fixed to every licence authorising a remote casino by an instrument dated the twenty-fifth of February 2025.

Reach is the part that matters here. An online slots game is what the instrument governs, meaning a casino game played online and built on reels: text or imagery shifting through reel representations, or through whatever stands in their place, until an arrangement lands that settles a prize or some other advantage. The Commission’s guidance confines these limits to online slots and says they leave the rest of the casino alone, roulette and blackjack being the two games it names.

So a dealt table sits outside the ceiling even inside the British licence. Every figure in part three is lawful here: a £10.00 round, a £15.00 round, a £20.00 round. The same twenty pounds may not ride on a licensed reel at all, by anybody, at any age, which means the two products diverge by a factor of four at their legal extremes before anything about the clock is considered.

Row three carrying no figures in four of its columns is the honest answer and the uncomfortable one. There is no published maximum on what may ride on a dealt round at a British licensed table, so there is no published maximum on what such an hour may cost. What there is instead is the five second floor, and part five showed that the floor sits a dozen times above where a dealer actually operates.

Row four is what the arithmetic of this page produces in that space. Twenty pounds a round on the assumed sixty second round is £1,200.00 of staking an hour and £48.00 of expected margin, which is four times what the brisk thirty second table charges at five pounds and forty times what a reel charges at ten pence.

None of which makes the reel the safer product in general. It makes the ceiling a product-specific instrument that was aimed at reels and that leaves dealt games where it found them. A reader who has absorbed the five pound figure from coverage of slots and carries it to a table has imported a protection that does not travel with them.

7

Four tables at once, and the hour that does not lengthen

Everything so far assumed one table. The dealer’s pace is the brake on this product, so the obvious way round the brake is to sit at more than one table and let the brakes run in parallel. The arithmetic of that is brutally simple and worth putting before anybody tries it.

Two tables of sixty seconds, five pounds riding on each round, is a hundred and twenty rounds an hour, £600.00 crossing the felt and £24.00 retained in expectation. Four tables is two hundred and forty rounds, £1,200.00 crossing and £48.00 retained. The hour has not got any longer and no round has got any shorter. The only thing that changed is how many of them were running inside the same sixty minutes.

British rules close this route on a licensed build, and they close it twice. A licensed system is forbidden to supply anything that makes play at several games together possible, with the guidance reaching split screens, multiple screens and any combining of games that lets them run side by side. Casino games are inside that scope and peer-to-peer poker is outside it.

A second rule took effect on 17 January 2025, forbidding anything the operator builds that lets a customer run more than one product at the same moment, and the release announcing it illustrated the point with tables of roulette and blackjack. Both rules bear on the table above with unusual directness, because this is the one product where the brake is a human being and the only way past a human being is to employ several of them at once.

Where no Great Britain licence is held neither rule applies, and the fourth row becomes available to anybody who wants it. Twelve thousand eight hundred and forty-eight pounds of expected margin across a modelled year, out of 267 h 40 min of sitting, is four times the single table figure for the same evenings, the same stake and the same dealer speed.

Worth naming is what the reader experiences while that happens, because it is the opposite of what the figures say. Four slow tables feel like one busy one. The pauses fill in, the attention is continuous, and nothing about the pace of any individual round changes. The quadrupling is invisible precisely because the brake it defeats was never visible either.

8

Twelve months of dealing weighed against twelve months of reels

Repetition is what this section prices, so the working case gets run to a year. The habit modelled is the site’s own: two sittings a day, each of the twenty-two minutes assumed for one pick-up of a handset, every day. That is seven hundred and thirty sittings and 267 h 40 min in the chair.

At the assumed sixty second round and five pounds on each, those hours hold sixteen thousand and sixty rounds. Staking comes to £80,300.00 and the expected margin to £3,212.00. Those identical hours hold eighty thousand three hundred presses on a reel of ten pence, £8,030.00 of staking and £321.20 retained in expectation. Exactly ten times, which is the pence a second ratio from part four reappearing.

Now take the other comparison, which is the one a reader is more likely to want. Hold the money still instead of the hours. Give a person the reel year’s £8,030.00 of staking and send them to the assumed table at five pounds a round. That buys 1,606 rounds, which at sixty seconds each is 1,606 minutes, being 26 h 46 min.

So the same money buys a tenth of the hours, and costs the identical £321.20 in expectation, because the expected cost answers to turnover and the turnover was fixed at £8,030.00 before anybody sat down. Ten times the money for the same hours, or a tenth of the hours for the same money, and no third option.

Row two is the one to sit with. A pound a round on a two minute table, run for the whole of the modelled year, produces figures identical to a reel at ten pence across the hours, the staking and the expected margin alike. Only the count of events differs, 8,030 against 80,300, and the reader at the table had a tenth as many results for exactly the same money.

Row five answers the question most readers actually have, which is how long a given sum lasts at a table rather than what a year costs. Eight thousand and thirty pounds of staking at five pounds a round is 26 h 46 min of sitting, which at two pick-ups of twenty-two assumed minutes a day runs for thirty-six days and a bit. The same staking at a reel ran for a year.

Nothing in the table forecasts what happens to one person. An expectation averages across everybody repeating the same behaviour, and one year’s results scatter widely about it. What the expectation fixes reliably is the order of magnitude, and the order of magnitude between row one and row four is ten.

9

Duties written over the interval and over the stake

Tables of this kind are frequently offered from an operation holding no Great Britain licence, and the duties that fall away are, on this page’s subject, duties about time and about how many clocks may run at once. Three have already been computed against rather than asserted, and they are gathered here with what their absence is worth in pounds.

The interval first. Under a British licence, no casino game outside the slot category may begin a further cycle inside five seconds, peer-to-peer poker aside, and 17 January 2025 is the date carried for it on the Commission’s updates page. Part five turned it into 720 rounds an hour and £144.00 of expected margin at five pounds a round.

What the absence of that floor is worth is therefore bounded and small for a dealt game, because a dealer is twelve times slower than the floor. It is not small for anything on a table that is dealt by software rather than by a person, and a page that treats a studio feed and a generated result as the same product gets this exactly backwards.

The multiple-game duty second. Nothing a licensed system supplies may make play at several games together possible, the guidance naming split screens, multiple screens and any combining of games that lets them run side by side, and a companion rule dated 17 January 2025 forbids operator-built features for running more than one product at a time. Part seven priced its absence: four tables rather than one is £12,848.00 of expected margin across a modelled year against £3,212.00.

Nine thousand six hundred and thirty-six pounds is the difference those two rules are worth across the year on this page’s assumptions, and it arrives without one extra minute of sitting. That is the sharpest single figure here, and it is sharper than anything the stake rules could produce, because the stake rules do not reach this product at all.

The stake third, and it is a duty by its absence rather than its presence. The five pound and two pound ceilings are slots rules, so a British licensed table is not capped and an unlicensed one is not capped either. The licence therefore makes no difference whatever to what may ride on one dealt round, which is worth stating because a reader may reasonably assume otherwise.

Taken together, what the licence buys at a dealt table is an interval the dealer already exceeds, a bar on running several tables at a person, and nothing at all about the size of a bet. A reader weighing a build holding no Great Britain licence should price the middle item at £9,636.00 a year on these assumptions and should not expect the other two to do any work.

10

Which of the two readings to carry into a second year

Two readings were set running in part three and they have to be settled. By the hour a long round is cheap: £6.00 of expected margin at two minutes against £24.00 at thirty seconds, with five pounds riding on each. By the round a long one is dear, since matching that brisk hour from a two minute table takes twenty pounds a round and eighty pence of expected margin on each.

Part four settled them, and the settlement is a division. Pence a second is what the arrangement charges for occupying a life, and it is stake over interval. Everything else on this page is that quotient multiplied by a count of seconds: 3,600 of them in an hour, 1,320 in a sitting of twenty-two assumed minutes, 963,600 in the modelled year.

Which reading a reader should carry depends on nothing about tables and everything about habits. Somebody who plays until a fixed hour arrives should use the hourly reading and should prefer the long round. Somebody who plays until a fixed number of rounds has gone by should use the per-round reading, and for them the long round is a trap that raises the stake.

Three figures summarise the whole note. Twenty pence is retained from a five pound round whatever the table. 8.333 pence a second is what the assumed working case charges, ten times a reel at ten pence. And £3,212.00 is what a year of two twenty-two minute sittings a day comes to at that rate, against £321.20 at the reel.

One last comparison closes it, because it is the one nobody makes. A pound on a two minute round and ten pence on a twelve second press are the same product priced identically, and the first of them looks careful while the second looks idle. What distinguishes a cheap habit from an expensive one is not the game, the room, the dealer or the studio. It is a quotient, and it can be worked out in advance on the back of a receipt.