Two currencies, one of which matters

Register anywhere on this list and the balance that greets you will be enormous. That is deliberate and it is not really an offer. Gold Coins exist so the lobby has something to run on, they are effectively free for the operator to issue, and there is no route by which they become money. Every brand says so in its rules and almost none of them say so in the advertisement.

The second balance is the one to read. It arrives in much smaller quantities, usually as a bonus attached to a purchase or a free postal request, and after it has been staked the required number of times it can be redeemed. A package reading 250,000 GC plus 25 SC is, for our purposes, a 25 SC offer. Reorder this market on that basis and several well-marketed brands fall a long way down it.

Play-through decides how much survives

The promotional balance arrives locked and has to be staked before it can leave. At one-times, which most brands here use, a 50 SC balance requires 50 SC of total stakes. That is measured in stakes rather than in wins, so you are not being asked to beat the house, only to pass the balance through it once.

At two-times you pass it through twice, and the house edge gets a second full opportunity to take it. Two operators on this page run above one-times. Both advertise well and both sit in the bottom third, and those two facts are the same fact.

The floor quietly decides everything

Minimum redemption gets almost no attention and deserves plenty. At 50 SC a short, ordinary session can finish with a payout. At 100 SC you are still playing, and every extra spin is one more chance for the balance to fall apart before it reaches the button. Two brands with identical packages and identical play-through can produce entirely different outcomes on this number alone, which is why it has a column of its own in our table.

What we are actually timing

Our payout clock starts when a request is submitted from a fully verified account and stops when the funds land. Identity verification sits outside that window, because it happens once and its speed depends mostly on how quickly you photograph a document. Every brand was timed three times in three different weeks and the middle figure is what we publish. Where a brand was slower than its own help pages claim, the review says so in plain language.