Minimum Spin Time and the Autoplay Ban: the Rules Behind a Slower Reel

The two speed floors

RTS 14 of the remote gambling and software technical standards is the responsible product design section. It contains two separate minimum intervals, written in almost identical words, and the distinction between them is the part that is routinely missed.

RTS 14D — "It must be a minimum of 2.5 seconds from the time a game is started until the next game cycle can be commenced." This is the slots floor, and it has applied since 31 October 2021. The requirement also carries a second element: it must always be necessary to release and then depress the start button, or take an equivalent action, to begin a game cycle. That is the clause that kills a held-down button as well as the one that kills autoplay.

RTS 14G — "It must be a minimum of 5 seconds from the time a game is started until the next game cycle can be commenced." This one applies to casino games other than slots and peer-to-peer poker, and it came into force on 17 January 2025. The Commission's purpose in setting the longer figure was to reduce the intensity of non-slot casino games, a number of which were playing faster than slots did under the earlier requirement.

So the position is the reverse of the common assumption. Slots are the faster category at two and a half seconds; the five-second floor applies to the non-slot casino games around them.

What else the same section rules out

Four more requirements in RTS 14 shape how a game may behave, and together they describe a single policy rather than a list of restrictions.

• 14A — a product must not actively encourage customers to chase their losses, increase their stake, or increase the amount they have decided to gamble.
• 14C — the gambling system must not offer functionality which facilitates playing multiple games at the same time.
• 14E — the system must not permit a customer to reduce the time until the result is presented. The implementation guidance names the features caught: turbo, quick spin and slam stop are not permitted.
• 14F — the system must not celebrate a return which is less than or equal to the total stake gambled. This is the requirement behind the absence of the coin-shower animation on a twenty-pence return from a fifty-pence stake, the practice usually described as losses disguised as wins.

Autoplay sits across 14A and 14D: a function that commences game cycles without the player acting cannot satisfy a requirement that each cycle begin with the release and depression of a start button. The prohibition on autoplay for GB-licensed remote gambling has applied since 31 October 2021.

Why the floor is expressed per game cycle

Both speed requirements are drawn around the game cycle — the interval from a game starting to the point at which the next one may be commenced — rather than around a session, an hour or a day. That makes them a limit on intensity, not on volume. Nothing in RTS 14 caps how many cycles a player may complete or how much may be staked over them; the limits that do that are the statutory stake ceiling on online slots and the player's own and the operator's account-level limits, which come from elsewhere.

It also explains why the rules survive changes of device and interface. A floor measured per cycle applies identically on a phone, in a browser and in an app, with no separate figure to maintain for each.

What this means when comparing games

Spin speed is not a point of difference between GB-licensed sites, because it is not theirs to set. Nor is autoplay, turbo, slam stop or simultaneous play. An operator advertising faster play, or a review treating spin speed as a feature of one site over another, is describing something the standards removed from competition. The things that do still differ between two sites offering the same title are the stake range, the RTP build the operator selected, and the game's own published rules — all of which are stated in the game's information screen rather than in the lobby.