Thirty-nine European countries, and no two answers alike

The four heaviest counts, and the four lightest

At the top of the European range sit four markets, and they are not the four a reader would guess from the size of the economy.

The United Kingdom at 29 and the Netherlands at 27 stand clear of everything else on the continent. Spain follows at 24 and France at 23. Those four are the only European countries above twenty, and between them they account for a disproportionate share of every European refusal counted here.

At the other end, three countries are named by nobody at all — Ireland, Luxembourg and Norway — and three more are named exactly once each: Italy, Switzerland and Finland. In all three of those single cases the name appears in the same document, or nearly: Crashino's schedule accounts for both Italy and Switzerland, while Finland's single entry comes from Winz.io. Six of Europe's countries, four of them large markets by any measure, rest on a total of two documents.

Read those two paragraphs together and the idea of a European shortlist stops surviving. Italy and Spain are neighbours with counts of 1 and 24. Norway and Sweden are neighbours with counts of 0 and 8. Ireland and the United Kingdom share a land border and carry 0 and 29.

Every European count, and where each one continues

The table below is the whole of the European picture: thirty-nine countries, grouped by how many of the thirty-eight read schedules name each one. Each entry leads to the page carrying that country's addresses, its reading dates and the names behind the figure.

Eighteen of the thirty-nine sit in the band from 10 to 19, which is where the middle of Europe actually lives: Lithuania and Ukraine at 19, Belgium at 16, Belarus at 15, Greece and Portugal at 14, Bulgaria and Estonia at 13, then Albania, Cyprus, Germany and Moldova at 12, and six countries together at 11. Fourteen more sit in single figures. The bands are not a ranking of anything; they are a map of how unevenly thirty-eight commercial documents treat one continent.

No single schedule covers Europe, and four ignore it entirely

The counts above are produced by operators, not by regions, and looking at the same data from the operators' side finishes the argument.

Thirty-four of the thirty-eight schedules name at least one European country. Four name none. At the wide end, Oshi Casino names 29 of the thirty-nine, 7Bit Casino and Mirax 28 each, Bitdreams and Slotum 27, PlayAmo and Bitkingz 26. At the narrow end, Cloudbet's entire schedule runs to two countries of which one is European, and Coins.Game names a single European country.

Not one document in the set treats Europe as a unit. The widest of them still leaves ten European countries unnamed, and the seven widest are so nearly identical to each other that they behave as a single drafting habit rather than seven independent judgements. Underneath those seven, thirty-one further schedules disagree with each other about almost every country on the continent.

The German suggestions end here

The German-language phrasings in this cluster all resolve to one figure and one page. Twelve of the thirty-eight read schedules print Germany and twenty-six leave it out, which puts the largest market in Europe near the middle of the range rather than at the top of it.

Two of the twelve are worth naming because they cut against an assumption. Windice was read at windice.io/de/terms and Bitkingz at bitkingz.com/de/terms-and-conditions — German-language addresses, on brands whose schedules name Germany. Serving pages in a language is a marketing decision; naming a country in a schedule is a contractual one, and the two travel separately. The German count in full carries the other ten addresses.

What this page does not carry, and why the gap is deliberate

Every figure above comes out of a contract. A restricted-territory schedule is drafted by an operator to govern its own dealings, amended when commercial conditions change, and addressed to nobody but its own customers.

Europe's thirty-nine countries also have thirty-nine licensing systems, thirty-nine statutes and thirty-nine regulators, and not one of them is read on this site. No page here names a European regulator, quotes a European statute or says whether anything is lawful anywhere. That is not modesty; it is the boundary of what has been read. Merging the two kinds of document is the standard error in this cluster: a permit number cited as though it settled a country, or a schedule cited as though it settled a law.

The permits themselves are read separately, and they show how little the schedules have to do with supervision — every permit in this table comes from one issuing authority, while the European counts above run from 29 to zero. Same authority, opposite answers, thirty-nine times over. The rules behind each figure set out what an unread document produces instead of a guess.

Sixty-two documents that would move every number above

One more figure belongs on a European page, and it is the largest of them: sixty-two.

That is how many operators in the hundred-name library keep a territorial schedule this reading has not opened. Every European count above — 29, 27, 24, all the way down to the three zeros — is drawn from thirty-eight documents, not a hundred. Retrieve one of the sixty-two and every country it names moves by one, in one direction only.

So the counts on this site have a floor and no ceiling. They can rise as documents open; they cannot fall except by an operator rewriting its own schedule. A reader in a country at zero holds the widest field on the continent and the least certainty about it, which is a very different proposition from a reader in a country at 29, who at least knows what the documents say.

Beyond Europe, the same reading runs to 122 countries from the index behind these pages, and the heaviest count anywhere is not European: thirty-two of the thirty-eight schedules print the United States, while Canada is named by none.