The rules on demo play, market by market

One question asked twenty-one times, and the answers do not agree

A game stripped of its stake is the same object in every country, and the law of every country looks at that object and sees something different. That disagreement is the most useful thing we found while building this record (twenty-one markets, and no two of them alike), and it is the reason the table below is not an illustration attached to an argument: the table is the argument, and the prose underneath it only explains how to read the columns.

Four questions are asked of each market, and they were chosen because each one has an answer somebody can check. Whether a "demo" may be opened without an account, whether an age must be checked before it opens, whether a "no deposit" offer is lawful, and whether a "freeroll" can be entered for nothing (four questions, and each of them settled by a document rather than by an opinion).

Twenty-one jurisdictions give twenty-one sets of answers, and the interesting part is not any single row (several rows are mostly blank, and each sheet says why) but the pattern running across them. Four large European systems looked at one problem and built four different machines for it (four systems, four instruments, four answers), and not one of those machines is the obvious one.

We would rather put the comparison in front of a reader than a verdict, because a verdict has to be believed while a comparison can be examined; the fourteen jurisdiction sheets linked from the table go into the reasoning one country at a time (fourteen sheets, and seven "market pages" beside them), and this page is only the map of those.

Four European systems, and four different machines for one problem

Great Britain decided that the problem is the age of the person at the keyboard, so a licensee has to establish how old a customer is before the "free-to-play" edition of a gambling game will open for him, and "self-declaration" of a birth date does not discharge that duty (social responsibility code provision 3.2.11, which took effect on 7 May 2019).

The rule then travels outward through the licensee's responsibility for the third parties it contracts with, which is how it reaches an affiliate and therefore how it reached this site.

Germany decided that the problem is the boundary of the gaming account, and shut the trial inside it. A free entertainment offering may be given only to a player who already holds a "Spielkonto" with that same licensee (an account as the German treaty defines it), and the second limb goes further by forbidding the operator to make such an offering usable without one at all.

Spain arrived at a comparable result through an instrument about commercial communications rather than about gambling. The "free play" application has to sit on the operator's platform behind a completed registration (article 14 of the Spanish royal decree of 2020, which applies from May 2021). Two countries, two legislative traditions, and one shared instinct that a free game belongs on the far side of a sign-up form.

Sweden refused that instinct and regulated the mathematics instead of the doorway, which is why it strikes us as the cleverest of the four. A licence holder there may not provide a free or "trial" game whose random outcome is other than the one produced by the paid version of itself; no account and no "age check" are required in order to reach it.

Italy is the fourth. It is the odd one of them, in a way that repays the detour. A game of "pure amusement" that pays no money prize stands outside the subject matter of the Italian advertising prohibition altogether (the definition is in an annex to the regulator's guidelines), and Italy is at the same time the only system in this record that denies registration any "excusing effect" whatever, so the condition that makes a trial lawful in Madrid and in Berlin buys nothing at all in Rome!

What a table does when the question has no object

Several rows are not answers to our question but reports that the question does not arise, and if you miss that distinction you will misread half of the grid. Denmark requires a licence only where three things are present together: a "stake", a prize that the payment puts within reach, and an element of alea in the outcome. Where none of the three is present, the game falls outside the statute rather than inside a permission (outside, which is a long way from allowed).

Australia reaches the same exit through a definition of its own, since a "gambling service" there needs a game played for money together with a customer who gives consideration in order to enter. France offers a different kind of emptiness: no online casino is authorised there at all, so there is nobody left to ask what a "licensee" might do with a "trial version" (no licensee, and therefore no licence conditions to read).

South Africa produces the same silence by a stranger route, because its statute permits licensed interactive gambling while the licences themselves are never granted. Japan is the sharpest case in the grid and the one that bears most directly on an editorial site, since presenting illegal gambling sites to people in that country has itself been prohibited since September 2025 (25 September 2025, under an amendment made that June).

Two rows carry dates rather than rules. Brazil's entry rests on an executive measure published in September 2026, which has the force of law and expires if the Congress fails to convert it inside sixty days, extendable once; New Zealand's regime was made in 2026 and will not be "fully operational", on the department's own account, until 2027 (its phrase, and its own date).

Why seven of the twenty-one rows lead somewhere else

Fourteen of the rows open a sheet of the kind described above, and the remaining seven open a market page instead (fourteen and seven, which is the whole of the twenty-one), so the split is deliberate rather than an accident of linking. Those seven are the markets this site addresses directly, and a market page carries things a jurisdiction sheet has no business carrying: the local minimum age, the local "register", the reduced page furniture and the operators actually licensed there (nineteen in Ontario, twenty-one in the United States, eighteen elsewhere).

Putting the legal answers on that page rather than on a separate sheet keeps one subject in one place. A reader in Ontario wants the standards and the list of registered sites together; splitting them across two pages would serve the structure of our site instead of the person reading it.

There is a second reason, and it is a compliance one we would rather state than imply. In Ontario and in Alberta the standards permit an incentive to be mentioned only on the operator's own gaming site, so a page addressed to those provinces has to be built under that constraint from its first line (Standard 2.05 in Ontario, and the equivalent standards in Alberta), which is easier to do on a page designed for the market than on a sheet designed for a comparison.

The remaining five of the seven are Great Britain, Spain, Québec, Australia and the United States, and each has a local peculiarity that the sheet format handles badly (a province with no licensing regime of its own, a federal prohibition with state exceptions, a "sweepstakes" model being banned state by state). Our links are commercial wherever they appear, and these legal pages carry none.

Greece is missing, and that is a hole rather than an oversight

Twenty-one rows is a number with an absence inside it, and the absence is Greece (twenty-one, where twenty-two would have been the honest count). We looked for the Greek position on all four questions and came away with nothing citable at all: the professional guide to Greek gambling law we expected to use is no longer available, and a general search returned nothing but search-engine spam dressed up as legal summary.

What would be needed is a reading of the Greek framework law and of the implementing decisions of the national commission, in Greek, on the commission's own site (a "primary source", in the vocabulary of the level column). That is a real piece of work rather than a lookup, and we have not done it, so there is no Greek row to click on.

The temptation to add one anyway is worth describing, because it explains the whole design of this page. A plausible Greek row would have cost us ten minutes and would have looked exactly like the other twenty (ten minutes, and nobody would ever have asked), which is precisely the problem: a fabricated sentence about a rule is more dangerous than a visible gap, since nobody checks what looks finished!

So read the right-hand column before anything else. It says whether a cell came from the text of a law, from a "trade source", or from nowhere at all, and a cell marked "not verified" means what it says. Your own use of this grid should start from the three markets whose rules actually bind you, and the rest of it is comparison.

By the Free Best Casino editorial team · Last updated October 2026