Demo play, no-deposit offers and free tournaments in Brazil

Authority

Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas del Ministério da Fazenda

Official register

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Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

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The one entry in this record with a clock running on it

Every row in this record ages, because a rule read in October may be amended in November, and that is the ordinary condition of writing about regulation rather than a defect of the method (a record of law is a photograph, and not a forecast). The Brazilian row ages faster than any other, and it does so for a reason built into the instrument itself rather than into the politics around it.

The measure at the centre of this page is a "medida provisória", which is an executive instrument carrying the force of law from the moment it is published (published on 25 September 2026, in an extra edition of the official gazette). What makes it different from a statute is the expiry condition attached to it.

A measure of that kind has to be converted into law by Congress within sixty days, extendable once by a further sixty (sixty plus sixty, and no more); if the conversion does not happen, the measure simply lapses. So the honest description of the Brazilian position is that a prohibition is in force and that its survival past the end of the window is not a fact anybody can report yet.

We say that at the top rather than at the bottom because it governs how the rest of this page should be read; a reader arriving here in the middle of 2027 should treat every paragraph below as a description of what was published and not as a statement of what applies!

What the measure prohibits, and how far it reaches

The first article is drafted in four verbs, and the breadth is the whole point of it (four verbs, and each of them does separate work). Exploitation, offer, intermediation and advertising of "fixed-odds betting" lotteries are prohibited in national territory, in physical or in virtual form, and the prohibition is expressly extended to an agent established abroad who offers them to a person located in Brazil.

That clause matters most to a reader outside the country. It removes the usual argument, and we have not found a way around it in anything we read. An operator sitting in another jurisdiction does not escape by pointing at its own licence, because the conduct the article describes is the offering to somebody who is in Brazil (the test is the location of the player, not the location of the server).

The first paragraph of the same article then pulls in what the instrument calls "virtual online game events", and that definition is why this page had to be written at all. An electronic channel that allows a virtual bet on a game whose result is determined by a future random event, produced by a "random generator" of numbers, symbols, figures or objects, is inside the prohibition (article 3, item III, for the definition).

That formula describes a slot machine (a "slot", in the vocabulary of every page on this site). It also describes most of what this site records, which means the Brazilian prohibition reaches the games as well as the betting, and the distinction between a "sportsbook" and a "lobby" of reels does no work at all here.

The deadlines, which are the unusual part of the drafting

Most prohibitions in this collection take effect and then leave the market to adjust. This one sets out a timetable instead; the timetable is short enough to be worth listing inside a single sentence: ten days to make sites and applications inaccessible, thirty days for existing authorisations to be extinguished, and immediate effect from the date of publication (article 30, for the last of those).

The authorisations granted under the 2023 statute are extinguished without any right to restitution of the fee that was paid for them and without compensation of any kind, which is a drafting choice rather than an oversight (no restitution, and no indemnity). New authorisations are prohibited from the date of publication and applications already pending simply lapse.

Failure to make a site unreachable inside the ten-day window exposes the operator to blocking, so that the sequence appears designed to produce an empty market rather than a supervised one (ten days, which is shorter than most notice periods in this trade). In our reading that is what distinguishes this measure from the Swiss or French approach, where blocking is a remedy against operators who never had a local licence at all.

The revocation is correspondingly wide. The measure strikes out most of the 2023 statute by article number, together with a whole chapter of an earlier law, which leaves very little of the regulated regime standing for anybody to comply with (article 29 of the measure does the striking out, and it does it at length).

What the previous regime said about offers, which still matters

The box above about offers reads as a refusal, and the refusal has two independent sources rather than one. The measure of 2026 prohibits the offer and the "advertising" wholesale; the statute it replaced had already prohibited the offers themselves in terms, which means that the answer does not depend on whether the measure survives.

The earlier provision deserves quoting in substance, because it is clearer than most of what this trade writes about Brazil. An operating agent was forbidden to grant, in any form, an advance, an anticipation, a "bonus" or any prior advantage for the placing of a bet. The prohibition applied even where the thing was offered merely by way of promotion or publicity (article 29, item I, of the 2023 statute).

So a "no deposit" offer was never lawful in the Brazilian regulated market (not once, and not during the two years in which that market was open and licensed). If you find a Brazilian "welcome offer" described on a comparison page, you are looking at something that was prohibited under the old law and is prohibited again, by a different route, under the new one (two prohibitions, arrived at independently).

The revoked provision has not stopped mattering, which is a point the trade press tends to miss. Conduct that happened while the 2023 statute was in force is still judged by it, so the old prohibition governs the past while the measure governs the present (a transitional rule of the ordinary kind, and expressly stated).

Why this entry ages fastest, and what went unchecked

Four things on this page are unverified, and they are worth naming one by one rather than gathering into a phrase. The measure refers to a decree of 2026 that we did not examine, and the ministerial orders of 2025 on "advertising" and on affiliates were not checked either, because the measure has left their legal basis in a state we could not establish.

Litigation over the measure is reported, and we have it only from trade sources rather than from a court record (reported, and reporting is not filing), so it appears nowhere in the boxes above. The affiliate rule of the earlier regime is worth one line for the same reason: under a 2024 ministerial order an affiliate's communications counted as the operator's own acts, with written contracts required in Portuguese, and how much of that "attribution" survives is exactly what we cannot tell you.

On free play the instruments are silent in both directions. Neither the 2023 statute nor the 2026 measure mentions a "demo", a "fun mode", a "free chip" or a "freeroll" at any point, which is why three rows of the panel above are blank rather than negative!

One absence is worth flagging on its own, because a reader in difficulty needs it more than he needs any of the above. No national "self-exclusion" service or helpline could be found to name for Brazil, and the row for it on this page is empty for that reason rather than because we chose to leave it out.

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