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

Authority

Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ)

Official register

anj.fr/offre-de-jeu-et-marche/operateurs-agrees

Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

interdictiondejeux.anj.fr; Joueurs Info Service 09 74 75 13 13

A question that has no object, and a prohibition that has plenty

The four questions this site asks are about licensed operators, and in France the first of them runs out of subject matter before it can be answered. There is no authorised online casino here, which means there is no licensee whose "demo" could be regulated, no account behind which a trial might be placed, and no set of conditions to read (the box above says "not verified", and in practice it is also moot).

That is an unusual shape for a market page, and it is worth being plain about what it does and does not mean (the box is empty because the question has nowhere to land, and not because a regulator declined to answer it). The absence of a rule about trial play is not a permission; it is the consequence of there being nothing in the French regime for such a rule to attach to.

What France does have, and in abundance, is a prohibition addressed to whoever advertises the games it has not authorised. That is a different target from the one the German and Swedish provisions take aim at (those two bind a licensee, while this one binds anybody at all). The interesting question in this jurisdiction is therefore not what a player may open but what a writer may publish, and the answer has a number attached to it.

We treat France as the clearest case in our record of a market where the regulatory risk sits on the affiliate rather than on the game; a page about free play that never mentions a French-facing operator is in a very different position from one that does.

What is actually authorised online, which is a short list

The internal security code sets out the online perimeter in one article, and the list it gives is closed (article L. 320-6, which permits three things online and no fourth). Horse-race betting, sports betting and what French law calls "jeux de cercle" are the permitted online segments; the last of those is the one that matters here, because it is where poker lives.

The institutional documentation of the authority arranges the same picture slightly differently, and reading the two together is useful, because the statute lists categories while the authority lists products (a "segment", in the vocabulary the regulator itself uses). Draw games and "scratchcards" sit with the national monopoly operator, sports betting and horse-race betting are open to licensed operators in competition, and poker appears as the single casino-type game available online (one game, on a list of four segments).

Slots, roulette and blackjack are not on the list. They are played in the physical casinos, which are licensed and supervised under a regime of their own, and they have no online counterpart that any French licence could cover (the gap is deliberate, and it has survived every round of reform so far).

A reader who finds a French-language "lobby" full of "slots" is therefore looking at an operator licensed somewhere else, however French the page may appear, and we would read the language of a page as decoration rather than as evidence. That is the single most useful consequence of this section, and it can be checked in a minute against the authority's published list of licensed operators (the list is public, and it names every holder).

The sentence with a hundred thousand euro in it

The provision an affiliate should read first is not in the gambling statute at all but in the act of 2010 that opened the French market to competition, and it is the one sentence in this collection that puts a figure on the risk of publishing a page (a figure, in euro, and not a licence condition). Anybody who advertises, by any means whatever, a gambling site that has not been authorised commits an offence punishable with a fine of one hundred thousand euro (article 57 of the act, and the phrase about means is as wide as it sounds).

Two further powers sit beside that one, and together they explain why the French regime bites harder than its reputation suggests. The authority may require the withdrawal of a commercial communication that amounts to "incitation excessive au jeu", and every licensed operator has to submit its promotional strategy to the authority rather than merely keep it lawful.

Since March 2022 the authority has also been able to block, by administrative decision and without a court, sites that offer illegal gambling or that advertise it. The sequence of those two verbs is the part worth noticing: offering and advertising are treated as the same kind of mischief, and the same remedy answers both.

A "no deposit" offer therefore has no lawful home in this market, and the box above reads as a refusal for a structural reason rather than a conduct one; where there is no authorised online casino, no authorised offer of a "free chip" or of "bonus credits" exists at such a casino for anybody to promote (no licensee, no lawful offer, and nothing to describe).

Why that box is the most important thing on the page

Most of this collection describes rules that bind operators, so that a reader of a record of this kind is a spectator to them, able to check a box and do nothing further (which is the ordinary relation between a reader and a licensing regime). France is the exception, and we would rather say so in the open than tuck it into a disclaimer that nobody reads.

The blocking power has been used against sites whose business is comparison and sites whose business is "bonuses" (two categories of site, and both of them are affiliates). The distinction between an operator and a person who writes about operators does not protect the second from the remedy aimed at the first. Every commercial link on this site is marked as one, and that marking is not a courtesy!

The practical consequence for this site is the same one that follows from the British rule, reached by an entirely different route. The power behind it is a different one as well (an administrative block, rather than a licence condition about "free-to-play" games). We host no playable games at all, we do not promote an operator into a market where that operator holds no licence, and we say as much on every page of this record, and the French perimeter is the reason the second half of that sentence has to be as firm as the first.

If you are in France and you want to know whether a given site is lawful, the authority publishes the list of licensed operators and it is brief enough to read in full (four segments, and no more than a few dozen names). That is a check you can finish before a page of ours has loaded!

The order of the gaps, and what stays unanswered

Three answers in the panel at the head of this page stand empty, and the reason differs from the Dutch case in a way that matters. Here the instruments were readable: what they do not contain is any provision about "free play", a "trial mode" or a "demo", in documentation that runs to dozens of pages about everything else.

Nothing requires an age to be verified before a "demo mode" opens, and there is nothing on a "freeroll" either. We looked in the authority's own published material rather than in a trade guide, which makes the silence better evidence than it would otherwise be, though silence is still not an answer.

The second gap is one of scope and we flag it deliberately. We did not examine the regime governing the physical casinos, which is a separate body of law with its own licensing, and nothing on this page should be read as describing what happens inside a French casino building.

The two addresses worth keeping are the list of licensed operators and the national "gambling-exclusion" register, which is run from the authority's own domain alongside a public helpline (the number sits on the same page as the form). Your own reading of France should begin with the list of what is authorised, because everything else on this page follows from how short that list is.

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