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

Authority

Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL)

Official register

gluecksspiel-behoerde.de/de/fuer-spielende/uebersicht-erlaubter-anbieter-whitelist

Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

OASIS (self-exclusion); Check dein Spiel, 0800 1 37 27 00

The strictest answer in Europe, and why it takes two sentences

A free version of a gambling game and the paid version of the same game are, in German law, one object described twice. The treaty governing online gambling in Germany (the "Glücksspielstaatsvertrag" of 2021, agreed between the sixteen Länder) spends two paragraphs making sure the description cannot come apart, and it is the only instrument in our record whose drafters set down both halves of the problem at once.

The first half is access. A licensee may offer an "unentgeltliches Unterhaltungsangebot" (a free entertainment offering, the treaty's name for what the trade calls a "demo" or a "fun mode") only to players for whom a gaming account has been opened with that licensee, and the sentence immediately after forbids the licensee to make the use of such an offering possible without an account at all (§ 6j paragraph 1 of the 2021 treaty, second sentence).

Those two sentences are not a repetition of each other, and reading them as one is the commonest error in this corner of the law. The first names who may be served; the second names what a "lobby" (the page of game tiles a player lands on) may not be built to do, and the gap between the two is why no public "practice play" button exists on a German licensed site.

A third sentence carries the same prohibition to minors and to players on the self-exclusion register (a detail that trade summaries of this provision almost always drop). The free version therefore takes the whole weight of the protective apparatus rather than a lighter copy of it, and in our reading the ordering is deliberate: a trial counts as the first move of the game instead of as a brochure for it.

What the account involves, which is the part that bites

The word doing the work in that provision is "Spielkonto" (a gaming account in the sense of § 6a), and a reader who stops at the English translation of it will underestimate the rule by a wide margin. Such an account is not an email address and a password.

Opening one means identification, and it means a check against "OASIS" (the federal register of self-excluded players, which every licensee has to consult before a customer is let in). The "demo" sits behind the same door as the money, so a player who wanted five quiet minutes with a slot before deciding anything has to walk through identification first.

We read that as the point of the provision rather than as a side effect of it; nothing in the text suggests that the inconvenience was an accident. The drafters were refusing to treat a free game as a lesser thing, and the position is a defensible one, however awkward it may be for anybody whose business happens to be the selling of access to free games.

The consequence for a reader outside the country is easy to get backwards, so it is worth stating plainly, because the error travels. The provision binds the holder of a German licence (the list of holders is published by the joint authority of the Länder as a "whitelist"); it does not bind the whole internet, and a "demo mode" opening somewhere else is no evidence at all that the German rule has been relaxed.

The second paragraph, which almost nobody quotes

The part of § 6j that trade summaries leave out is the second paragraph, and it is the more interesting of the two by a long way. The free offering has to correspond to the real game "insgesamt" (as a whole), and the treaty names the two respects in which the correspondence is not negotiable: the probability of winning, and the "Auszahlungsquote" (the payout ratio, or "RTP" in the English of this trade).

A demo built with friendlier mathematics is unlawful in Germany even when it sits correctly behind an account, and the obligation turns a question of access into a question of product design. Where a fee or a similar charge has to be paid in the real game, the free version has to simulate that charge and state it.

For a reader of this site that is the most useful sentence in the whole German instrument, and it answers a question the rest of the law never reaches. A trial that flatters a player teaches him the wrong lesson at his own expense later, and this is one of two markets in our record that forbid the flattery in so many words.

The mistake we meet most often is to read the identity requirement as a consumer protection that registering can waive. Registration is the condition that makes the "free play" lawful at all; the mathematical identity is a separate obligation that survives it, and it applies to every title in the catalogue and to every "credit" (the unit of play money that a demo hands out) shown on screen.

How the neighbours arrange the same problem

Spain reaches a comparable place through a different instrument. There the "aplicaciones de juego gratuito" (free game applications) have to live inside the operator's own platform, once the person has registered and not before, and the rule lives in a royal decree on commercial communications rather than in a treaty on gambling (royal decree 958 of 2020, article 14, in force since 1 May 2021).

Sweden went the other way and left the trial open to anybody, on the single condition that its random outcome match the game played with stakes. Great Britain did something different again, and that one shapes the site you are reading: there a customer's age has to be established before a "free-to-play" version will open at all (provision 3.2.11 of the licence conditions, in force since 7 May 2019), and the licensee is answerable for the affiliates it has contracted with.

Germany is the only one of the four to solve both halves of the problem inside one provision, and we use it as the reference point rather than as an outlier. A reader who has understood § 6j will recognise the Spanish rule as one half of it and the Swedish rule as the other half!

The date matters here as much as the wording of the provision does. The text was agreed in October 2020, the consolidated version we read gives 1 January 2023 as the day from which it applies (the Bavarian portal states it in exactly that form), and a description of this market written before then is a description of a different regime.

What we could not establish, and why the gap is on the page

Two of the four boxes above read "not verified", and the reason is identical in both cases: we looked for a primary source on the point and did not find one, so that the box says as much instead of saying something plausible. No-deposit offers are not treated by § 6j at all.

What we did read is a neighbouring prohibition, which bars any advantage that is handed to a player readmitted after a self-exclusion, and that is a narrower rule than the question deserves. "Freeroll" tournaments (an entry with no cost at all and a prize in money) are not verified for any jurisdiction in our collection, and they are the one sub-question on which our reading produced nothing worth citing.

A gap of that shape is never a reason to guess at the answer. The German text is long, dense and freely available, and a page that filled the two empty boxes with a plausible inference would be hiding the only thing a reader can actually use, namely the knowledge of where the next look should go!

If you want to test any of this for yourself, the whitelist of permitted providers is the place to start and the treaty text sits on the Bavarian register of consolidated law (both were reachable on 20 October 2026, when this page was written). Your own reading of a German lobby should begin at the account, and not at the game, because the law begins there too.

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