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Demo play, no-deposit offers and free tournaments in Italy
Four questions and the rule behind each one. This page names no operator and carries no commercial link, because a page about the law of a market should not also be an advertisement inside it.
| Question | Answer | What the rule says | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public demo without an account | A game played for amusement, with no money prize, sits outside the advertising ban. | Primary source | |
| Age verified before the demo | No specific rule found. | Not verified | |
| No-deposit offers | An affiliate may promote neither bonuses nor promotional codes. | Trade source | |
| Free tournaments | Not verified. | Not verified |
- Authority
- Agenzia delle dogane e dei monopoli for gambling, AGCOM for advertising
- Official register
- adm.gov.it/portale/monopoli/giochi/gioco_distanza/gioco_dist_concessionari
- Minimum age
- 18
- Self-exclusion and help
- The self-exclusion register kept by ADM; the public health freephone line on 800 558822
A prohibition written about advertising, and not about games
Italy is the only market in this record where the question about free play has to be asked twice, once about the game and once about the page that describes it. The prohibition at the centre of Italian gambling law is not a prohibition on games at all, and a reader who treats it as one will arrive at the wrong answer by a short and entirely plausible route.
What the statute forbids is advertising. Article 9 of the decree law of 2018 (decree law 87, converted with amendments by law 96 of the same year) bans any form of advertising, even indirect, of games or bets with cash prizes and of gambling, however carried out and on any medium, social platforms included (the article names the media and then adds a catch-all, so its list is not a limit).
Three things stand outside that ban by force of the statute itself, and the list is short enough to learn: national lotteries with a deferred draw, local games of chance, and the safe and responsible gambling marks of the customs and monopolies agency (three exceptions, and nothing beyond them). From 1 January 2019 the ban also took in sponsorships and every other form of communication with promotional content.
The guidelines that make the article workable arrived a year later, and they came from the communications authority rather than from the gambling agency (decision 132/19/CONS of 18 April 2019, with an annex of its own). We read the annex as the operative text, because the article itself runs to a few lines while the annex carries the definitions, the exclusions and the examples.
Where a free game sits, and why that is only half an answer
The annex defines a "game with a cash prize" as one played for profit in which winning and losing are wholly or partly a matter of chance, and it then excludes, in the same clause, "games of pure amusement without a cash prize" (article 3, paragraph 1, letter a). A "demo" of the sort this site records therefore falls outside the object of the prohibition.
The second half of the answer is less comfortable, and it is the part that trade summaries drop. Operators asked during the consultation for advertising of games without cash prizes (the "for fun" titles of the trade) to be written into the list of exclusions, and the authority declined to put it there (the request is recorded in the consultation responses), so the exclusion now rests on a definition rather than on an exemption.
The distance between those two positions is where the risk sits, in our view, and it is not a small distance. A "free play" version published on the site of an Italian concessionaire, reproducing a title that the same concessionaire sells for money, falls plausibly inside the broad notion of "indirect advertising" that the annex defines as any communication made for payment or for self-promotion in order to promote the supply of goods or services for payment (article 3, paragraph 1, letter d).
One exclusion in that article does hold firm, and it matters to the studios rather than to the casinos. "Business to business" commercial communications sit outside the ban, including those carried in the specialist press, as does the organisation of trade fairs open only to people working in the sector (which is why a studio's own catalogue of "demo" links is a different object in law from a casino's "lobby").
The sentence that has no counterpart anywhere else in this record
Every other market in this collection treats registration as the thing that makes a free game lawful. Germany shuts the trial inside a gaming account (an account in the sense of the treaty's own definition), Spain allows the free application only on the operator's platform, and only once the person has signed up, and in both cases the reader's act of registering is precisely what the rule is waiting for.
Italy says the opposite in terms, and the sentence is worth setting out at length because it is routinely ignored: no "excusing effect" can be attributed to the fact that the user consented to receiving communications with a promotional purpose, that he registered on the site, or that he went in person to the gambling premises (the three cases the authority lists, in the authority's own order).
Registration, in other words, buys nothing here. It does not turn a prohibited communication into a permitted one; it does not help that the person asked to receive it, and the only thing left standing is an informative reply to a customer who asks how the service works (a reply that answers a question, which is a narrow permission indeed).
That asymmetry is the hinge of this page, and it explains why a method that works in two neighbouring markets fails in this one; a site built on the premise that a registered reader may be told anything will be right in Germany and wrong in Italy, which is an odd thing to have to write about two members of the same union.
What follows for a site of this shape
An affiliate is not a gambling operator, so no licence from the customs and monopolies agency is required; neither technical certification nor any individual authorisation is needed either. The freedom ends at that point (and the list of what an affiliate may not do is the part worth learning).
An affiliate addressing this market may promote only operators the agency has authorised, and inside the rules on commercial communications it may not promote a "bonus" or a "promotional code", may not buy advertising or social advertising, may not run influencer campaigns, and may not use "tracked links" (the redirecting addresses that let a commission be attributed) towards those same authorised operators.
The last prohibition in that list is the one that catches people out, because a tracked link is the ordinary plumbing of this trade and looks like a technical detail rather than a communication. In our reading it is the reason an affiliate business of the usual shape cannot address the Italian regulated market at all, whatever care it takes over its wording.
The boxes above therefore read differently from the German ones, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with games. "Free play" sits outside the object of the ban, while the "no deposit" box reads as a refusal because of what an affiliate may say about an offer rather than because of what an operator may hand out, and we have not seen that distinction drawn on a competitor's page, which is one reason you are reading it here!
Two regulators, two subjects
The customs and monopolies agency licenses the gambling itself and keeps the register of distance-gaming concessionaires; the communications authority polices the advertising ban and can fine an affiliate between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand euro while ordering the content removed. A page can satisfy one of them and breach the other.
Where the reading stops, and why one gap is a connection error
The gap that matters most is specific and easy to describe. We did not find any rule of the gambling agency on "demo mode" inside an Italian licensed site, which is why the box on age verification stands at "not verified" instead of at a confident refusal (the technical rules for distance gaming would be the place to look next).
There is a second gap of a different kind, and it is a reading failure rather than a hole in the law. The text of article 9 we worked from is the version reproduced inside the authority's own guidelines, because the two national archives of legislation reset the connection on every attempt we made (both were tried again on 20 October 2026, with the same result).
A reproduction inside a regulator's guidelines is a decent second best, and we would rather name the text we actually read than claim a consolidated source we never managed to open! "No deposit" offers and "freeroll" tournaments are not verified on any Italian primary source (the second of those is unverified everywhere in this collection).
If you work in this market, the register of distance-gaming concessionaires is the one list worth keeping open; the agency's self-exclusion register is the instrument a reader in difficulty should know about before any of the rest of this, and you can reach both without leaving an official site. Your own check, in Italy, starts from what may be said and not from what may be played.
Is a free casino game something that may be advertised in Italy?
A game of pure amusement with no money prize falls outside the definition on which the advertising ban operates, although the regulator declined to add for-fun titles to its closed list of exclusions.
Does it help that a reader has registered or asked to be told?
No. The guidelines say that consent to promotional messages, registration on a site and a visit to a gambling venue carry no excusing effect at all, which inverts the Spanish and German approach.
What may an affiliate not do in this market?
It may not promote a bonus or a promotional code, buy advertising or social advertising, run influencer campaigns, or use tracked links pointing at operators the gambling agency has authorised.
Where does the text of the prohibition quoted here come from?
From the version reproduced inside the communications authority's own guidelines, because both national archives of legislation reset the connection on every attempt made to reach them.