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

Authority

Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa)

Official register

kansspelautoriteit.nl/kansspelwijzer

Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

Cruks (self-exclusion); Loket Kansspel

The one page in this set that has to begin with an admission

Every other market in our record produced an answer of some kind, even where the answer turned out to be that nobody had ever asked the question. The Netherlands produced the gap instead, and it is the most serious one in the whole collection, so it goes at the top of the page rather than into a footnote at the bottom (which is where a gap goes in order to be ignored).

Whether a public "demo" is lawful for a Dutch licensee is something we could not establish, and the reason is that the instrument in which such a rule would live was out of reach (the implementing decree on remote gambling, with the implementing regulation beside it). That is a statement about a piece of reading and not about Dutch law, and the distance between those two things is the subject of this page.

The panel above therefore carries three honest blanks beside one partial answer (the worst score of any market in this set, and not by a narrow margin). Filling all four of those cells would have meant guessing at three, and on a question whose wrong answer sends somebody off to open an account he never needed, an empty box does less damage than a confident one.

So the gap is the content here! What follows is the part we verified, the part we did not, and the precise cause of each failure, because a reader who knows why a source was unreachable can go and try it again from a different desk with a different connection.

What the statute says, and what it simply does not contain

The Dutch gambling act (the consolidated text carries the identifier BWBR0002469) contains no provision about trial play at all. A textual search returns no occurrence of "demo" and none of "oefenspel", which is the natural Dutch word for a "practice game", so the silence here is not an artefact of translation (the consolidated text was searched word by word).

There are four occurrences of "gratis" in the act, and all four of them concern the right to a free game on a physical slot machine, in a provision about arcades written long before anybody opened a slot in a browser (the four hits sit together in the same place). Not one of them has anything to do with an online "lobby" or with a "fun mode" inside it.

What the act does impose on a licensee is a standard rather than a rule: recruitment and advertising have to be shaped in a careful and balanced manner, with particular vigilance against immoderate participation (article 4a of the act, which is the nearest thing to a relevant provision). A standard of that kind binds a licensee's judgement without ever telling him where a button may go.

The regulator also publishes a "model licence" for remote gambling, and we read it in the hope that the condition would appear there instead of in the statute. It mentions neither trial play nor free credit nor the word "gratis", which leaves the question precisely where the act had left it.

Why the gap matters more here than it would in Copenhagen

If you have arrived from the Danish page, you will be tempted to transplant that reasoning. The transplant fails at once (at the first sentence of the act). Under the Dutch act the payment of a stake is not required for a game to count as a "game of chance", which removes the single step on which the whole Danish conclusion rests (that test needs a stake, a prize and an element of chance together).

A social game stays outside the Dutch regime only if it offers no prize and no "premium", and the notion of a premium is wide enough to take in prizes in kind as well as money (a prize in kind counts, which is broader than it sounds). The qualifying element is the prize and not the payment; that single inversion turns the test used two countries away upside down.

The honest position on a Dutch "demo" is therefore an open risk rather than an established prohibition, and the difference deserves care. Nothing in the statute says that a free game without a prize is caught, nothing in it says that such a game escapes, and the provision that would settle the point sits inside an instrument we could not open at all.

A guess in either direction would be worth something to somebody. A confident yes would flatter this site's own subject matter, while a confident no would make us look more rigorous than we are, which is exactly why the box says "not verified" instead!

What is verified: offers, advertising, and the position of an affiliate

On offers the position is clearer, and it rests on a trade source instead of on the statute (a professional guide to Dutch gambling law, which we name as such in the level column). A "bonus" is permitted in principle and counts as an advertising activity, but it may not be personalised according to a player's behaviour, which rules out the offer arriving after a significant loss.

There is a second limb to that rule, and it deserves more attention than it usually gets. No bonus at all may be given for a period after a responsible-gambling intervention has been made with that player; the "no deposit" row above is a partial answer for those two limbs taken together (two limbs, and the second is routinely dropped).

Advertising is where this regime became one of the strictest in Europe, and the date is 1 July 2023, when "untargeted" advertising was prohibited across television, radio, the press and public places. Online advertising survived only under three cumulative conditions (cumulative, so no one of them substitutes for another), and the third is the one that bites.

A licensee has to offer an "opt-out", has to exclude minors, people aged eighteen to twenty-three and self-excluded players using the best available measures, and has to be able to demonstrate afterwards that at least ninety-five per cent of the people reached were twenty-four or older (a documentary burden, and applied retroactively to a campaign already run).

Affiliates are admitted for an authorised offer, and they comply through the licensed operator; that operator stays responsible for whatever they publish. For an unauthorised offer the regulator has gone at them directly: cease-and-desist orders served on affiliates with forty-eight hours to stop, and in 2025 orders against influencers carrying twenty-five thousand euro per violation, up to seventy-five thousand in all.

Where the trail went cold, and the exact cause in each case

The national legislation portal runs its search entirely in the browser, so a plain request returns a page complaining that no search date has been supplied instead of returning any result (the complaint is in Dutch, and it is about a missing date); that single technical fact is the reason why three answers above stand empty rather than answered.

Three further attempts failed for three different reasons, and we list them so that nobody has to spend the same hour twice (three attempts, three separate causes). One identifier tried on the portal turned out to belong to a regulation about school fees, the official gazette pages on the publications portal are browser-side shells as well, and the regulator's own "testing schedule" is published at an address that answers with a 404.

If you want to take one thing away from this page, let it be the register of licensed providers and the national "self-exclusion" scheme, both of which answered on 20 October 2026 (the register is searchable, and the scheme covers every licensee at once). Your own reading of the Dutch position should begin at the implementing decree, because that is the document we could not obtain and the one that would answer the question.

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