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

Authority

Spelinspektionen

Official register

spelinspektionen.se/licens-o-tillstand/licensregister/

Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

spelpaus.se (self-exclusion); Stödlinjen 020-81 91 00

A third way through a problem that has only three solutions

There are, in the end, three places to put a game that costs nothing: behind an account, outside the reach of the gambling statute altogether, or inside the same mathematics as the paid version of itself. Sweden is the only market in our record that chose the third place on purpose. The choice is written into a single sentence of the gambling act (the act of 2018, numbered 2018:1138 in the Swedish series).

A licence holder may not provide "free games", "trial games" or similar games with a random outcome different from that of the corresponding game played with stakes (the fifth section of chapter 14, as amended in 2025). Nothing in that sentence asks for a registration, and nothing in it asks for an age (two absences that decide the whole of this page).

The consequence is the opposite of the German one, and it is worth taking slowly because it surprises people. A "demo" may be public in Sweden, and it may open to a visitor who has no account and has given no name. What the law insists on instead is that the free spin and the paid spin come out of one generator (the same "RTP", in trade shorthand).

We find this the most instructive of the four European approaches, and not because it is the most permissive; it is the only one of them that identifies what a free game can actually do to a player, which is to teach him a false distribution of outcomes, and then regulates that instead of regulating the door.

What the provision forbids, read in the order it is written

The section does not begin with free games at all, and its opening sentence is the one that explains the rest. Designing or programming a game so that the player gets the impression of being close to winning when he is not is forbidden in terms. That is the "near miss" effect, which slot design has argued about for forty years and which we take to be the key to the section (the heading above both sentences is about the design of games).

The free-play rule arrives immediately afterwards, in the same section and under the same heading, and in our view the placement is the interesting editorial fact here. The legislator put the trial version and the "near miss" side by side, because both are ways of telling a player something untrue about his chances. Treating them as one subject is a judgement about what a "practice play" mode is for.

Read in that order, the rule stops looking permissive at all. A free version with a friendlier generator is forbidden outright; a free version with the real generator is unobjectionable, and in our reading the licence holder carries the whole burden of the difference without any help from an "age gate" or a sign-up form (neither of which the section mentions).

The obligation attaches to the licence holder and to nobody else, which has a consequence for a reader arriving from outside the market: a "play money" game offered by somebody holding no Swedish licence is not caught by this section (a point worth remembering when a "lobby" looks Swedish and is not), and the absence of a prohibition there says nothing about quality.

The bonus rule, which is stricter than the rule about demos

If the demo provision is the liberal half of this regime, the bonus provision is the severe half, and the two sit nine sections apart inside one chapter (section 5 and section 9, under separate headings). A licence holder may offer or give a bonus only on the first occasion on which a player plays one of that holder's games.

One occasion, once, and then never again from the same operator. The definition behind the word is deliberately wide (it sits in chapter 2, and covers a discount or similar economic incentive directly connected to the gambling), so that "free spins", a "cashback" arrangement, a gift, a non-monetary prize and the ordinary furniture of a "loyalty scheme" all land inside it.

A "no deposit" offer is therefore lawful in Sweden in exactly one shape, as a first-contact offer (the act says first occasion, which is narrower than first deposit), and unlawful in every other shape; a reader who has played with an operator before and is then shown a second free offer by that same operator is looking at something the act does not allow.

Marketing carries its own requirements beside all this, and they are the ones an affiliate feels first: it has to be "moderate" in tone, it may not suggest that games are free when a stake is in fact required, it may not present them as "risk-free", and it may not be aimed at anybody under eighteen or at a person on the self-exclusion service.

Where this sits next to the neighbours, and from when

Germany placed the trial behind a gaming account and then demanded that its payout ratio match the real game, which is the Swedish condition with a door added in front of it. Spain demanded the same correspondence and the same registration through a decree on advertising instead of a gambling statute (the fourteenth article of royal decree 958 of 2020), while Denmark needed no rule at all, since a game without a stake falls outside its definition of gambling.

Great Britain went somewhere else again, and that is the rule this site is built around, because a British licensee has to establish a customer's age before a free version will open for him and answers for the affiliates it contracts with (the British code makes a licensee liable for third parties, in provision 1.1.2). Four jurisdictions, three mechanisms, one button!

Sweden is thus the single member of the four to leave that button alone, and we read the choice as a bet on transparency over access control. Whether it was the right bet is a question for the people who will measure it rather than for a record of this sort, and our own is not evidence either way.

The current wording is recent, and the date is the thing to carry away from this section: the amending act is from 2025, and the two sections quoted above were both tightened in the same pass. A summary of the Swedish rules written in 2024 describes a looser regime than the one now in force.

The two blanks above, and the one that bites

Two of the answers above are honest gaps rather than negative answers. The act does not require an age check before the free version opens, which we record as "not verified" instead of as a permission, because a duty of that kind might sit in the gambling ordinance or in the authority's own licence conditions without ever appearing in the statute (the ordinance is numbered 2018:1467).

The tournament box is the one that genuinely troubles us, and the reasoning is short. A "freeroll" (free to enter, and paying out in cash) looks very much like an economic incentive directly connected to the gambling, and on that reading it falls under the once-only bonus rule rather than under the free-play rule.

We could not confirm the reading on a Swedish primary source, so the box says as much; guessing here would be worse than useless, because the difference between the two readings decides whether a licensee may run a weekly tournament at all (the weekly event being the common shape of the thing)!

If you want to look further, the licence register kept by the authority will tell you who is actually licensed, and the national self-exclusion service covers every licence holder at once rather than one operator at a time (the register is public, and it is searchable by company name). Your own reading should start there, because this whole chapter applies to licence holders and to nobody else.

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