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

Authority

Commission fédérale des maisons de jeu (CFMJ/ESBK)

Official register

esbk.admin.ch/fr/maisons-de-jeu-en-ligne

Minimum age

18

Self-exclusion and help

National line 0800 040 080; sos-jeu.ch

A country that answers with a list instead of with a rule

Most of the jurisdictions in this record answer the question about "free play" with a provision, and Switzerland answers it with an enforcement register instead. There is a published list of domains that internet providers are required to make unreachable, and the quickest way to understand the Swiss position on anything is to look at what is on that list (an answer by inventory, rather than by definition).

The "blocking list" is the thing a reader should take away from this page, and the mechanism matters quite as much as the length of it. Swiss blocking works through the domain name system, so that the address simply stops resolving for a user inside the country rather than the site being taken down anywhere at all (the block is applied to the name, and not to the server behind it).

We had to build this page differently from the others for that reason (differently, and the difference shows). The German and Swedish pages quote a provision and then explain what it does, while here the provision is short and the interesting material lies in the way the authority has chosen to use it against particular kinds of site.

The federal gaming board keeps both the list of blocked domains and the register of authorised online operators (two lists, one of them a "whitelist" and the other its opposite, maintained by the same body). A reader who checks a doubtful site against the first list and an operator against the second has already done most of what a page of this sort is able to offer him!

The list, and the number on it

As published on 25 August 2026, the Swiss blocking list ran to three thousand five hundred and sixty-six domains (three thousand five hundred and sixty-six, counted on the register itself). That figure deserves a moment. It is not the number of unlicensed casinos in the world; it is the number of addresses that one small country has decided its own residents should not be able to reach at all.

What the list contains is the part that bears on a publisher. It is not confined to operators at all: sites built around "bonuses" and sites whose business is "comparison" appear on it as well, which is to say affiliates, and the inclusion cannot be an accident at that scale (two categories, both of them publishers rather than gambling operators)!

In our reading that places Switzerland alongside France and apart from most of the rest of this collection (France has blocked by administrative decision since March 2022, through a different power). The remedy is aimed at the description of gambling and not only at the offering of it, and the person who writes the description has no special position.

The practical consequence is one a reader can test in a few seconds. If a Swiss visitor finds that a "comparison site" simply fails to load while a search engine goes on listing it quite happily, the likely explanation sits on that register rather than in the site's own code; a failure to resolve looks, from the outside, exactly like a server that has fallen over.

The two articles behind the list

The substantive prohibition is short enough to quote in a clause, and it is wider than the blocking power. "Advertising" games that are not authorised in Switzerland is prohibited outright (article 74, paragraph 3, of the federal gambling act), which covers the message rather than the mechanism and reaches whoever carries it, wherever that person happens to sit.

Beside it sits the penalty, and the figure is the largest in this collection: a fine of up to five hundred thousand francs for whoever does the advertising (article 131 of the same act, which is the enforcement half of it). Neither of the two articles depends in any way on the writer being established in Switzerland (neither of them, on any reading we could find).

The architecture is familiar, in a Swiss accent. A narrow list of authorised operators, a broad prohibition on promoting anybody outside that list, an administrative remedy that works at the level of the domain name, and a criminal penalty standing behind it for the cases a block does not settle (four parts, and they fit together rather too neatly to be improvised).

What makes it unusually legible is that the authority publishes both halves of its own work. You can read the list of who may be promoted and the list of what has been blocked from the same site, which is more transparency than several larger regulators in this record manage.

What is authorised, and what that does to free play

Online casino gambling in Switzerland is reserved to the Swiss casino houses that hold an authorisation for it, which the authority calls a "maison de jeu en ligne", and it publishes the register of those that do hold one. That is a narrower gate than the licensing systems of Malta or of Great Britain (a dozen or so houses, rather than hundreds of licensees), and the narrowness is deliberate rather than incidental.

Inside that gate, free games and "free credits" are permitted only so far as the authorisation itself permits them, which is the reason the "no deposit" row above sits between a yes and a no. The permission is derivative: it follows the authorisation and has no existence apart from it (derivative, and therefore as narrow as the authorisation happens to be).

We mark that reading as a "trade source" and not as a primary one, because we did not read the authorisation conditions themselves (the conditions attach to each authorised house, and we did not obtain them). The distinction is the difference between knowing the shape of a rule and knowing its text.

For a reader the consequence is still usable. A "free play" mode offered by an authorised Swiss house is covered by that house's authorisation, while the same mode offered from outside the register belongs to an operator whose promotion is prohibited here, whatever the mode itself may do.

The weak boxes, and the level column that says so

Three of those four answers are weak, and we would rather be explicit about how weak. Nothing we read states whether a public "demo" may be opened in Switzerland without an account, and the answer we have is an inference from the structure of the authorisation rather than a provision about trial play.

No duty to verify an age before a "trial mode" or a "free play" session opens has been established either, and no treatment of a "freeroll" tournament anywhere in what we read. The three blanks sit at the lowest level in the column on the right, which is the level we use when nothing primary was read at all.

What is verified here is the part that matters most to a publisher of pages; the prohibition on advertising unauthorised games, the penalty standing behind it and the existence of the published register are all plain on the authority's own pages, and we read them there on 20 October 2026 (the pages are published in French and in German).

If you are in Switzerland, the two links worth keeping are the register of authorised online houses and the national helpline that sits beside the "self-exclusion" information. Your own check here is unusually easy, because the authority has already written both of the lists you would otherwise have to compile.

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