Free cash and tickets to play real-money poker, with no deposit needed. Plus top no-deposit casino picks.
A no-deposit poker bonus is, among all the ways there are of sitting down at a real-money table, the one that costs the player nothing at all, because the room credits the new account with a small balance (or with a "ticket" for one of its tournaments), and whatever is won with it can be withdrawn once the conditions have been met. On this page we have gathered the rooms whose offers we consider worth claiming, together with the reasoning that, in our view, you should know before accepting one. It concerns three things: why these bonuses are so rare in poker, how their "conditions" are measured, and where a few units of "free money" are best spent.
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The list is short on purpose, since we include only rooms that hold a licence from a recognised authority (Malta, Gibraltar, the United Kingdom), that have enough players at the tables to run games at every hour, and that have been paying their customers for years. A "free" offer from a room without these three qualities is, as experience teaches, an afternoon thrown away rather than an opportunity. When a room falls short on one of them, or when its offer is withdrawn, it leaves the list, and the page says so.
Markets: the operators below address the international, non-regulated market; before registering, it is the player's responsibility to check that playing with them is allowed in the country where he or she is located.
Anyone who compares the poker rooms with the casinos and the bingo sites notices at once how few no-deposit offers there are at the tables, and the reason lies in the economics of the game rather than in the generosity of the operators. In a casino the player plays against the "house", so that the money given away as a bonus, when it is lost, simply returns to the place it came from.
In a poker room, instead, the players play against one another, the house collects only the "rake" (the small commission taken from each pot, usually around five per cent up to a fixed ceiling), and the free money handed to a newcomer is redistributed among the other players at the table.
The arithmetic is worth seeing. If a room credits ten dollars to a thousand new accounts, the ten thousand dollars it has given away do not come back to its cashier when they are lost: they end up in the stacks of the "regulars" (the experienced players who sit at those tables every day), and the room recovers its outlay only through the rake that the newcomers (and the regulars) go on paying in the weeks that follow.
This explains two things that players ask us about regularly. The first is why the amounts are modest when set beside the "welcome bonuses" of the casinos; the second is why the conditions are written to keep the player at the tables (with points to accumulate and hands to play within a set number of days) rather than simply to be cleared and forgotten.
The two are confused often enough to be worth separating with some care. A no-deposit bonus is money (or a ticket) credited to the account and spent wherever the player prefers. A "freeroll", on the other hand, is a tournament with free entry and a real prize pool, in which something is taken home only by finishing in the "paid places", which in practice means outlasting most of a very large field over several hours. A freeroll with a "prize pool" of five hundred dollars and five thousand entrants, for example, usually pays the first ten or fifteen per cent of the players. Reaching the "money" therefore requires surviving more than four thousand opponents, often for three or four hours, for a reward that for most of the paid places amounts to a few dollars (and sometimes to a ticket for another tournament).
In our view the two work best together, each in its own place. The bonus belongs to the "cash games" (the tables where the chips are real money and where a player may stand up at any moment), since a small balance lasts considerably longer there and can be rebuilt after a bad hand. The freerolls are better kept for the evenings when there is time to play a long tournament without putting anything at stake, and without expecting from it more than the pleasure of the game.
Three figures decide almost everything, and they are not always printed in the same place. The first is the "playthrough", which in poker is almost never expressed as a multiple of the bonus (as happens in the casinos) but as a number of "loyalty points", or of "raked hands", to be reached within a deadline. The second is the "max cashout" (the ceiling on what can be withdrawn from winnings made with free money), and the third is the deadline itself, after which whatever has not been cleared simply expires.
A worked example shows how much the three weigh.
Suppose that a room asks for one hundred points within thirty days, and awards one point for every dollar of rake paid. At the lowest stakes, where an hour of play generates perhaps one or two dollars of rake, those hundred points mean between fifty and a hundred hours at the tables in a month, which is to say two or three hours every evening. Suppose further that the player is lucky (it happens), and turns a ten-dollar bonus into one hundred and eighty! With a ceiling of one hundred dollars on winnings from free money, the withdrawal will be one hundred, and the other eighty will be lost (which is entirely legitimate, since it is written in the "terms and conditions", but which disappoints anyone who had not read them).
We read these three conditions before anything else, and we would advise the same order to every player. An offer with a generous headline and a playthrough impossible to complete in the time allowed is worth considerably less than a smaller one with calm conditions. The terms are published (usually under a link at the foot of the offer), they bind the operator, and the few minutes you need to read them are the best investment available on a bonus that costs nothing in the first place.
The licence comes first, and not as a formality: an operator licensed in Malta, in Gibraltar or in the United Kingdom has audited software, holds player funds separately from its own (so that a failure of the company does not take the balances with it), and answers to a regulator to which a complaint can actually be addressed. An "offshore" licence (Curaçao is the most common) offers considerably less on all three counts. For this reason we list poker rooms only when they hold one of these licences, and we say so on each card.
After the licence we look at the "traffic" (the number of players connected at the usual hours), because a room without players has no games running at the hours when one is free to play, and at the cashier, since a bonus cleared in a week and paid out in six is not the bargain it appeared to be. The software matters as well, more than it seems. A "client" (the program, or the app, through which one plays) that behaves on a telephone, with tables readable on a small screen and a connection that holds, is often what decides whether the free balance gets used at all or is quietly left to expire.
The procedure is short and nearly always the same, and the mistakes that cost a bonus are concentrated at the beginning. The account is opened with real data, because the name registered must match the identity document that the room will ask for later. The "bonus code", where one is required, is entered during registration, since almost no room will add it afterwards, and the e-mail address (and, where it is requested, the telephone number) is confirmed straight away.
The step that deserves the most attention is the identity check (which no licensed room can skip), the so-called "KYC" (from the English "know your customer"), which every licensed operator is obliged to carry out before paying anything. Sending the document and a "proof of address" (a recent utility bill or bank statement) immediately after registering, rather than on the day of the first withdrawal, is the simplest way of avoiding the delay that, in our experience, is the most common source of complaints about payments. It costs you ten minutes, and it saves days.
With a few units of free money the sensible place is the cash tables at the lowest stakes (with "blinds" of five and ten cents, or lower where the room offers them), where the player decides when to sit down and when to stop, and where the balance can be rebuilt after a bad hand instead of disappearing with it. The "Sit & Go" tournaments (small tables that start as soon as the seats are filled) are the reasonable second choice, since they end within the hour and the entry fee is known in advance. The large scheduled tournaments, on the other hand, are the tempting mistake, because a single entry consumes the whole bonus and buys one attempt against thousands of players.
Whatever the choice, the "free balance" is a test of the room and not a "bankroll" (the money a player sets aside for the game and is prepared to lose). It serves to establish whether the software, the tables and the cashier deserve a deposit, and it does that job very well!
The same logic applies away from the poker tables, in the form of "free spins" or a "free chip" to be tried without depositing, and the conditions are read in exactly the same order. What changes, and changes considerably, is the weight of the licence. In a casino the player plays against the operator and not against other players.
The "regulator" standing behind that operator (the authority that issued the licence) is what decides whether a dispute over a payment has anywhere to go, and the three offers below have been chosen deliberately to show the whole range.
About Decode Casino: Decode runs on an offshore licence issued in Curaçao and on Real Time Gaming software, with a short history behind it. We list it for its free chip, which costs nothing to try, but we would not deposit real money there: for that, the casinos licensed in Malta or in the United Kingdom offer protections that an offshore licence does not.
How we rate these offers: the games are played in demo by our editorial team, while the casinos are assessed on their licence and on the reputation gathered from independent sources (Trustpilot, Casino Guru, AskGamblers), which we cite as context and never present as a rating of our own. The method is described in full on the How We Review page.
The licence tells the player how far to go with each of the three. Jackpot City, licensed in Malta and online since 1998, is the one we would choose for real-money play, with audited games and a proper route for complaints (through the Malta Gaming Authority). Yukon Gold, a veteran brand of the Casino Rewards group running on Microgaming software, sits in the middle and is sound enough for a low-stake try, while Decode, on an offshore Curaçao licence and with a short track record, is worth the free chip and nothing more. Put briefly, the free bonuses can be taken wherever they are offered, while the deposits belong to the casinos with a strong licence.
It is, provided that the proportions are kept clear. A no-deposit bonus will not change anybody's finances, and a site that promises otherwise is saying something untrue; what it does, and does well, is allow a real-money room to be tried at somebody else's expense, with winnings that are genuinely withdrawable once the conditions have been met. That is exactly what a prudent player needs before trusting a room with a deposit, and it is a great deal more than nothing!
Our advice, after many years spent reading these conditions, is the least exciting one available and also the one that works: claim the free bonuses that interest you, read the playthrough, the ceiling and the deadline before sitting down, and keep your own deposits for the rooms that hold a serious licence.
Poker is entertainment and has to remain so, which is why every offer on this page is reserved for players aged 18 or over (or older, where the law of the country requires it), and why we repeat, without apology, that a bonus is not a source of income. If the time or the money spent at the tables begins to weigh on anything else, the operators themselves provide "deposit limits", "self-exclusion" and pauses of a set length (the so-called "cooling-off"). Outside the rooms, free and confidential help is offered by the National Gambling Helpline run by GamCare in the United Kingdom, by 1-800-GAMBLER in the United States, by Gambling Help Online in Australia and, for every other country, by Gambling Therapy. Online gambling, finally, is not permitted everywhere, and the law that applies is that of the country in which the player is located.
Yes: the winnings are withdrawable like any others, once the playthrough has been completed and within the ceiling the room applies to money won with a free bonus.
The bonus is a balance, or a ticket, credited to the account and spent where the player prefers; the freeroll is a tournament with free entry, in which something is taken home only by finishing in the paid places.
Because in poker the money given away is redistributed among the players instead of returning to the house, which earns only the rake, so the room recovers its outlay slowly and only if the player stays at the tables.
At a room licensed in Malta, Gibraltar or the United Kingdom, yes, since nothing of one's own is at stake and the operator answers to its regulator; the licence number, published in the footer of every serious site, is the first thing to check.
Not always. Some rooms credit the offer automatically on registration, others require a code typed in during sign-up (and almost never accept it afterwards), so it is worth checking before opening the account.
Yes, every licensed room does so before the first withdrawal; sending the document and the proof of address straight after registering is the simplest way of avoiding a delay in being paid.
It does, and the conditions are read in the same order; the difference is that in a casino the licence weighs more, because it decides whether a dispute over a payment has anywhere to go.
