Original Release: Palm Solutions Ltd., 2019, Web browser
A “slot tournament only” social casino backed by Pragmatic Play that offers real money rewards for free play
Social Tournaments (Web browser, Palm Solutions, 2019)
Where to Buy: Play for free online (at socialtournaments.com)
Review by: C. M0use
Social Tournaments is a little different in structure from the usual social casino; it focuses on daily free slot tournaments for real cash, rather than having a system of “loyalty points” that you cash in for prizes.
Apparently in operation since 2019, the site has a relationship with Pragmatic Play (one of the biggest online slot companies) to promote their games. It’s run by an entity called “Palm Solutions Ltd.” that I can find very little info on, but Pragmatic Play endorses the site on their own website and it now has several years of news history about it so it’s undoubtedly legitimate.
If you’re not familiar with slot tournaments, it’s basically a way of making slots into a multiplayer competitive activity. You get a bunch of people on the same type of game, with the same bankroll and required to bet the same denomination per spin. They basically just spin their way through their allotment of credits, and whoever has the biggest pile o’ winnings at the end is the champ and takes home the prize.
In the case of Social Tournaments, every six hours or so you seem to get a new crop of free-as-in-beer tournaments with no strings attached, distributing actual prize money to the top 25 or so. The free tournaments tend to have a prize pool of just a few hundred euros, meaning around 10 to 30 each for those that place in a top spot. There are some more lucrative tournaments with pools in the thousands or even low tens of thousands, however, which generally require entry tickets that are paid for with the in-game “gold coins” currency.
You get at least a few hundred of these gold coins for logging in each day, but there doesn’t seem to be any other way to earn or buy them (save some tournaments that have you buy in with a small amount and usually have tens of thousands on the line as a prize pool). They aren’t used for playing slots, merely for in-environment purchases: the aforementioned tournament entry tickets, raffle tickets and avatars to display on leaderboards primarily (along with “loot crates” that contain some random mix of these things). You can also put them up in one-on-one “duels” with another player at a particular slot.
The site is available throughout a whole lot of the world, including the US (with the exception of Nevada, Idaho and Washington). Surprisingly, the UK is excluded despite being quite online-casino-happy. Most of the other omissions are the usual suspects, but would-be players in Australia, the Netherlands and Pragmatic’s own Malta are out of luck. You might be able to make an account and play for fun from these locations (Pragmatic makes all of its slots freely available through its own website anyway), but any real money winnings have to be claimed within 14 days and you’re subjected to a “know your customer” ID process to do so, which is where you’d probably get hung up.
Cashing out involves either providing bank transfer information or a Skrill or Neteller address, but the process also apparently involves emailing a picture of your photo ID and something like a utility bill to prove your place of residence. Though I’m comfortable with the site’s legitimacy, this part is iffy to me; you really shouldn’t be emailing identity documents to anybody as a matter of basic cybersecurity. Unfortunately this is still quite a common practice for online casinos around the world, I’d really like to see a secure encrypted upload process to handle this and a guarantee that the documents will not be stored any longer than is necessary to check them for validity. I feel like it would take a pretty big cashout to convince me to take that risk, I wouldn’t do it over 20 euros or whatever … maybe that’s the entire point.
Anyway, it’s legit slots and legit money you can win, but be aware that you can very easily spin for hours at this and walk away with absolutely nothing to show for it but a few “consolation prize” raffle tickets. It’s not like other social casinos where you’re at least getting loyalty points to spend or “leveling up” some aspect or another that helps you out in the future. Still, I suppose it’s as good a choice as something like MyVegas to set to spin in the background while you do other stuff (particularly if the usual social casino prizes don’t do anything for you).
Links
- Be sure to check the site’s “Social Pass” page each day before you logout, you have to go there to manually collect coins and EXP from the challenges and little achievements that pop up while you’re spinning and such, there are daily and weekly challenges
Videos