One of Canada’s central igaming operators expects to be front and center in Alberta once that province’s new competitive igaming market opens up.
Alberta’s conservative government is heading down the same road as Ontario, which launched its open, regulated, igaming market in April 2022. The Hon. Dale Nally, Minister of Service and Red Tape Reduction, Province of Alberta, told CDC Gaming in July that the rollout in his province is progressing nicely.
“I can’t give you an exact date, but I can tell you that I think people are going to be surprised by how fast we get this done … and roll this out,” said Nally.
Objectives in a regulatory regime there are consumer protection, eliminating the illegal side of the market, government revenue, and protecting land-based casinos.
As Canadian Gaming Association President and CEO Paul Burns said, the deeply ingrained Alberta gaming market, an industry that generated over $2.9 billion last year, is not for everyone. “It will look a lot like Ontario on some level. We have encouraged them to look at Ontario in terms of regulatory standards. That makes it easier for companies to evaluate the marketplace. It doesn’t mean everyone is going to go. The market may not be for everybody, given its size. But you want people to be interested. It is a good gaming market, we know that.”
Still, pencil theScore Bet in as one of the licensed Ontario operators that will be dipping their toe into the Alberta market when it goes live. According to Jay Snowden, Chief Executive Officer and President of Penn Entertainment, which owns theScore Bet, Alberta is too enticing to ignore. Penn has a user database of nearly four million unique digital bettors and is live in 19 jurisdictions in North America.
“We expect to further increase our digital footprint with prospective launches of ESPN in New York subject to regulatory approval and theScore Bet in Alberta when the market eventually opens,” he told investors during an earnings call this week, expanding on Penn’s Q2 fiscal 2024 report. “Both with online sports betting and icasino, we expect Alberta to be a very strong market for us, given the power of theScore Bet brand in that market and the success we have seen in Ontario.
“We don’t have an exact date on Alberta and I don’t want to speak for the government or the regulators there,” Snowden added. “But I would say, we’re thinking sometime toward the end of this year or early 2025 as the rough time frame [for a market launch]. We would anticipate that the success that we’ve seen in Ontario with theScore Bet, we would be able to replicate that in Alberta. … theScore is a very popular brand throughout Canada. It’s not just a Toronto or Ontario thing. So given the success we’ve had in Ontario, and given that Alberta will have very similar tax rates as we understand it, and be both OSB and icasino, we think it’s going to be a really important North American market for us, probably a two top three or four market for us.”
