Alberta's Emerging Gambling Market: A New Frontier
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00:00All right, let's get to the latest.
00:04Pat Evans joins us from Legal Sports Report.
00:06Pat, great to have you back here on Newswire.
00:08Let's get fired up and get started right now.
00:11Fired up and started in Canada, we begin today.
00:13I know we were gonna talk a little bit
00:15about this yesterday.
00:16The Score, which is a very popular app for many years,
00:20is one of the apps on my phone, by the way,
00:21that I check scores on.
00:22They're launching in Alberta.
00:24Let's get to the latest there.
00:26Yeah, so I think we talked about this back in June,
00:28right after I got back from the Canadian Gaming Summit,
00:31but Alberta is the next market in North America
00:34to be opening up a commercial market.
00:36I think that's of note because,
00:37as we talked about yesterday,
00:39the U.S. is devoid of any market opening up right now.
00:43I mean, maybe Missouri gets it.
00:45It's on the ballot this November.
00:47Maybe it gets through and gets passed
00:49and we have a new American market next year.
00:51But Alberta, we know, is opening up.
00:54And we don't know exactly the date.
00:57Regulators have said maybe later this year,
00:59maybe very early in 2025, but it's coming.
01:04And so, yeah, of course, of note is operators
01:06looking to this province and saying, let's go.
01:10Again, at the Canadian Gaming Summit,
01:11we got lots of news from operators and stakeholders
01:14in the industry that said, this is gonna be a big market.
01:18It's not huge population-wise,
01:20but they're very avid gamblers.
01:22There's lots of casinos there.
01:23There's huge amounts of money raffled
01:28during Oilers hockey games.
01:30I think there was a 50-50 raffle
01:31that it got up to like $16 million
01:33during one of the playoff games.
01:36It's the youngest by demographic,
01:39but also the highest in per capita GDP.
01:42So, I mean, it's a very ripe market for the taking.
01:45And yeah, so during the recent earnings seasons,
01:48a lot of operators have said,
01:49hey, we're excited about this.
01:50We wanna be in it.
01:51We wanna see Ontario as a successful province and let's go.
01:55Penn Entertainment of note here,
01:58because they've got ESPN bet down here in the US,
02:01but up in Canada, they've got The Score,
02:03which is a Toronto-based media organization,
02:05to your point, very well known
02:07for their just basic sports media app
02:09that's good for tracking scores.
02:12And they're looking from all points of views
02:15that I've talked to, we don't know for sure operator shares,
02:18but we know from just kind of anecdotal evidence
02:21that they're one of the leading operators in Ontario.
02:24So you have to imagine just by just the brand awareness
02:28in Canada that they're also gonna be huge in Ontario
02:31or in Alberta.
02:32And Jay Snowden, the CEO said pretty much just that.
02:36We've also got several other operators
02:38who mentioned how excited they are
02:40to kind of build on their Ontario experience in Alberta,
02:44including Betway, which recently just pulled out of the US.
02:47So that's kind of a significant note.
02:50Northstar Bet, which is another Canadian-based
02:54kind of sports media organization,
02:56but they also are in the gambling business.
03:01Rush Street Interactive, which is, you know,
03:04Bet Rivers, and they're excited about it.
03:05So there's lots of operators who are looking at this as,
03:08hey, we need some growth opportunity in new markets,
03:12and this is where they're gonna get it from.
03:14And again, of note, you know,
03:16Ontario is a wholly different world than the US,
03:19even though we're just right next to each other
03:20and do share a lot of cultural similarities.
03:23It is a very different place.
03:26And Alberta is very different from Ontario
03:29when you get down to what sports they like
03:31and watch and bet on, and operators need to know that.
03:34And it's gonna be fun to watch to see kind of
03:37how it opens up and who takes the lead there.
03:41But lots of operators are excited,
03:43because again, no new markets in the US to look at.
03:47So they're looking at Alberta as the next frontier.