On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, Dr. Michael Naraine joins host Steve McAllister to continue the conversation they had for last week’s newsletter regarding a Toronto Star investigation into research commissioned by iGaming Ontario that wasn’t released.

Naraine, a professor in the sports management program at Brock University and a member of the Institute on Sports Wagering and Gaming at San Diego State University, expanded on his reaction to Brendan Kennedy’s reporting in The Star, including criticism of iGaming Ontario’s decision to tender the research project five years ago and eventually award it to the Responsible Gambling Council.

He also talked about the creation of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute more than 25 years ago and the work done by AGRI, including new research about problem gambling rates in Ontario since the launch of the province’s regulated sports betting and igaming market. Naraine believes Ontario should exploit the brainpower at universities across the province to create its own institute , and also called on the provincial government to increase the tax rate on regulated operators to help fund research around problem gambling.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• SportsGrid sale follows FanDuel TV shutdown and VSiN restructuring as US betting media shifts 🎙️ 🎥

• Alberta, Advertising & the High-Stakes Fight Over Canadian Gaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Why Canada’s Gaming Industry Needs an AML Overhaul 🎙️ 🎥

• Moving Beyond Geolocation in Canada’s Evolving Regulated Gaming Market 🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s Sports Media Landscape Is Changing 🎙️ 🎥

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

An investigation by Brendan Kennedy of The Toronto Star that iGaming Ontario quietly deep-sixed a study meant to track problem gambling rates in the province got the attention of many folks across the industry late last week and over the weekend.

As for getting people talking, that’s a whole other story.

Kennedy’s reporting, which was the lead story on the front page of The Saturday Star and was released online last Friday, is a must read. The news outlet’s investigative reporter also appeared on a video to explain the journalism he did here:

And The Star editorial board Monday called for Premier Doug Ford to “explain and account for the iGaming Ontario scandal.”

To summarize the investigation for our readers:

• iGO commissioned the study (which was eventually given to the Responsible Gambling Council through a bidding process) months before the launch of the province’s regulated sports betting and igaming market in April 2022. The research would be made public, the agency said and that it would provide, in Kennedy’s words, “a baseline for problem gambling in Ontario while informing how they tailored their responsible gambling program.”

• Records obtained by The Star – through freedom of information legislation – showed concern with iGaming executives when researchers reported that problem gambling rates were much higher than expected. A decision was then made to keep the research confidential.

• iGO, worried that the findings would get into the public domain, tossed around ideas for damage control including discussion of a “gag order” and, wrote Kennedy “other strategies to minimize the chances the researchers may “bad mouth” iGaming Ontario.

• During the process, iGO wanted to change the methodology for the study. Gaming News Canada has learned that iGO had concerns about the methodology and hence, the study didn’t meet the standard required for informed policy development.

The cone of silence that has been pervasive in this industry over our five years of covering it was on full display. Kennedy reported that iGO wouldn’t make anyone available for an interview and didn’t answer a detailed list of questions for his story. Martha Otton, iGO’s executive director when the market launched in 2022, didn’t respond to Kennedy’s request for comment, nor did Shelley White, then the Responsible Gambling Council’s CEO, who has since retired but was appointed to the board of directors at iGO a year ago. Current RGC CEO Sarah McCarthy also declined to be interviewed.

Gaming News Canada reached out to iGO, the RGC, the AGCO and the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming’s office with requests for interviews and/or statements. Emails sent to the Ministry’s communications office Monday and Tuesday went unanswered, while the comms staff at iGO and RGC emailed statements. As of the publishing date this morning, we were awaiting a statement from the AGCO.

From a spokesperson at iGO:

“Ontario’s regulated online gaming market has some of the strictest standards in the country, and we continue to work with our partners to strengthen responsible gaming and protect players across the province.

iGaming Ontario has implemented a variety of structural and programmatic improvements to better support responsible gaming. These include investing nearly $5 million over the last year in responsible gaming initiatives and player supports, including on-campus education and outreach programs as well as the launch of BetGuard, Ontario’s new self-exclusion tool that allows players to opt out of the regulated online gaming market.  

We will continue to build on these protections while introducing new tools, programs and partnerships that support player health across Ontario.”

Our question for the RGC focused on two researchers – Iris Balodis and Michael Wohl – being brought in to assist the organization with research after being named the successful bidder and if the council was directly involved in the study. An RGC spokesperson confirmed that and added, “under our contract with iGO, the data and findings are iGO’s property and the decision on how and when to publish rests with them.”

In Ontario, the current Conservative government continues to lower the cone of silence over the leaders of its agencies when it comes to speaking with journalists. As so often is the case the only person willing to be interviewed was Canadian Gaming Association president/CEO Paul Burns.

“What bothers me the most is it looks like we’re hiding and that’s not what the industry is built on,” Burns told us during a phone interview yesterday. “We’re built on transparency and trust.

“One of my biggest concerns is we support public evidence-based research based on trustworthy data. It’s the old adage if you can’t measure this, how do you prevent and reduce it. That’s why we advocate for regulated markets.”

Burns added that the CGA supports independent research but also said research that helps find solutions is best accomplished through collaboration between the industry and the experts collecting and analyzing the data.

“There are a lot of good researchers that the industry works with,” Burns told GNC. “We have a role to coordinate on strategy, which dictates what the research should be and what we should tackle.

“We’ve always supported independent research.”

“Why are we still trying to figure this out?”: Brock University professor.

Back in the early days of this media outlet, including our Thursday afternoon chin wags on Clubhouse, then Twitter Spaces and later LinkedIn Audio, Dr. Michael Naraine was a frequent participant. After Ontario’s regulated market set sail in April 2022, the Brock University professor was a frequent and loud voice in calling for the provincial government to provide funding for research into the potential health effects of gambling.

Since then, Naraine has researched the effectiveness of responsible sports betting PSAs, appeared on panels organized by Greo Evidence Insights and the Alberta Gambling Research Institute, and in July 2025 joined the then newly-created Institute on Sports Wagering and Gaming at San Diego State University. So, when Gaming News Canada reached out to Naraine on Monday for his reaction to The Star’s investigation of the hidden iGaming Ontario study, the professor didn’t hold back.

“Why are we still trying to figure this out?” asked Naraine, referring to the lack of research available in Ontario.

During an interview with your neighbourhood editor-in-chief, Naraine was highly critical of iGaming Ontario’s tendering process and eventual awarding of the research contract to the Responsible Gambling Council.

“iGO puts out at tender (RFP) and RGC gets it. They subcontract it to two researchers. Why would you do that in the first place?” asked Naraine.

“iGO and the RGC are not expert researchers. You’ve got top-line researchers chomping at the bit to get into this space.”

Naraine pointed to the creation of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute by the provincial government in 1999 in response to recommendations from the Alberta Lottieres and Gaming Summit of the previous year as the province was seeing rapid growth in commercial gaming – including the increased presence of video lottery terminals. AGRI, a consortium of the University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge. Among the studies receiving funding in 2026 is “An Assessment of the Self-Regulation Strategies Used by Sports Gamblers in Canada”. There’s currently in progress a “Longitudinal Study of Online Gambling and Single-Event Sports Betting in Western Canada”.

Twenty-five years ago the Ralph Klein government said, ‘We’re going to make a bunch of money, but we need to be responsible for Albertans. Let’s build an institute. We’re going to fund it, and we’re going to walk away.’ The responsibility for AGLC is to take that data, listen to the researchers and say, ‘how can we do better?’

“The AGLC. . . they get it. They don’t like it sometimes, and it’s like Buckley’s. It doesn’t taste good, but it works.’

Speaking of which, as we were about to hit the Publish button this morning, there’s reporting from the CBC’s Dave Seglins, Andreas Wesley and Saloni Bhugra on new research from AGRI that shows “nearly 130,000 Ontarians now show signs of gambling problems, compared with roughly 43,000 in 2018, a tripling of the number of people who meet the criteria of gambling too frequently, losing money and struggling with addiction”.

Naraine believes the Ontario government should take the same approach as their western Canada counterparts.

“We have one of the strongest education programs in the world and (that includes) psychology researchers all over the province. Why not build the Ontario Gambling Research Institute?

(Now) the RGC is entrenched with iGO. The research needs to be funded, and then you need to walk away.”

To fund the institute, Naraine is calling for a 2.25-per-cent increase in the tax rate on operators in the Ontario market to 22.5%, the same as Alberta’s regulated market.

“That dedicated 2.5 per cent goes to education and research. Take the smart minds we have in this province and also bring in national and international scholars. Let’s build a robust ecosystem of researchers who are in the game to make this framework stronger so we can create a healthier, most sustainable industry.

Added Naraine: “I am an iGaming consumer and I believe the consumer should have choices. But we’re bereft of the data points. There needs to be a situation where funding comes in but the funders don’t gerrymander the numbers.”

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

CIRO tightens the rules on prediction markets in Canada

Speaking of things that are illegal for prediction markets to offer in Canada, beyond being banned from offering markets on Canadian elections, the rules have also been tightened to expressly ban taking sports events contracts.

Geoff Zochodne of Covers reported this week that the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) has updated its terms and conditions for offering event contracts in Canada.

Under the new rules, prediction markets are also banned from showing forbidden contracts to customers.

AGCO reaches agreement with PointsBet Canada

PointsBet Canada has agreed to a two-day suspension of its Ontario sportsbetting and igaming operations after reaching a settlement with the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario on Monday.

The AGCO announced the settlement yesterday in a news release. You may recall back in February, the commission issued a Notice of Proposed Order to suspend PointsBet for five days for “alleged system failure to properly, monitor, detect, document and report suspicious betting patterns” related to the 2024 betting scandal involving then-Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter.

Tom Nightingale, in Canadian Gaming Business, detailed yesterday why a scheduled five-day hearing in the Licence Appeal Tribunal wasn’t necessary.

The AGCO communique also mentioned that PointsBet has agreed “as part of this resolution that it will undertake an independent audit using an auditor and audit methodology approved by the AGCO and commits to addressing any findings”.

Another media misstep in reporting on elections and betting

While the mainstream media has proven effective at uncovering government missteps (see above), it still has much to learn about how Canada’s gambling industry works.

Two separate stories in the past week – one by the CBC, the other by CP24 – incorrectly stated that betting on Canadian elections is illegal in Canada.

The CBC story originally was published with the opening line: “Betting on the outcome of elections isn’t allowed in Canada.”

We reached out to the CBC reporter, Kate McGillivray, to provide some feedback for her story – primarily to let her know that betting on elections is very much legal via Ontario’s regulated sportsbooks. We also sent along a screenshot showing DraftKings offering bets on both the Ottawa and Toronto mayoral elections.

Kudos to McGillivray for correcting her story to focus on the fact that election betting was illegal in Canada via prediction markets – which is true.

The story now opens with the line: “Betting on the outcome of elections on prediction markets isn’t allowed in Canada.”

Yet, on Tuesday, CP24 published a story by Alex Arsenych that begins with the line, “Betting on the outcome of elections is illegal in Canada but there is still more than US$400,000 wagered on who will become the mayor of Toronto on a prediction platform that is currently banned in Ontario.”

The first part of that sentence is completely wrong, of course, but both of these stories point to the bigger problem of the mainstream media getting the entire gambling industry wrong, which makes one question the rest of their reporting on the subject.

In the past, we’ve also found the mainstream media confusing the regulated and unregulated markets. In 2024, a Global News story told the story of a problem gambler who was frustrated with his inability to self-exclude himself from gambling sites – and then showed that person using some unregulated sites, which, of course, do not have to abide by self-exclusion laws because they’re not registered, legal operators.

It all points to the need for the mainstream media to better understand the subject before reporting on it, and for regulators to better educate the media and the public.

Clearly, if the media doesn’t understand how the gambling industry works, the public is even less likely to understand the differences between prediction markets and the regulated / unregulated platforms.

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People on the Move

• Laura Taylor, ex of Games Global, is appointed fractional Chief Marketing Officer at GameOn.

• The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario promotes Gillian Wong to Senior Advisor, Strategic Planning.

• Former Caesars Digital COO and CPO Ken Fuchs joins Nota as an Advisor.

• Peter Eugen Clausen departs Stake and his role as Managing Director, Denmark.

• Boyd Gaming promotes Rick Goldstein to Senior Vice President of Operations.

• Peter Post, ex of IGT, is appointed Vice President - Content Management at MERKUR Group.

• Sportradar appoints Brian Josephs as Senior Vice President, Global Sales.

• Sean Oellermann is named Head of New Business – iGaming and Sports at CreateFuture.

• Tino Liebich is appointed Head of Marketing Operations at Tipwin Limited.

• After six years at BetMGM, most recently as Director, Micheal Nagle is leaving the operator. Also making her exit is Senior Regulatory Compliance Analyst Alissa Naylor.

• Hannah Whyte is named interim Head of CRM for American sports at DAZN and Parker Sperry is appointed Director of Partner Management.

• Todd Nelson has a new title at Aristocrat Gaming as Director of Advance Compliance.

• Gaming Performance GmbH appoints Konstantin Nikulin as Director, Strategy & Product Design.

• Adam Bourne has a new role at BVGroup as Director of Product, Sports and Gaming.

• DAZN appoints Patrick Rose as Director, Strategic Partnerships.

• Jason Luong says goodbye to Venetian Resort and walks across the street to become Director of Talent at Hard Rock Las Vegas.

• Phil Chadwick exits Stats Perform and his role as Commercial Director – Betting to join Polymarket as Liquidity Lead.

• Natalie Cooper joins bet365’s U.S. legal team as Legal Counsel.

• Journalist Bobby Allyn departs NPR and joins Bloomberg to lend a hand in its coverage of prediction markets.

• Greg Dick is promoted to Deputy Commissioner of the Canadian Football League and Tia Jones has a new role as Senior Director, Digital Marketing & Product.

• Former CEBL Commissioner Mike Morreale is named the new President of the CFL Ottawa Redblacks.

• Former NorthStar Gaming editorial guru Mike Cormack joins CBC Sports as Senior Producer, Digital.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• The Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming is looking for a Director of Policy.

• Wanted at Bet99: a Senior Acquisition Marketing Lead.

• The AGLC requires an Enterprise Portfolio Advisor.

• Light & Wonder has an opportunity in Montreal for a Technical Account Manager.

• In North York, ON, NSUS Group has an opening for a Community and Social Media Manager, Poker.

• Pinnacle is on the lookout for a Financial Reporting Analyst.

• Canadian publication Maclean’s is seeking an Editor-in-Chief.

• In Toronto, Deloitte is hiring a Senior Editor, AI and Technology, Global Insights.

• Wanted by Lacrosse Canada: a Director, Commercial.

• The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are in the market for a Senior Manager, Partnership Development & Events.

• The Canadian Olympic Committee has a 12-month contract in Toronto for a Manager, Brand and Integrated Marketing.

South of the Border

• Wanted at FanDuel: a Counsel Senior Manager, Regulatory Investigations & Enforcement.

• In New Jersey, Konami Gaming is seeking a Senior Account Executive.

• There’s an opportunity with the American Gaming Association for a Senior Manager, Events.

• Hard Rock Digital has need of a Trader – Soccer.

• ProphetX has a remote opening for a Product Manager.

• The NFL is hiring a Manager, Communications – Consumer Products.

Across the Ponds

• DAZN has a hybrid position available for a Head of Product.

• EGR Global is on the lookout for a Senior Event Manager.

• Betsson Group is searching for a Senior Security Governance Specialist.

• In Australia, Aristocrat is hiring a Manager, Internal Communications, APAC.

• White Hat Studios is in seek-and-employ mode for a Key Account Manager.

• NFL HQ had an opening in London for an Associate Counsel.

• Also in London, Google is hiring a Football Partnership Marketing Manager.

For Your Perusing Pleasure

1. Here at GNC HQ, we’ve heard rumblings over the past few months that there’s interest from Atlantic Canada in going down the regulated gambling road. Well, Adam Huras reported for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal on Monday that the Susan Holt government in New Brunswick is doing the proverbial “exploring options” thing.

2. At the recent SBC Summit in Lisbon, a panel including Canadian Gaming Association head honcho Paul Burns, legal beagle Ron Segev and PointsBet Canada casino boss Brooke Hilton discussed the possibility of regulated gaming coming to Quebec. Tom Nightingale has the details.

3. As CTV News’s Adrian Ghobrial reported over the weekend, the Trump Administration’s revamped tax policies are hurting Canada’s horseracing industry.

4. ICYMI, BetMGM and Connor McDavid have reached a deal for the Edmonton Oilers captain to continue the partnership with the Alberta and Ontario-licensed operator.

5. Bet99 boss Jared Beber did the Q and A thing with Geoff Zochodne with, of course, a focus on Alberta.

6. Also from the Covers guy (Zochodne), a read of the excellent sort looking at the future of gambling.

7. Kinetic Digital is among the newcomers to Alberta’s regulated market.

8. The aforementioned Nightingale has the deets on River Cree Resort & Casino turning to GiG to lend a hand with the launch of its igaming product.

9. If you’ve spent the past three-plus months making your way along the Camino de Santiago, Eric Raskin put together a neat-and-tidy summary of Alberta’s regulated market.

10. As mentioned in our conversation on the latest Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, Front Office Sports journalist Ben Horney was first to report on the For Sale sign being put on SportsGrid.

11. There was news first thing yesterday of major job cuts at Flutter Entertainment focused on its UK & Ireland operations.

12. Esports organization Evil Geniuses announced yesterday it will cease operations at the beginning of November.

13. Wildz Group, which last year closed the digital doors on its Ontario casinos, has been the first operator to confirm getting a licence to thrill in Finland.

14. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement recently handed out $100,000 in fines to theScore, DraftKings and Fanatics.

15. There was reporting a plenty last week, including by ESPN’s David Purdum, that the NBA wants sportsbook to put an end to certain bets and some restrictions on parlays.

16. In his Cap Space blog, Sam McQuillan examined the relationship between the NBA and sports betting/prediction market operators.

17. There’s a new article in the Journal of American College Health digging into the data of a study into gambling involving U.S. undergraduate students at a “large U.S. public university”.

18. The International Tennis Integrity Agency has put the hammer down on a Serbian tennis player who was found to have fixed matches and attempted to fix more.

19. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is reported to be looking into allegations of deceptive marketing practices by online sportsbook operators.

20. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission, reported Robert Linnehan, has sent correspondence to licensed operators on its use of artificial intelligence with their customers.

21. The CEO of the International Betting Integrity Association argued via the LinkedIn that Brazil’s sports betting ban will set back the efforts to fight match fixing.

22. Meanwhile, Entain CEO Stella David expects the Brazilian market to reopen.

23. There’s reporting by Katie Knibbs of Wired that more than $600 million in trades took place on Polymarket AFTER election results were known in Ethiopia and Romania.

24. Lee Mottershead of The Racing Post delivered a history lesson on the motivation to legalize betting in the UK many, many moons ago.

25. Gary McFarlane of Gambling Insider did a deep dive into more than 5.3 million trades on Kalshi’s ether futures market.

26. Eilers and Krejcik Gaming co-founder Adam Krejcik spoke about “the rise of reveal gaming” with Brad Allen on the Zero Latency podcast. Also, here’s the EKG report, for your reading pleasure.

27. Speaking of EKG, its latest newsletter was a state of the icasino business in the U.S. o A.

28. Paul Pellizzari, the VP of global social responsibility for Hard Rock International did the op-ed thing for GGB Magazine on the secret to responsible gambling’s “everlasting power”.

29. The Phildelphia Inquirer reported Monday that the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board is looking into FanDuel apparently offering its VIP customers a family outing at the Philadelphia Zoo.

30. NEXT.io scribe Rob Fletcher reports a slowdown in France’s regulated gambling market.

31. Better Collective has a new subscription-based product for prediction market traders.

32. Q3 wasn’t very kind to Catena Media.

33. There’s a study out of Serbia about sport participation and gambling involving adolescents.

34. Jeff Edelstein tapped the keys on the entrance of trading cards into the casino era.

35. There was reporting by Sportico’s Dan Bernstein last week that Kalshi has launched new measures to deal with harassment of athletes by bettors.

36. Speaking of Kalshi a member of its board of directors made the case last week that prediction markets aren’t gambling.

37. From the Dept. of What the Hell Were They Thinking, Polymarket has withdrawn a market around the alleged rape of a Cornell University student.

38. Coinbase will no longer offer “new sports related event contracts”, the Michigan Gaming Control Board announced last week.

39. Finally, Bede Gaming and Sun International have extended their longstanding partnership.

Stay up to date with the news on the Canadian gaming industry by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Please send your news releases and other announcements to steve@gamingnewscanada.ca. Also, if you’re interested in learning about our sponsorship and advertising opportunities in the newsletter and on our podcast, please email Steve McAllister at the aforementioned address.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, host Steve McAllister welcomed back long-time sports media/business/tech entrepreneur, executive and advisor Eric Herd.

These days the Head of Global Media & Emerging Markets at Yieldmo, Herd talked about his current role and the work his company is doing with professional sports teams. Most of his conversation, however, was focused on the ongoing relationship between sports betting operators and media companies, the For Sale sign being placed on sports betting content company SportsGrid, the shutting down of the FanDuel Sports Network and a recent restructuring of Vegas Sports and Information Network (VSiN).

McAllister also asked Herd for his thoughts on the sports rights landscape that now includes streaming companies (i.e. Netflix), the shifting watching habits of sports fans, and more.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Alberta, Advertising & the High-Stakes Fight Over Canadian Gaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Why Canada’s Gaming Industry Needs an AML Overhaul 🎙️ 🎥

• Moving Beyond Geolocation in Canada’s Evolving Regulated Gaming Market 🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s Sports Media Landscape Is Changing 🎙️ 🎥

• Protecting the Next Generation of Canadian Gamblers 🎙️ 🎥

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Tuesday was a major milestone day for Alberta’s open and regulated online gambling market. The Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) set Oct. 13 as the end of a three-month grace period from the July 13 launch date for unregulated sites to make the transition to the legal market.

By day’s end, some 29 operators and 50 brands are now in business having been given the seals of approval by AGLC and the Alberta iGaming Corporation.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Dale Nally, the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction that oversees Alberta’s online gambling market, said two weeks ago at the G2E conference in Las Vegas that the province will go after unregulated operators that continue to take bets from Albertans (Covers senior news analyst Geoff Zochodne reported yesterday on the “mystery levers” Nally and Co. can use).

The communications team at AiGC emailed us these bullets last night:

• As of today, only registered iGaming sites are approved to operate within Alberta’s regulated market. These sites are authorized to offer gaming services to Albertans and meet regulatory requirements designed to protect players.

• Sites that have not transitioned to Alberta’s regulated market—or that are still awaiting approvals in order to transition—are required to go dark.

• AGLC will be responsible for monitoring compliance and taking appropriate enforcement action against sites that continue to operate outside of the regulated deadline of October 13, 2026.

And, from corporation CEO Dan Keene: “Alberta’s regulated iGaming market exists to protect Albertans. We look forward to working with operators who have chosen accountability by transitioning away from the illegal grey market.”

At least one operator is taking Nally’s threat seriously. PokerStars has announced it is leaving the market, for now. It has told customers it will stop taking bets from those in Alberta as of Oct. 13 and will use both IP and registration information to ban people in the province from accessing the site. There was reporting yesterday from Poker Industry Pro that 888 will offer online poker to Albertans.

That doesn’t mean PokerStars, which is regulated and operating in Ontario, won’t return to Alberta at some point by officially regulating. There is speculation that the operator may be waiting to see how a case currently before the Supreme Court of Canada plays out. Ontario is trying to establish common-pool wagering for poker and Daily Fantasy Sports outside of the province’s borders in order to grow pool size. A Supreme Court decision in Ontario’s favour would mean Alberta and Ontario could operate one pool for poker, which would make for a more attractive business case for PokerStars.

That aside, Alberta’s open market is largely a huge success in just three months. A quick tour of the internets last night reminded us that some 15 operators and 31 websites were up and running in Ontario’s regulated market at the end of its opening quarter in June 2022.

In its latest earnings report, BetMGM let it be known yesterday that it is pleased with its business in Alberta since the market opened July 13.

BetMGM has said its multi-product launch in Alberta has revealed “per player metrics trending above the Ontario launch.” From Tom Nightingale’s reporting in Canada Gaming Business, BetMGM chief financial officer Gary Deutsch said:

“From an acquisition standpoint, about 20% of the new players we acquired in Q3 were from Alberta, so we have had a really good burst out of the gates there. We modelled our own forecast for Alberta to mimic the trajectory takeoff that we had in Ontario a few years back.

“We have ramped up faster and higher than that trajectory, so that is positive. We are exceeding our daily targets. We’re all good there.”

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Supreme Court of Canada hears both sides of international igaming case

To paraphrase the aforementioned Zochodne and his article on Covers, the highest court in the land devoted its morning seven days ago to gather information on Ontario’s “proposal to let its online gamblers play and bet with counterparts outside of the country”.

Both Zochodne and Canadian Gaming Business editor Tom Nightingale watched the Supreme Court of Canada hearing about the case of Atlantic Lottery Corporation et al. v. the Attorney General of Ontario. As Zochodne and Nightingale reported, Chief Justice Richard Wagner said the judges would take the case under advisement.

The two journalists joined your resident editor-in-chief on the latest Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, devoting the final chunk of the podcast (which starts at the 63-minute mark) to the court proceedings. To watch the entire episode:

RGC’s latest Impact Report is out and about

While we were getting ready to turn out the lights at GNC HQ for the Thanksgiving long weekend, a Friday perusing of the LinkedIn uncovered the Responsible Gambling Council’s release of its 2025-26 Impact Report: A Year of Connection & Impact. The report captures the highlights from the second year of the organization’s strategic plan.

In the report are words from RGC CEO Sarah McCarthy and board chair Bev Mehmel, including:

Our impact was both measurable and meaningful. PlaySmart Advisors continued to meet players where they are across Ontario, and the Virtual PlaySmart Centre extended our reach beyond physical venues. With core funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health, our prevention campaigns reached millions of Canadians across general and ethnocultural audiences, while our programs continued to influence practice nationally and internationally. The Randomizer returned to post-secondary campuses, Beyond the Game high school training module expanded into French, and a new program, Games, Bets and Reality Checks, was piloted in Ontario high school classrooms for the first time.

The report contains a “financial impact snapshot” that includes funding support from the Ontario Ministry of Health ($6.2 million), $9.3 from the OLG courtesy of PlaySmart Centres and $3.2 million from the Responsible Gambling Council of Canada.

And. . .

People on the Move

• Laurie Fisher has a new role at Scientific Games as Managing Director, Canada. For the past four years, Fisher served as the company’s VP, Business Development – Canada.

• At Pavilion Payments, Mary Beth Higgins is named Chief Executive Officer, Alyssa Beaver is promoted to Chief Revenue Officer and Dawn Brandt is appointed Vice President, Regulatory Relations.

• Adam Shorts is appointed Chief Operating Officer at Global TV Experts.

• Shelley Samel, who recently joined Amanda Brewer on the Canadian Gaming Association’s Get to Know Canadian Gaming podcast, is leaving his Chief Legal Officer, Corporate Secretary position with Ad Standards.

• Flip Pidot joins High Roller Technologies as Chief Business Officer.

• Megan Matlock has a new business card at FanDuel as Senior Vice President, Marketing. Connor McCarthy is named Senior Associate, Brand & Content Strategy.

• Adam Doyle, ex of PureWager Group, joins Crucial Compliance as Chief Revenue Officer.

• Anestis Karagiannidies is named Senior VP, Wallet Platforms & Transformation at Paysafe.

• Ex-Netflix guy Eric Berman joins Fanatics as Vice President, Commercial Strategy & Operations.

• After almost 20 years, Eduardo Aching leaves Konami Gaming and his role as Vice President, International Gaming Operations.

• Light & Wonder introduces Aimee Hoyt as Chief People Officer and Mike Smith as its new Vice President & Managing Director, Asia.

• Tracey White announces her retirement after 32 years in the gaming industry, the past eight as Vice President of Finance for Seminole Hard Rock Support Services.

• Jordan Lazenby has a new gig at White Hat Gaming as Vice President, Legal & Regulatory Affairs.

• Genius Sports names Richard Crouch as Senior VP, Sports Rights and Gabrielle Trovato as Vice President, Growth Marketing.

• Neil Chetcuti is named General Counsel at LCKY Group.

• Novibet appoints Ioannis Alysandratos as Head of Affiliates, Emmanuel Kavarnos as Head of Public Relations and Argiris Loizos as Director of Affiliates & Poker.

• Bryce Blum is appointed Global Head of TFT Esports at Riot Games.

• The World Gaming and Betting Alliance tabs Maarten Haijer as the leader of the new organization.

• Aristocrat Interactive names Paren Arzoomanian as Commercial Director of Emerging Markets.

• Ex-Flutter senior manager Tony Buono Jr. joins Boyd Interactive as Director of Regulatory Compliance.

• Former Entain General Counsel Simon Zinger launches London-based advisory firms Calibri Law and Bluestar Partners.

• Lee Astley departs Clickout Media and his Head of News role.

• Meaghan McSorley, ex of Betty and Soft2Bet, joins Hard Rock Digital as Senior Content Manager, Performance Marketing, International.

• NeoPollard Interactive promotes Jason Tayon to Senior Manager, Payments, Risk and Compliance.

• DraftKings names Tyler Matthews as Manager, iGaming Marketing and Operations.

• Karan Virdi is named Executive Assistant at the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming.

• Ashton Chalmers is appointed Senior Sports Partnerships Manager at EPIC Global Solutions.

• Major League Baseball promotes Tim Hurd to Vice President, Digital Media and Marketing.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• Pinnacle is pining for a Senior Cloud Network Engineer and a Trading Systems Analyst.

• Midnite is hiring in Canada a Senior Backend Engineer.

• In Moncton, N.B., IGT is seeking an Account Executive – Canada.

• There’s an opening at Betty for a User Acquisition Manager (App).

• Corus Entertainment is looking for a Digital Content Creator.

• U Sports, the national governing body for university sport in our home and native land, is hiring a Director, Compliance & Eligibility.

• Speed Skating Canada is in the market for a Director, Business and Member Development.

• MLSE is searching for a Creative Solutions Strategist (Pitch & Storytelling), Partnership Development & Solutions.

• The CFL Hamilton Tiger-Cats are looking for a Manager, Ticketing Business Development.

• Your Toronto Blue Jays are seeking a Program Specialist, Blue Jays Baseball Academy & Youth Development.

South of the Border

• Good gig alert at MGM Resorts International, which is hiring a Director of Sports Partnerships.

• The Tennessee Sports Wagering Council is on the lookout for an Assistant General Counsel.

• Netflix has a remote opportunity in California for an Executive Producer – Mainstream, Narrative & New Experiences (Games).

• Paysafe is looking for a Data Products Director.

• DraftKings has a remote opening for a Senior Accountant - SEC Reporting, Acquisition & Integration, Lead Product Designer, Core Journey and is also looking for a Manager, Content & Employer Brand.

• Fanatics is searching for a Loyalty Marketing Manager (Brand & TGM) and needs help with some apps building.

• Hard Rock Digital is seeking an Engineering Manager – Sportsbook and has a trio of positions available for its Partnership Marketing team.

• In Las Vegas, Light & Wonder requires a Marketing Manager.

• In Tampa, Xtremepush is looking for an Account Manager.

• BetMGM has a partially remote opening in New Jersey for an Influencer Manager.

Across the Ponds

• The UK Gambling Commission is hiring a Chief Executive Officer.

• In Sliema, LeoVegas Group is seeking a Head of Change & Tech (Fraud/Risk & AML).

• Pierre Lindh (belated Happy Birthday greetings) and Co. at NEXT.io are looking for a Head of Media Products and a Head of Marketing & Growth Operations.

• Betsson Group is on the lookout for a Director of Product.

• Sportradar has an opening in Vienna for a Senior Product Lead.

• Sport Integrity Australia has an opportunity for an Assistant Director, Intelligence.

• Wanted by the UK Betting and Gaming Council: a Policy and Research Executive.

• Betty UK wants to bring on board a Senior Back-End Software Engineer.

• In Gibraltar, DAZN Bet is hiring a Compliance Manager.

• UK-based Press Box PR is in the market for a Media Relations Executive (U.S. Sports).

Get to Know Canadian Gaming, advertising rules episode

On a new episode of Get To Know Canadian Gaming, Canadian Gaming Association SVP Amanda Brewer is joined by Shelley Samel, Chief Legal Officer at Ad Standards, and Yamina Bennacer, Director of Standards, for a conversation about responsible and truthful advertising in Canada’s gaming industry.

They discuss the CGA Code for Responsible Gambling Advertising, how Ad Standards handles consumer complaints, the responsibilities of operators and creative agencies, and what advertisers need to know when working with influencers.

For Your Perusing Pleasure

1. Quebec Online Gaming Coalition spokesperson appeared on a Quebec radio station last week to make the case for regulated gaming in La Belle Province.

2. Author Rob Csernyik, a recent guest on the Gaming News Canada Show, appeared on CBC’s St. John’s Morning Show to discuss his book.

3. A tap of the Titan twig to the creative folks at OLG, which was recognized with seven awards last week at the North American Association of State & Provincial Lotteries.

4. Speaking of OLG, it launched its new Cash Pop lottery product last week including a wraparound package of The Toronto Star’s Saturday newspaper.

5. PointsBet’s latest financial results didn’t include any information about its Canadian connection.

6. While we. . . sigh. . . continue to wait for Dr. Karin Schnarr to join us on the Gaming News Canada Show, The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario’s head honcho had a lengthy conversation with Kirk Geller of Global Gaming Insider.

7. Ex-gaming industry executive/regulator Richard Schuetz wrote a must-read piece for RG Journal about “irresponsible gambling”.

8. Barron’s journalist Nick Devor has the deets on chaos inside the National Council on Problem Gambling after it accepted a $2 million donation from Kalshi.

9. The man in the middle of an NCAA hoops betting and bribery scandal was sentenced yesterday to six years in prison.

10. Betting activity on midterm elections on the south side of Lake Ontario is leading to concerns about insider trading. And it’s the same story with the announcement of the White House’s new press secretary.

11. Jeff Edelstein has a thought or two on gambling advertising.

12. Brant James took Gambling Insider readers on a trip down Memory Lane by catching up with a former federal prosecutor who’s written a book that comes out today.

13. The ban on betting in Brazil has resulted in the loss of more than 3,500 jobs, reports Gildo Mazza of iGaming Business.

14. Speaking of Brazil, there’s reporting that soccer clubs in the South American country might endorse Flavio Bolsonaro in the presidential election.

15. The New York State Gaming Commission, reports CDC Gaming managing editor Chris Sieroty, is working to prevent sports betting operators from using AI to “personalize promotions and wagering recommendations in order to protect consumers”.

16. In a post on LinkedIn, the director of research and education at the International Center for Responsible Gaming asked “how might other addictions resemble gambling?”.

17. The NBA and WNBA have raised the curtain on a new responsible gambling campaign for sports wagering and prediction markets.

18. Sportico’s Michael McCann has a smart piece on the connection between the NFL, prediction markets and the U.S. Supreme Court.

19. Almost 80 companies have submitted their application to join Finland’s regulated gaming industry when it launches next summer.

20. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is trying to redefine gambling on behalf of prediction markets, wrote Steve Ruddock.

21. In yesterday’s edition of The Event Horizon, Dustin Gouker and Eric Ramsey weigh in on the latest bit of spin by PMs.

22. There was a matter of M&A last week with the acquisition of Splash Games by LOW6.

23. Bob Duff has the goods for Betting.net on the Florida Gaming Control Commission’s new responsible gambling campaign.

24. The latest gambling-related piece by McKay Coppins for The Atlantic reports the increasing role of American churches in the crusade against sports betting.

25. CNN gambling reporter Marshall Cohen covered Kalshi’s new business with Native American tribes that’s causing a split within U.S. First Nations gaming folks.

26. Cohen also posted on X the results of a Reuters poll about prediction markets. It’s not pretty for PMs.

27. There’s reporting from the New York Post’s Ariel Zilber that a former Democratic senator who pushed for a crackdown on sports betting is now a lobbyist for Kalshi.

28. Sportradar is selling off its Atrium Sports business for $170 million U.S.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Given the daily flurry of news, notes and quotes around the Canadian gaming industry, Steve McAllister brought back his media colleagues Geoff Zochodne (Covers) and Tom Nightingale (Canadian Gaming Business/SBC Americas) for an extended episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming.

Among the stream of topics covered:

• A postmortem on a busy Global Gaming Expo, including the piling on by the American Gaming Association and others against prediction markets over the three days of panels, fireside chats and speeches at the Las Vegas conference.

• The latest on Alberta’s regulated market, including the comments of Service Alberta/Red Tape Reduction Minister Dale Nally on how many operators will be up and running (legally) by October 13, what the province can do when it comes to unlicensed operators moving forward, a federal bill to create guardrails around sports betting advertising, and possibly exploring the use of cryptocurrency in the gaming space.

• Comments by AGCO boss Dr. Karin Schnarr at G2E about Ontario also seeking to deal more harshly with unlicensed operators.

• The results from the Quebec provincial election and what that may mean for regulated gambling in La Belle Province.

• The ongoing discussion around sports betting and igaming advertising by national TV networks and most notably TSN and Sportsnet.

• Nightingale’s interview last week with Molly Cormier on the rebranding of the Canadian Lottery Coalition to the Canadian Alliance for Regulated Gaming and what that means.

• And, a lengthy final segment on last week’s Supreme Court of Canada appeal hearing with some provincial lottery and gaming corporations pushing back against Ontario’s wishes for cross-borders gaming.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Why Canada’s Gaming Industry Needs an AML Overhaul 🎙️ 🎥

• Moving Beyond Geolocation in Canada’s Evolving Regulated Gaming Market 🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s Sports Media Landscape Is Changing 🎙️ 🎥

• Protecting the Next Generation of Canadian Gamblers 🎙️ 🎥

• The human cost of gambling in Canada 🎙️ 🎥

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

The folks who are in favour of both a united Canada AND regulated sports betting and gaming in provinces across our home and native land most likely woke up yesterday morning with feelings of the mixed sort.

The sovereignist Parti Québécois, led by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, garnered enough seats Monday to form a minority government. The PQ won 59 seats followed by the Liberal Party with 40 while the former ruling party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, was completely shut out.

While the new Premier and his party will attempt to re-plant the seeds of separation, Plamondon has indicated he won’t hold a referendum until after the term of the current U.S. President ends in 2029.

Under the PQ’s fiscal plan, there is a forecasted $6.6-billion reduction in government spending over five years and promises to get rid of the provincial sales tax on second-hand goods, temporarily cut the province’s sales tax on gasoline in half and expand benefits under Québec’s parental insurance plan. We’ll see if Plamondon et al can get help from one of the other political parties on those fronts.

However. . . both Plamondon and Liberal leader Charles Milliard let it be known on the campaign trail that they were open to bringing some semblance of the Ontario and/or Quebec regulated gambling models to La Belle Province.

“Mr. Milliard says – and he’s right – I’ve done the research – online sports betting in Québec is a wild west,” Plamondon said back in early September. “American companies arrive, then advertise, and are not regulated.

“Ontario decided to clean up and collect a tax on these activities, and it raised an additional $300 million. It’s an excellent idea that may fly under the radar because it’s a bit original but imagine if we take $300 million and invest it in homelessness, for children who are hungry at school, for learning disabilities. We could have an immediate impact.”

Covers journalist Geoff Zochodne spoke yesterday with Arianne Gauthier, the spokesperson for the Québec Online Gaming Coalition, who believes the election results show there’s a “consensus” to have private-sector operators in a regulated market.

Québec has a lengthy track record for committing significant dollars to sports facilities. Tennis Canada this summer announced plans for a complete makeover of its Montreal facility at Parc Jarry, including a 15,000-seat stadium with retractable roof. The mayor of Québec City last week gave a thumb’s-up to a CFL expansion franchise with the caveat of funding support from the province and the federal government for a new stadium (or a massive makeover of the football stadium on the campus of Laval University).

As Dave Briggs reported in last week’s dispatch, some $2.67 billion in tax revenue has been delivered to Ontario’s coffers since April 2022. An influx of tax revenue from private-sector gambling operators in a regulated might help with the PQ’s fiscal plans. Also, the new provincial government is likely to join Alberta in opposition to the federal Bill S-211 that’s currently in front of the standing committee on Canadian Heritage. At last week’s Global Gaming Expo, Alberta minister Dale Nally said the bill “is another example of federal overreach on a provincial jurisdiction”.

The Quebec Online Gaming Coalition and others interested in seeing the province join Alberta and Ontario will be crossing fingers and toes in hopes that Plamondon and Milliard put their words into action in a rare act of bipartisanship in today’s political climate.

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

An update, AML edition, on Ontario and Alberta

When Canadian Gaming Association board member Derek Ramm joined us on a recent Gaming News Canada Show episode, among the topics du jour was the failure of the Ontario and Alberta regulated gambling markets to have an anti-money laundering program in place at launch.

If you’ve been reading this weekly dispatch over the past five-plus years, you’ve seen the criticism iGaming Ontario has received for delays in putting into place both AML and centralized self-exclusion programs. The self-exclusion box was ticked off this spring with the introduction of BetGuard.

In Alberta, there was a centralized self-exclusion product in place when the market opened its doors in mid-July. But nothing on the AML front.

“There should have been a product in place on Day 1, but sometimes politics is speed to market,” Ramm told your humble podcast host. “In Ontario there’s still frustration about the lack of any sort of AML technology. We don’t have the efficiencies we probably should (have).”

Ramm also mentioned on the pod that the Alberta iGaming Corporation put out last month an RFI (Request for Information) “to gather preliminary information regarding technology and solution approaches that may support AiGC’s future-state anti-money laundering capability. . .” for the province’s regulated market. The RFI’s closing date is Friday.

Gaming News Canada emailed the communications team at AiGC for more information on its AML plans and received this statement:

AiGC’s recent Request for Information (RFI) on anti-money laundering (AML) software is a non-binding process and doesn’t commit AiGC to any procurement or course of action. Its purpose is to help us understand the options available and the current state of technology for AML solutions.

AiGC is the reporting entity for FINTRAC purposes in Alberta’s regulated iGaming market. Registered operators conduct the day-to-day AML controls and provide relevant information to AiGC. We, at AiGC, oversee these activities; we review and assess the information received to fulfill obligations under federal AML legislation.

Meanwhile, iGaming Ontario’s plan to implement an automated system for filing suspicious transaction reports continues to be a slow boat from Georgian Bay to the St. Lawrence Seaway. The iGO comms team provided this statement Monday in response to our request for an update:

iGaming Ontario takes its anti-money laundering obligations seriously and we are confident in the robustness of our program. We work closely with our operators and the federal regulator FINTRAC to identify and report suspicious financial activity in the regulated market.

We are also pioneering a modern, scalable data platform that will substantially streamline information exchange with our operators, identify player risk and more fully automate AML reporting. As communicated to our operators, we are targeting a launch this spring.

And speaking of AML. . . .

While we were en route to Vegas for G2E some 10 days ago, the international Financial Action Task Force and Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering delivered an evaluation report, Canadian style. The report “assessed the effectiveness of the country’s measures against money laundering, countering terrorist financing and proliferation financing (AML/CFT/CPF), and the level of compliance with the FATF Recommendations, at the time of an on-site visit in November 2025”.

This section of the report caught our eye:

Overall, Canada faces material ML risks driven by major profit‑generating crimes, while TF (terrorism financing) risk remains limited in scale and proliferation financing (PF) exposure is assessed as low to medium, with sectoral and jurisdictional differences shaping the risk profile. ML in Canada is mainly linked to proceeds from drug trafficking, fraud, commercial trade fraud and tax crimes, often involving organised crime groups and professional money laundering intermediaries. Key inherent vulnerabilities are present across large banks, certain money services businesses, virtual asset service providers, private corporations and express trusts, with growing exposure related to virtual assets, crowdfunding mechanisms and online gambling platforms.

In a LinkedIn post, the aforementioned Derek Ramm points out that while Canada’s oversight of the casino received plaudits from the report “what it leaves out may matter more”.

Also from Ramm:

“The assessors accepted Canada’s model at face value, which is very puzzling. The provincial Crown agencies are the reporting entities, while in the majority of cases private operators are the ones who actually run the day-to-day business. The report doesn’t examine how accountability flows, and it doesn’t discuss the provinces acting as owner, beneficiary and regulator all at once.

“Also, counting the sector as 19 reporting entities really flatters the numbers. Seventeen FINTRAC examinations over five years looks like near-full coverage, but the picture looks very different once you account for the sheer number of gaming venues and operators behind those statistics.

“Canadian gaming has a real AML story to tell. Hopefully the next evaluation will take more than a superficial look at the industry.”

PENN-owned theScore Bet incurs the wrath of the AGCO

In keeping with the plethora of puck parlance over recent editions of the newsletter, PENN Entertainment has landed itself in the penalty box after being called for an infraction by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario.

Yesterday, the AGCO announced a $200,000 monetary penalty has been handed to the proprietors of theScore Bet for “presenting cash-out offers that were not honoured”. From the AGCO’s news release:

The enforcement action relates to a $1,000 bet placed on March 14, 2025. The bet was a multi-leg parlay, meaning the player had to correctly predict the outcomes of multiple NHL, NBA and NCAA basketball games all taking place that day. If every selection was correct, the potential payout was more than $1 million.

After all but one of the legs were successful, theScore presented the player with a cash-out offer of approximately $380,000. The player accepted the offer immediately, however theScore rejected the transaction during automated verification after the odds changed.

Four minutes later, theScore presented the player with a second cash-out offer of almost $100,000. The player again accepted immediately, but this offer also was not honoured. The bet ultimately settled as a loss, and the player received no payout.

The Registrar found that neither cash-out offer was achievable as presented to the player. The enforcement action relates to Standard 4.07 of the Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming, which requires that information provided to players before and during gameplay does not mislead players or misrepresent games, including by describing outcomes, prizes or features that are not achievable.

Gaming News Canada received this statement from a PENN spokesperson:

“We take our responsibility to provide customers with a fair and transparent betting experience seriously. We have been engaged with the AGCO throughout this process and remain committed to working constructively with our regulator.”

The AGCO has taken action against eight gambling-related operators for alleged wrongdoing so far in 2026. One of those operators, PointsBet Canada, has appealed a five-day suspension handed down by the AGCO back in February for allegedly failing to “properly monitor, detect, document and report suspicious betting patterns” around the 2024 betting scandal involving then-Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter. A decision has yet to be announced on the appeal.

Stake, Spin Casino latest to join Alberta market

As your huffing-and-puffing editor-in-chief checked his inbox yesterday morning after surviving his inaugural spin class of the 2026-27 season, news landed that well-known gambling brand Stake has been given the green light by the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission to join Canada’s second regulated sports betting and gaming market. There remains the business of getting an operating agreement with the Alberta iGaming Corporation, but we’re told that will happen before the October 13 cutoff date for legally operating in the western Canada province.

“Our planned entry into Alberta represents an exciting milestone step for us in Canada – we are not here to blend in,” Kris Abbott, Canada’s country manager for Stake who held similar roles previously with Coolbet and Betano, said in a news release. “We are here to raise the bar and bring the distinctive Stake experience to Alberta’s highly engaged player audience.”

Stake has been attempting to join Ontario’s regulated market for more than two years now. Abbott told GNC in an email yesterday that Stake’s application is before the AGCO and “we expect to hear more soon”.

Also of interest in the release was that Birgitte Sand, who was instrumental in the creation of the Ontario market some five-plus years ago now, is a member of Stake Canada’s board of directors.

“Securing licensing in Alberta provides a strong foundation for the company’s development in Canada and reflects the importance we place on meeting local standards and player safety. We commend the Alberta government, the AGLC and the AiGC for their work to establish Alberta’s regulated iGaming framework,” Sands said in the release.

AiGC also announced late last week that Spin Casino is the 35^th gaming product to join the market. As we reported in last week’s newsletter, Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction Minister Dale Nally believes that number could close reach 60 by next week’s cutoff.

Supreme Court of Canada appeal hearing ready to roll

Barring an unforeseen circumstance, there will be a Supreme Court of Canada hearing today in “Atlantic Lottery Corporation, et al. v. Attorney General of Ontario (Ontario) (Civil) (As of Right) on whether Ontario should be able to offer online poker and daily fantasy sports beyond its borders. You can access a live stream of the proceedings here.

In case you’ve been riding the waves in Nazare for the past 18 months, the ALC (with the support of fellow Canadian Lottery Coalition members BCLC, Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries and Loto-Québec) are appealing a 2025 Court of Appeal for Ontario decision that ruled in favour of the Attorney General of Ontario. Standing in support of the Attorney General for the Supreme Court appeal are the Canadian Gaming Association, Flutter Entertainment, NSUS Group and the Attorney General of Alberta.

Molly Cormier, the executive director of the newly named Canadian Alliance for Regulated Gaming (more on that in another section of the newsletter), arrived in Ottawa for the hearing. Cormier wouldn’t get into specifics around the case only to say for the coalition/alliance “legal clarity is very important for us in Canada’s gambling framework”.

The western Canada province is a late comer to these legal proceedings now that it has opened its regulated gambling market. Dan Keene, the Albera iGaming Corporation’s CEO, said during the SBC Summit Canada in May that Alberta and Ontario were working on a memorandum of understanding around the combining of player pools. We are told that’s not a done deal.

Yesterday, Alberta licensee Tonybet let it be known it is now offering online poker to Canadian customers outside of the western Canada province and Ontario.

We will follow the developments from the Supreme Court hearing and keep our loyal subscribers informed. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a more-detailed primer on the appeal, we steer you to Tom Nightingale’s reporting last month for Canadian Gaming Business.

Canadian Lottery Coalition has a new handle

Count the former Canadian Lottery Coalition among the stakeholders calling audibles as the gambling industry continues to evolve across the country.

So, goodbye CLC, hello Canadian Alliance for Regulated Gaming. In a news release Monday, CARG announced it’s now a not-for-profit association “representing members of the legal and regulated gambling industry”. The alliance’s members include Atlantic Lottery, BCLC, Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries, and Loto-Québec.

Gaming News Canada spoke yesterday with Molly Cormier, who replaced Will Hill as executive director in April. We asked the former Atlantic Lottery director and journalist about “regulated” being included in the rebrand for a couple of reasons. The four lottery and gaming corporations aren’t responsible for regulation of gambling in their respective provinces, and we asked Cormier if membership to the alliance will now be open to licensed operators and suppliers in Ontario and Alberta.

“I’m a Maritimer. . . I’ll talk to anybody,” said Cormier, laughing, then adding, “We don’t have the authority to be a regulator.”

Cormier said the new name reflects an association that, according to the news release, “provides a unified national forum for collaboration, research, public education and policy engagement on the issues shaping Canada’s gambling sector”.

“We’ve seen gambling policies become more national in scope and increasingly complex,” she said. “The members felt they needed a strong national voice and around player health, player protection and enforcement. (They) felt there’s no national voice when it comes to focusing on the public interest mandate.”

Not surprisingly, prediction markets are on the alliance’s radar. Cormier also said the association is submitting this week a brief to the standing committee on Canadian Heritage around Bill S-211. She added that CARG “really respects the decision and the authority of the provinces on how gaming is conducted in their jurisdictions”.

The association’s news release points to a willingness to work with “governments, regulators, industry stakeholders and communities. . .”. We will be keeping tabs on that given the past tensions between the former coalition and its members with grey-market operators in provinces not named Ontario and Alberta, and with groups such as the Quebec Online Gaming Coalition.

Sportsnet sends response on coverage around ads

ICYMI, the lead item in last week’s edition of Gaming News Canada on the role of our national sports broadcasters in the conversation around gambling advertising.

We thought it only fair to contact the communications folks at Sportsnet and TSN for a response what was written and also what feedback, if any, the networks were receiving when it comes to the volume and content of gamblng commercials and branded content.

Emails requesting comment were sent Friday and Monday to the communications manager at Bell Media. The response?

Yesterday, a Sportsnet spokesperson sent this statement:

The sports betting industry is heavily regulated, and all betting ads that appear on our channels are in accordance with provincial regulations and industry standards. We are extremely thoughtful about the volume and content of ads, and we continue to engage with government and industry stakeholders on responsible gaming.

On another note, former iGaming Ontario chief of staff Mitch Davidson posted on X in response to a TVO program looking at gambling advertising.

PointsBet Invitational removed from Curling Canada calendar

There was a bit of reportage Monday by Gregory Strong of The Canadian Press that Curling Canada had “quietly” dropped the PointsBet Invitational from its 2026-27 calendar.

The inaugural PBI took place in Fredericton in September 2022, just months after the launch of Ontario’s regulated gambling market and not too long after Curling Canada landed a sponsorship deal with PointsBet Canada. Nic Sulsky, then PointsBet’s chief commercial officer, was a catalyst in creating the March Madness-type men’s and women’s curling event with 12 top Canadian rinks, national junior champions, club titleholders, sponsor’s exemptions and teams selected by the host committee.

Gaming News Canada reached out Monday to Sulsky for comment and asked him if the PBI lit the fuse for him to co-found The Curling Group, current proprietors of the Grand Slam of Curling and Rock League.

“When the PointsBet Invitational was created, I knew almost nothing about the curling world,” Sulsky wrote back. “I’d led the PointsBet partnership with Curling Canada and came at the event as an outsider. The idea was basically: Let’s take inspiration from the most popular casual sports fan event and create something that might engage new and younger fans. ‘What would March Madness look like in curling?’ I definitely underestimated the depth and complexity of the Canadian curling ecosystem, but the whole point was to try something different, take some risks and give the sport a new look.

“The irony is that while the PointsBet Invitational ultimately didn’t work, the instinct behind it absolutely did. We believed curling could be louder, more entertaining and willing to challenge convention and a few years later, I bet my career on it (pun intended).”

It appears as if Curling Canada isn’t ruling out bringing back the event.

“I think we can just see how this first year goes and if it’s something that we really want to see for the high-performance program,” David Murdoch, the national association’s high-performance executive director, told Strong. “And for Curling Canada in terms of promotion, where it’s just the Canadian athletes, then maybe that’s something that we can build out as the quad goes.

“There’s certainly some benefits that we enjoyed from just having the Canadian teams all together under one roof.”

People on the Move

• Enteractive appoints Stephen Parry as Group CEO.

• Dan Taylor’s tenure as Flutter’s Chief Executive Officer got underway October 1. Meanwhile, Edward Traynor is appointed interim Group Chief Legal Officer and Group Company Secretary with the retirement of Don Liu.

• Katie Simmonds is named Chief Legal & Business Officer at Sport Integrity Global Alliance.

• Fredrik Ogren is appointed Group Chief Technology Officer at Allwyn.

• Hannah Buitekant is the new Chief Growth Officer at FairPlace Sports Media.

• Former Casumo Chief Technology Officer Cristina Turbatu joins iGP in a similar role.

• Gary Hunter is appointed Chief Information Security Officer at PENN.

• Sky Betting & Gaming names Neil Banbury as Managing Director.

• Merkur Group appoints Paul Richardson as Senior VP, International Casino.

• Ex-Paysafe senior director Daniel Carson joins Cyclops as VP of Strategy.

• Ruwani Hewa comes on board at Paysafe as VP, Consumer Product.

• Evoke appoints Tara-Rose Byrne as Head of UK Online Compliance.

• Liam Whitehead is the new Head of Partnerships at HEROIC.

• Ex-Bragg commercial director Hristofor Hristov is named Head of International Business Development at Amusnet.

• Skylar Dice departs Golden Entertainment to become Vice President & General Manager at Aliante Casino + Hotel + Spa.

• Gabriel Baron bids adieu to American Gaming Systems and his role as VP of Table Products to launch a new gaming business with Stephen Crystal and SCCG Management.

• Saskia Karsen Ferrer is appointed Head of Programmes & Delivery at Legend.

• Aristocrat Gaming names Mihir Wagh as Head of Global Supply Chain.

• SciPlay is seeking a new General Counsel with Rob Gustafson’s departure.

• John Stanhope has a new role at American Gaming Systems as Vice President of Interactive Technology.

• Chris Kronow Rasmussen is the new Vice President for Sports Betting Integrity at General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority.

• James Ford walks away from his Senior Director of Gaming role with LeoVegas Group.

• Lindsay Kalbfleisch has a new role at Greo Evidence Insights as Director, Implementation and Insights.

• MediaTroopers appoint Zoran Arunovic as Team Lead – AdOps & Campaign Management.

• Pamela Yang moves from her Canada Casino Product Manager role at FanDuel to Product Manager on the Casino Generosity team.

• Sebastian Brescanovic is named Group iGaming Product Manager at Allwyn.

• Bradley Szalach departs Catena Media and his Content Lead gig.

• Finally, a tap of the True hockey twig to Barron’s reporter Nick Devor, who is receiving the Walker Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications’ Barrett and Steel Outstanding Young Journalist award for his work on the legal dispute over 1-800-Gambling, attrition in the CFTC’s enforcement division, and a cryptocurrency token governing resolutions on Polymarket.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• DraftKings has a remote opening for a Sportsbook Operations Senior Associate.

• In Toronto, Fanatics is hiring a Senior Campaign Operations Manager – Casino.

• Wanted by Loto- Québec: a Business Partner, Talent & Culture.

• The Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority is in search of a Programmer Analyst (IT Application).

• Betty has a position available in Calgary for a Customer Success Representative.

• Niagara Casinos is on the lookout for an IT Infrastructure Manager.

• Better Collective is in need of a U.S./Canada Commercial Content Writer & Editor.

• Red Bull Canada has a freelance role available for a Social Channels Specialist.

• Western Hockey League HQ has an opportunity for a Director, Finance & Administration.

South of the Border

• Seminole Hard Rock Support Services requires a Director, AML Compliance.

• Delaware North has a position available in Buffalo for a Director of Growth Analytics.

• BetMGM has a remote opportunity for a Real Time Associate.

• Hard Rock Digital is hiring a Specialist – Data Governance.

• The Chicago Blackhawks are searching for a Vice President, Corporate Partnerships.

• NBA HQ is on the lookout for a WNBA and International Brand Strategist.

• Yahoo Sports is seeking an Associate Producer.

Across the Ponds

• In New South Wales, Aristocrat is seeking a Senior Director: Enterprise Workforce Planning Transformation.

• In Malta, Betsson Group has an opportunity for a Director of Product.

• ComeOn Group requires a Payment Solutions Manager.

• In Salzburg, Red Bull is hiring a Gaming & Esports Player Marketing Specialist.

Reading and Reflecting

1. We mentioned in last week’s dispatch comments from gambling executives in Las Vegas that visitors with Canadian passports would return to normal in the not-too-distant future. About that, eh. . . :
   
   

2. Also, from last week, Tom Nightingale of Canadian Gaming Business has more on our reporting of Dale Nally’s comments at G2E that Alberta will have a heavy hand in dealing with unlicensed operators.

3. Covers guy Geoff Zochodne spent some of his time in Vegas last week with Circa owner Derek Stevens, who got the lay of the land in Niagara Falls while visiting Canada this summer.

4. Globe and Mail reporter Meera Raman was first with the news that some longstanding Canadian finance executives are seeking the green light to build an unprecedented investment dealer “focused exclusively on prediction market trades”.

5. BCLC responsible gambling guru Ryan McCarthy joined the conversation, via the LinkedIn, on sports betting and youth.

6. As the puck drops on the start of the NHL regular season, Loto- Québec has a new commercial about gambling responsibly. Nous l’aimons.

7. Hockey fans of your geezer-status editor-in-chief’s vintage will remember ye olde Showdown series from Hockey Night in Canada intermissions back in the 1970s. Well, Better Collective and bet365 have come up with their own version, which will debut tomorrow.

8. Hard Rock Bet customers in Ontario, Florida, New Jersey and Michigan will have the opportunity to compete in a $5 million slots tournament being operated by the Seminole Tribe of Florida in December. According to a new release, digital qualifiers through the Hard Rock Bet app will take place in Ontario and the other three markets beginning this week and running through the end of November. Winning a qualifier means a trip to the live tournament on December 12.

9. Some Canadian media outlets, including Toronto Life, got a little giddy last week at learning Prime Minister Mark Carney was attracting interest from prediction markets as a Nobel Peace Prize candidate (just don’t tell Don Trump Sr.).

10. A G2E panel that included Responsible Gambling Council boss Sarah McCarthy devoted a significant chunk of time to youth gambling, wrote Kirk Geller for Global Gaming Insider.

11. TheScore has a new multi-year partnership with the National Football League in the true north strong and free.

12. Bede Gaming product chief Sarah Hitchcock spoke with Craig Davies for Canadian Gaming Business on the company’s work with partners around changing trends in the gaming industry, and other matters.

13. Isaac Rose-Berman delivered on the Substack a thoughtful piece about gambling as a social activity.

14. Robert Fletcher of NEXT.io did some reportage on the plans of Catena Media and Better Collective to get into the prediction market affiliate biz.

15. NPR journalist Bobby Allyn tells the story of the man who self-excluded from sports betting websites only to have prediction markets arrive.

16. In his Straight to the Point newsletter, Steve Ruddock delivered a summary of G2E, American style.

17. NEXT.io senior journalist Sonja Lindenberg asks if operators in Brazil’s (previously) legal market played a hand in the ban handed down last week.

18. Did you hear the one about Hard Rock Bet, football and bars of soap whose names are inspired by American cities?

19. Speaking of Ruddock, he also reported about another month, another billion dollars in revenue for igaming operators in the U.S. of A.

20. Earnings + More has reaction to the latest tax hike being imposed on the UK gambling industry.

21. Dan Waugh weighed in on the UK Gambling Commission’s “tortured survey of its Young People and Gambling Survey”.

22. There’s also reporting by Martin Bjoerck of iGaming Business of the UK gambling industry taking aim at proposed ban on gambling ads.

23. The CEO of Robinhood . . . er. . . predicts that the activity around sports on prediction markets will take a back seat to crypto contracts and other sectors in the not-too-distant future.

24. The ban on betting in Brazil could mean more business for other markets in Latin America, reported Macarena Lopez Rodicio for NEXT.io.

25. San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama wants nothing to do with being an ambassador for a sports betting operator.

26. Jason Lloyd of The Athletic raised a Spockian eyebrow about LeBron James’s endorsement deal with Polymarket.

27. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission has launched the “Bet on Respect” campaign as a zero-tolerance policy for sports betting harassment.

28. Good reading from Sports Business Journal’s Bret McCormick on the hospitality program for the MLB A’s new stadium in Las Vegas.

29. The case of the U.S. politician who made the dumb-dumb move of betting on his own pardon.

30. The Ohio Casino Control Commission has sent cease-and-desist correspondence to 10 prediction market companies.

31. The volume of trading in some areas on prediction market platforms is drawing some scrutiny, reported CNBC’s Ananya Chetia and Davis Giangiulio.

32. Giangiulio also wrote a piece on the increasing normalcy of sports betting when it comes to Gen Z, and why that’s drawing concern.

33. Global Gaming Insider chronicler Keih Ma has the deets on changes to the rules around advertising from Germany’s Joint Gambling Authority of the Federal States.

34. The EKG Line newsletter has the latest online casino market metrics from the country on the south side of Lake Ontario.

35. The merger of the Vegas experience and sporting events is working quite well, a G2E panel agreed.

36. Speaking of G2E, Steve Ruddock pounded the keyboard for a piece on CasinoReports.com about the cone of silence around online casinos at last week’s conference.

37. A Pennsylvania lawmaker is pushing for online gambling operators to provide monthly activity statements to customers.

38. Clarion, which operates ICE, iGB and the Indian Gaming Tradeshow, has a new owner.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Memo to Canadian broadcasters: It’s time to join the conversation when it comes to advertising by regulated gambling companies and the lottery and gaming corporations in the true north strong and free.

As Covers guy Geoff Zochodne tweeted last week, the House of Commons Heritage committee is operating - to quote the late, great Danny Gallivan - at rapier-like speed to put into place Bill S-211 and “create a national framework on sports betting advertising” (similar efforts are happening at the same time in New Jersey). In its Sept. 22 meeting, the standing committee will “commence clause-by-clause consideration of Bill S-211 on Thursday, Oct. 22. What that means is there will be no opportunities for outside parties to appear in front of the committee and make their case for or against the bill.

What it also means is the bill is going to happen. What’s TBD is how long it takes for the bill to take effect, if/how the overwhelmingly successful online gaming piece of the business is affected by S-211, and its impact on stakeholders.

Ah yes, the stakeholders. That would include provincial governments, regulated operators, ancillary businesses (e.g. advertising/marketing agencies, sports leagues and teams. . . and media organizations).

“It’s an industry-wide topic that includes partners such as broadcasters,” Scott Woodgate, BetMGM’s vice president, Canada, told Gaming News Canada during an interview Monday at the Global Gaming Expo.

“If we’re all at the table, good things will happen.”

As we’ve already reported, the Canadian Gaming Association has had discussions with the media folks at both Rogers and Bell, which have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from the gaming industry since the launch of Ontario’s regulated market in April 2022. While there’s been a decrease in advertising volume since those early days in Ontario, it remains impossible to watch a sporting event on Sportsnet and TSN without being exposed to a significant number of gambling spots. On the day this newsletter lands in the inbox our loyal subscribers, Prime Video’s Wednesday Night Hockey debuts with DraftKings on board as the “exclusive Sportsbook and Online Casino Integration sponsor of NHL on Prime.” The first season of NHL hockey in Alberta’s newish regulated market includes both the Oilers and Flames playing on the inaugural evening of Saturday Night Hockey on Sportsnet, which bid adieu to Hockey Night in Canada at the end of last season.

In this corner, we’ve been critical at times of the lack of responsible gambling messaging from too many operators that spend money on television advertising. BetMGM recently completed shooting a “Mullet Over” 2.0 RG commercial with Connor McDavid and Terry Ryan that is scheduled to be unveiled later this fall. Wayne Gretzky did a chat of the fireside variety (minus the kindling and flames) with BetMGM boss Adam Greenblatt yesterday morning to open Day 2 of G2E. The conversation, however, focused on The Great One’s life in hockey, with a bouquet tossed to his late mother Phyllis and all hockey moms for their influence on the lives of their sons and daughters.

FanDuel unveiled its “Play With A Plan” campaign at the beginning of 2026, bet365 devotes a noticeable percentage of its TV ad spend on RG, and Betway has featured Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in RG-focused advertising since bringing the Blue Jays first baseman on board as a brand ambassador.

We’ve written before that we’d like to see TSN hockey commentator/Mystic Mike “betting analyst” Mike Johnson featured in network-produced RG messaging. The same for TSN Overdrive personality Jeff O’Neill, and any combination of Kate Beirness, Davis Sanchez and/or Luke Willson from TSN’s on-air football team. At Sportsnet, the same with its roster of NHL talent (e.g. Friedman, Kevin Bieksa, Kyle Bukauskas, Colby Armstong) and/or Hazel Mae and Kevin Barker, Blue Jays reporter and analyst respectively, and partners in life (or the father-and-son voices of the Jays, Dan and Ben Shulman). Or. . . Evanka Osmak and Ken Reid, partners on the Sportsnet Central desk.

Media companies have . . .er . . . skin in the game, especially since we expect they will push back - and there will almost certainly be involvement from the CRTC at a time when media companies and outlets keep cutting back or closing their doors - if Bill S-211 ultimately leads to a slower flow of advertising dollars from regulated operators in our home and native land.

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ACGO working with province to be tougher on illegal gaming operators

When Ontario nears its fifth anniversary as a regulated gaming market next April, the CEO of the province’s alcohol and gaming commission hopes to be in a different place when it comes to taking concrete action against illegal operators.

Dr. Karin Schnarr appeared on a panel Monday morning alongside AGLC chief regulatory officer Dave Berry and regulatory gaming officials from Michigan, Iowa and the United Arab Emirates on “regulatory priorities and enforcement trends” in betting and gaming. During the panel, Schnarr discussed the commission’s work in the first four-plus years of regulated gambling in the province and the AGCO’s focus overseeing the market.

“Historically we are the regulator, and if you have a licence and you’re not following the rules, we will come and have a conversation with you, increasing the volume depending on how often we have those talks,” Schnarr explained to a packed room. “But we really didn’t have a mandate to go after folks that were outside of our licensees. So, the government and our board have been quite adamant that, ‘No, you’re the AGCO’.

“We have a role to make sure that people are investing a lot of money in our very open iGaming market and that needs to be protected. I wish I had the powers of some of my colleagues.”

Afterwards, speaking with a couple of reporters, Schnarr gave another example of the AGCO having limited powers when it comes to advertising by unregulated operators.

“We will literally call a radio station or write to them and say, ‘they’re illegal and we can prove they’re illegal.’ We have radio stations say, ‘Yeah, we know that, but it’s hard for media right now. So sorry, but we’re going to continue to take [the money.]’ We’ve had some success where (media) will say, ‘Oh, okay, we will stop doing it, but it’s because you’re being nice.’ I don’t have the enforcement powers to do anything.”

Schnarr hopes that will change as the AGCO works with the provincial government to provide regulatory or legislative tools such as issuing cease-and-desist letters and handing out monetary penalties. That stems from a mandate letter sent a year ago this week from Ontario attorney general Doug Downey to then-AGCO chair Dave Forestell.

From Downey’s letter:

I ask that the CEO and Registrar and the board continue to develop additional resources to combat illegal gaming operators. This includes undertaking a review of current AGCO authorities to identify opportunities to more effectively disrupt these illegal markets, such as enabling the regulator to issue cease and desist orders and impose monetary penalties on unregulated actors.

During Monday’s panel, Kurt Steinkamp, the chief of staff for the Michigan Gaming Control Board, said it has distributed more than 200 cease-and-desist letters. Schnarr mentioned that the AGCO speaks regularly with state regulators across the U.S. and is keen to apply the “lessons learned” once the commission gets the green light from the province.

During a panel yesterday afternoon (more on that below) Service Alberta minister Dale Nally said the province will go after “illicit operators” after the Oct. 13 deadline for sportsbooks and casinos to have agreements in place with the AiGC. When asked about what action the province will take, Nally would only say, “We have levers at our disposal that we didn’t use in the past, and we are motivated (to take action).”

Alberta won’t sit on the Bill S-211 sidelines, and more

Minister Dale Nally was joined by Alberta iGaming Corporation chief legal beagle Steve Inglis and FanDuel senior VP Cory Fox for a catch-up of sorts yesterday afternoon. A summary of what we heard:

• On the aforementioned Bill S-211, Nally didn’t mince any words about the federal government weighing in/throwing its weight around in an industry that has the feds’ blessing in being overseen by the provinces.

“We don’t support (it),” said Nally. “The bill is another example of federal overreach on a provincial jurisdiction. Alberta will always stand up and protect provincial jurisdiction.”

The Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction minister added that the province is already preparing to take action against the bill. “We aren’t sitting on our hands because we’re alarmed by what that could mean.”

• With the addition of Betway, Golden Tiger Casino and PowerPlay over the past week there are now 34 regulated gambling sites up and running in the province. Gaming News Canada confirmed Monday that Stake has also had its application approved by AGLC and is awaiting a licence to thrill from AiGC. The well-known betting brand could be among the operators to get in under the Oct. 13 deadline for the end of unregulated gaming in Alberta.

• On the ubiquitous issue of advertising, Fox referred to marketing the brand as a priority when launching in a new market, and FanDuel is following the same script as it did in Ontario back in the spring of 2022 by leaning in on responsible gambling messaging.

“It’s easy to criticize the volume that comes in a new market,” Fox said. “That is the opportunity for an operator to introduce itself and an important way to communicate to consumers.

From the AiGC’s Inglis: “Yeah, we’ve been following it quite closely. I think there was a host of consumer complaints that came in, and it was amplified by the media when the market launched. With the sports season picking up now, it’s not new for Albertans but they’re going to start seeing (ads) in difference places. We’ll have to keep a close eye on it and I know the AGLC has sent some correspondence to try and ensure everything’s going in a reasonable direction.”

• On Alberta eventually allowing cryptocurrency to be used in the market, both Inglis and Nally said the province is open to - in the words of Inglis - “exploring innovative payment methods. . . providing they meet compliance standards”. We’re certainly looking into it.”

Added Nally: “We have to separate cryptocurrencies because there are different (types), and one that’s coming to the forefront is Bitcoin. So, we’re looking at how we can support this. We believe it’s a freedom currency . . . it really comes to the core of everything that we believe in in Alberta. We’re monitoring it and are always embracing innovative ways to do things.

• The panel also discussed responsible gambling (surprise, surprise). Worth noting is how proactive AiGC has been in the early weeks of the market using social media to promote responsible play.

Other takeaways from the first 48 hours of G2E

What else came out of our various conversations and from listening to panel discussions during the conference’s first two days.

• The folks covering this industry landed in Vegas expected prediction markets to be a topic of conversation this week. However, to borrow some hockey parlance, the gaming industry Monday and Tuesday morning steered the prediction markets into a corner of the Venetian Expo and worked them over with hockey sticks, fists, elbows and several knees to the nether regions. Geoff Zochodne and Ryan Butler did the double-byline thing for Covers on the gaming industry’s elbows-up approach.

• There’s an excellent piece by Jill Dorson of InGame on the collaboration taking place around integrity monitoring coming from a panel that included NFL global sports betting director Keith Perschetz.

• On the first panel du jour yesterday, journalist Contessa Brewer asked senior executives Tom Reeg (Caesars), Bill Hornbuckle (MGM Resorts) and Craig Billings (Wynn Resorts) about Canadians coming - or not - to Vegas.

“It’s coming back slowly,” answered Reeg. “Over time I’d say yes, visitation from Canada will normalize.”

Ontario online casinos set revenue record, top $10 billion lifetime

Another month, another record for gross gambling revenue from online casinos in Ontario.

August figures released last week by iGaming Ontario (iGO) show online casinos had total revenue of $336.3 million to surpass the previous record of $330.4 million set just one month prior. Lifetime, online casinos also surpassed the $10 billion mark in August.

A sports betting revenue decline of 20 per cent from July to August (from $77.8 million to $54.4 million) caused total revenue to miss the $400 million mark for the first time in five months.

For August, the total was $396.3 million, down three per cent from July’s total of $413.6 million, which was the second-best month since the open market launched in April of 2022.

But the continued growth of online casino revenue is especially interesting. In July, online casino revenue made up 80 per cent of total revenue. That grew to 85 per cent in August, likely impacted by softer online sports betting numbers in the heat of the summer. That bears out in the handle numbers which were down 15 per cent from July ($992 million) to August ($843 million). It was the lowest sports betting handle since August of 2025 ($765 million).

Some other notable figures:

Year-to-Date (through August 2026)

• Total online gambling revenue of $3.16 billion up 26 per cent from $2.51 billion through first eight months of 2025

• Total online casino revenue of $2.53 billion up 30 per cent from $1.95 billion through first eight months of 2025

• Total online sports betting revenue of $587.7 million 15.5 per cent from $509 million through first eight months of 2025

Year-to-Date compared to first eight months of 2023 (the first full year the market was open)

• Total revenue is up 124 per cent compared to January through August of 2023 ($1.41 billion)

• Online casino revenue is up 148 per cent compared to January through August of 2023 ($1.02 billion)

• Online sports betting is up 68 per cent compared to January through August of 2023 ($350 million)

Lifetime totals:

• Total online gambling revenue: $13.36 billion

• Online casino revenue: $10.14 billion

• Online sports betting revenue: $2.95 billion

• Online poker revenue: $270.6 million

• Tax revenue from online gambling: $2.67 billion

People on the Move

• Alyssa Beaver is promoted to Chief Revenue Officer at Pavilion Payments. Karen Haines also receives a promotion to President, Commercial Operations.

• Leon Thomas, who was hip-deep in the Canadian gaming industry while serving in leadership roles at Hard Rock International and Entain, joins White Hat Gaming as Chief Commercial Officer.

• Boyd Gaming promotes Matt Bunyan to Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.

• Kate Pulford has a new role at Aristocrat Gaming as Senior Vice President, Commercial Strategy APAC. Richard Blues is named Director of Operations.

• Motti Colman is named Senior VP, Revenue at Optimove.

• Brite Payments name Mickael Marceau as Senior VP – Gaming & Financial Services.

• Gavin Isaacs joins the Board of Directors at Gaming Laboratories International as an Advisor.

• MGM Resorts International appoints Zachary Levine as Executive Vice President, Japan Gaming.

• Mark Dufty, formerly of IGT, is the new Head of Game Analysis at Advanced Compliance Technology.

• Tim Miller, the former Executive Director at the UK Gambling Commission, launches GamReg Consulting.

• Ex-Gaming Innovation Group guy James Hancock is the new Vice President of Marketing (B2B) at Soft2Bet. Harry Heynes is named Director, Business Development.

• SPORTFIVE appoints Jason Scorrano as Vice President, U.S. Gaming & Creators.

• David Nantais is the new General Manager at the Gateway Clinton (Ontario) Casino.

• Robert Lo Giudice exits BetMGM to become the Director, Regulatory Compliance (Gaming) at Trustly.

• Paulo Garcia Cordova joins BetStarters as Global Head of Sales.

• Chris Fleming joins GameSquare Holdings brand Click as Head of Commercial Strategy & Growth.

• Lewis Westerman has a new role as Global Head of Resourcing, Product & Technology.

• Arun Lal exits Paysafe to join nSure.ai as Head of Fintech Sales.

• Heather Maurer steps down as Executive Director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

• EveryMatrix promotes Dominic Grose to Managing Director – Casino.

• Interblock Gaming appoints Ryan Yee as Senior Director, Consumer Insight and Market Strategy.

• Hristfor Hristov exits Bragg Gaming and his role as Commercial Director, Aggregation & Strategic Partnerships.

• Breard Snellings leaves DraftKings and his position as Director, Regulatory Operations.

• Kevin Allen departs BetMGM and his role as Senior Associate, Gaming Experience.

• Kieron Beman joins NEXT.io as CRM Operations Executive.

• Alexandra Mufson is appointed Senior Manager of Acquisition Strategy at FanDuel.

• Christiana Pearson has a new gig at ComeOn Group as a Marketing Analyst.

A call for more conversation on gambling and youth

From an op-ed just released by the Canadian Gaming Association:

Canadians have had access to online gambling for 25 years, and Ontario and Alberta have since introduced stronger market protections. The goal is shared: better protection for players. But the digital environment has changed quickly over the past five years, and yet we still do not fully talk about how young people are finding their way into gambling.

Every operator registered to take bets in Ontario is legally barred from opening an account for anyone under 19; in Alberta, the minimum age is 18. Before a player can deposit, the operator must verify identity under FINTRAC-compliant standards—either by matching the user against a credit bureau file or by checking government ID through facial-recognition and liveness verification. The system is not perfect, but it reliably confirms whether an adult opened the account and provides an example of how the regulated industry takes responsibility by not letting underage people gamble.

To read the entire article, click here.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• The Western Canada Lottery Corporation is in need of a Vice President, Player Growth & Experience.

• Hard Rock Digital has a remote opportunity in Canada or the U.S. for a Senior Director – Casino Content Strategy.

• The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario is seeking a Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics.

• AGLC requires a Director, Audit Services and an iGaming Compliance Analyst.

• OLG has need of a Senior Product Manager (Retail Sports).

• The Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority (SIGA) is on the lookout for a Manager of Brand & Creative Services.

• Atlantic Lottery is searching for a Product Manager, Destination.

• Nordiq Canada is looking for a Manager, Communications and External Relations.

South of the Border

• In Lansing, Michigan, Aristocrat Interactive is hiring a Director of Operations.

• Fanatics has a hybrid/remote opening in New York for a Compliance Analyst.

• Paysafe is looking for an AML Financial Crimes Investigations Analyst.

• Hard Rock Digital is seeking a Trader – Sportsbook.

• Yahoo has a trio of opportunities in the areas of streaming and growth/subscriptions.

• AMP Sports is in the market for a Senior Creative Producer, Original Content.

• Bloomberg is on a hiring mission for a Business of Sports, Team Lead in New York.

• CNBC is searching for a Director, Podcasts & Digital Shows.

• The Vegas Golden Knights have an opportunity for an Associate – Expertiential Events & Partnership Engagement.

• CAA Hockey has need of a Brand Partnerships Director.

• The Guardians of Cleveland are seeking a Data Scientist.

Across the Ponds

• Midnite is seeking a Head of Audit and Risk.

• In London, DAZN is hiring a Senior Product Manager.

• Betty is looking for a CRM Manager – Growth Team for its business in Canada.

• Wanted by the International Tennis Integrity Agency: an Investigator.

Reading and Reflecting

1. Derek Ramm, whose appearance on the latest Gaming News Canada Show drew a shoutout from Karin Schnarr during a G2E panel discussion Monday morning, posted a few thoughts yesterdfay via the LinkedIn on the Financial Action Task Force Mutual Evaluation of Canada.

2. A little more than two months since launching regulated gaming, the Alberta government announced $2.4 million in funding to Brick House Recovery Centre for gambling treatment and recovery services.

3. Breaking news Monday, courtesy of Canadian Gaming Business scribe Tom Nightingale, that Century Casinos is selling off the racing and gaming businesses at two Alberta racetracks. Canadian Thoroughbred reported the buyer is an investment group whose owner has longstanding ties to the horse racing industry.

4. Nightingale was also the first to report last week that Stake’s application has been accepted by AGLC. Next up: an operating license from the Alberta iGaming Corporation.

5. BETER, a provider of streams, data and odds for sports and esports, has obtained a supplier licence from AGLC.

6. In the latest Eilers-Fantini Canada Online Game Performance Report, there’s new information around Alberta.

7. Declan Hill, writing on the Substack, says mafia-operated sports betting remains alive and well in Canada.

8. The Responsible Gambling Council and the Canadian Addiction Counsellors Certification Federation are getting together on a pilot scholarship initiative in Ontario. And ICYMI, the RGC also has a new postsecondary education-related partnership with iGaming Ontario.

9. The PlaySafe Initiative posted via the LinkedIn its thoughts on predictions markets and sports in our home and native land.

10. Ontario licensee Tonybet is sponsoring the Brampton Blitz for the Canada Super60 cricket tournament, which began yesterday at Vancouver’s BC Place and runs through Sunday.

11. The university formerly known as Ryerson will host a Generation Bet: Student and Sports Betting panel discussion October 9 that is schedule to include Senator Marty Deacon, Dr. Jennifer Reynolds from the Responsible Gambling Council, Dr. Matthew Young from Greo and Dr. Andrew Kim from Toronto Metropolitan University.

12. Good reading from Geoff Zochodne on the giving nature of sportsbooks and prediction markets in the early weeks of the Amarican football season.

13. While walking the Las Vegas Strip with a couple of fellow Canadians on Monday evening, we wondered why the strip was bereft of a swim-up sportsbook. Well, that’s about to change.

14. An interesting post from Wall Street Journal reporter Heather Long on the Polymarket-Drake relationship.

15. As Anamaria Bacci reported for NEXT.io, legal sports betting in Brazil is no mas. Alina Moskalova worked her graphics magic to create this snapshot of what’s happening.

16. Also, Regulus Partners was among the many weighing in on a new twist of a Brazilian wax. And, NEXT.io chronicler Rory Calland reported yesterday on the ban’s impact on the share price of gambling operators.

17. The number of gambling licences for Finland’s incoming regulated market has ballooned to 75, reports Deyan Dimitrov for Gambling News.

18. Some scoopage by Dustin Gouker, who had a sneak peek at a study commissioned by the American Gaming Association.

19. Gouker, in The Closing Line newsletter, also had something to say about the sports betting-as-entertainment conversation.

20. The latest article, this time by ProPublica’s Jake Pearson, on his own betting experiences.

21. Sportico’s Dan Bernstein wrote about the current trials and tribulations at Flutter.

22. Betano, according to Global Gaming Insider, plans to take legal action against the Brazilian government.

23. DraftKings boss Jason Robins addressed the company’s falling stock price and sundry other topics at last week’s Front Office Sports Asset Class event.

24. The NBA, WNBA, their respective players association and officials association have joined the crowd asking for more action to be taken against the abusive idiots on social media.

25. In case you were fuzzy about how tribal gaming leaders feel about prediction markets in the U.S. of A. . . .

26. The Major League Baseball Players Association says it’s open to not allowing players to be involved as ambassadors with sports betting operators.

27. In The Closing Line Newsletter, Dustin Gouker reported on an American Gaming Association-commissioned study into gambling and financial literacy.

28. Gambling Harm editorial boss Brian Pempus wrote that it’s possible for online gambling advertising to be effectively regulated.

29. Jeff Edelstein did some columnizing on a New York Times piece on DraftKings’ use of artificial intelligence.

30. Speaking of Edelstein, he found a unique path to write about the prediction market boom.

31. Jonathan Prynn spoke with some Brits for a piece in The Telegraph about the continuing popularity of betting shops.

32. Hillary McAfee, writing for CDC Gaming, did a rather deep dive into the angst over the Novig ad featuring Sydney Sweeney.

33. Former GeoComply senior executive Lindsay Slader did the Q and A thing with Brant James of Gambling Insider on his new gig.

34. The president of the board of directors for the National Council on Problem Gambling last week addressed the non-profit group’s relationship with Kalshi.

35. Former sports betting industry exec Sara Slane, now working for Kalshi, took umbrage last week at PM operators not paying state taxes.

36. Play’n GO’s communications chief Andrew Pink spoke about the company’s participation in discussions around brain health at United Nations General Assembly week.

37. Betr founder Jake Paul isn’t a happy camper with receiving a cease-and-desist letter regarding an ad campaign featuring the stars of the former HBO series Entourage.

38. A tap of the CCM JetSpeed to the good folks at CDC Gaming and Global Gaming Women for honouring the latest 10 Women Rising in Gaming at a pre-G2E function Sunday evening.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Between trips to Las Vegas for the BSA/AML Gaming Conference and this week’s Global Gaming Expo, Derek Ramm made his return to the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming.

Ramm, the Global Head of Advisory Services for Kinectify and a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Gaming Association, has been a leading voice for an overhaul of anti-money laundering rules and regulations in the Canadian gambling industry with a special focus on online gaming. He spoke with host Steve McAllister about recent monetary penaltieslevied by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) against the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation and New Brunswick Gaming Corporation.

Ramm sits on an AML working group in the CGA and spoke about the conversations the association has had with the federal government. We also asked the Kinectify exec why AML programs have yet to be put in place by gaming regulators in both Ontario and Alberta, and why he believes revised AML measures matter so much.

Finally, he spoke about what he and his colleagues at Kinectify are seeing with the data being collected around the industry these days and of the company’s emerging business in Australia.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Moving Beyond Geolocation in Canada’s Evolving Regulated Gaming Market 🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s Sports Media Landscape Is Changing 🎙️ 🎥

• Protecting the Next Generation of Canadian Gamblers 🎙️ 🎥

• The human cost of gambling in Canada 🎙️ 🎥

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Over the past few weeks, Canadians have seen several stories about youth and gambling in different newspapers, each identifying a different part of the problem. Yet none seemed to notice that they were missing half of the story.

The Globe and Mail first reported new data from CAMH’s Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, which found that more Ontario teenagers said they gambled online last year than in previous cycles. The data are real, and the trend deserves attention: online gambling among students in grades 7 to 12 has risen from under 8 per cent two years ago to nearly 12 per cent today. Days later, the National Post reported something that should have been treated as connected news: parents admitting, in their own words, that they opened the betting account their teenager later used.

Then, this past weekend, a Globe and Mail columnist wrote about “a recent report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found a sharp increase in gambling-related emergency room visits after online sports betting and single-event betting were legalized and expanded. Over 14 years, researchers found visits rose 154 per cent among males aged 10 to 29 and 116 per cent among males aged 30 to 44, with no change among females.

The incidence numbers are modest—the report identified 952 emergency-room visits over 14 years—but that figure does not capture the likely thousands more whose lives have been disrupted or damaged by online gambling without reaching an emergency-room crisis.”

Read together, these stories raise a question that no paper or columnist asked on their own: how are underage Canadians accessing gambling, and through which platforms?

More strangely, none of the coverage seems to recognize that young people live much of their lives on digital platforms, creating an obvious path for bad actors to reach them.

Canadians have had access to online gambling for 25 years, and Ontario and Alberta have since introduced stronger market protections. The goal is shared: better protection for players. But the digital environment has changed quickly over the past five years, and yet we still do not fully talk about how young people are finding their way into gambling.

Every operator registered to take bets in Ontario is legally barred from opening an account for anyone under 19; in Alberta, the minimum age is 18. Before a player can deposit, the operator must verify identity under FINTRAC-compliant standards—either by matching the user against a credit bureau file or by checking government ID through facial-recognition and liveness verification. The system is not perfect, but it reliably confirms whether an adult opened the account and provides an example of how the regulated industry takes responsibility by not letting underage people gamble.

Unauthorized operators do not rely on traditional television advertising to reach Canadian consumers. Their acquisition channels include social media, streaming platforms, search engines, affiliate sites, creator accounts, short-form video, incentivized referrals, online communities and other digital spaces.

These channels are hard to contain within national borders. A livestream produced overseas can be clipped and redistributed across TikTok, Meta platforms, X, YouTube and countless other places. An influencer does not need to be in Canada to reach Canadian audiences, and affiliate websites can rank highly in search results while directing users to operators that are unauthorized in the user’s jurisdiction.

The path to an unauthorized site can also come with instructions for evading access controls. Some affiliate sites provide step-by-step guidance on using VPNs to reach gambling brands from restricted jurisdictions, while offshore operators may use alternate domains or mirror sites when a primary domain is blocked. This is not universal—some offshore operators expressly prohibit VPN circumvention in their terms—but the broader acquisition ecosystem can make geographic restrictions much easier to bypass.

Then there is the role of influencers.

That role matters. Major offshore brands have invested heavily in celebrity and cultural visibility, using figures such as Neymar, Ronaldinho, Drake, Snoop Dogg and Jason Derulo to build awareness well beyond traditional gambling audiences. Duel.com offers a recent example, with Mike Tyson, Bonnie Blue and Lil Pump appearing in or being associated with its promotional content, alongside promotional and sponsorship activity linked to Clavicular and Andrew Tate (we assume before they were arrested).

Duel.com is not licensed in Ontario. Yet it remains accessible from a Toronto IP address and allows direct sign-in through existing Google or Steam accounts. The same pattern appears among several other offshore brands that rely on high-profile celebrity and influencer partnerships. Their content can still move through the social, streaming and creator-led environments used by Canadian consumers, giving those brands visibility and credibility in markets where they operate outside the regulated system.

That context matters because the answer determines what will actually protect young people.

So, when a parent tells a reporter they opened the account themselves, that is not evidence that age verification failed. It suggests the opposite: verification worked as designed and identified an adult. What happened afterward is a different problem, unfolding household by household, and it calls for different solutions—parental controls, bank- and card-level spending limits, direct conversations at home, and fuller use of the deposit limits and self-exclusion tools every regulated operator is already required to provide.

That contrasts with the question no one asked: how many teenagers in the CAMH survey who reported online sports gambling were using a regulated Ontario platform, and how many were using an offshore site with no ID check, no deposit limits and no legal presence in Canada? The survey does not ask, and its limitations section says so. If most underage gambling is happening there, the answer is not tighter rules for operators that already cannot legally open a minor’s account. It is enforcement against illegal operators that were never following the rules to begin with.

Judging a regulated, closely supervised industry by a survey question that cannot distinguish a licensed Ontario platform from an offshore sportsbook—or by a story about parents handing over their own verified accounts—or that blames TV advertising and ignores what’s happening on Meta platforms —does not help Canadians protect a fifteen-year-old from a bad bet. It offers a headline-friendly villain instead of identifying the actual point of access. The industry understands the need for greater education and awareness for youth to understand the risks of gambling and how influencers are preying on them. Coupled with strong regulation, these are the strongest tools that licensed operators have at their disposal.

The next reporter, researcher or regulator who wants to take youth gambling seriously—and we hope many do—should ask the question all the stories skipped: whose account was it, and which operator, legal or illegal, allowed the bet? We will answer that question whenever it is put to us. We would like to see it asked of the illegal operators who never will.

Grounding: Boak, A., & Hamilton, H. A. (2026). The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students, 1991–2025 (OSDUHS), CAMH, Section 3.5.1 and Discussion; The Globe and Mail, Aug. 24, 2026, coverage of the OSDUHS gambling findings and CAMH’s advertising-restriction framework; National Post, Aug. 24, 2026, “The under-the-radar epidemic of underage gambling” (characterization pending direct review - see note above); CGA Code for Responsible Gaming Advertising; iGaming Ontario / AGCO KYC and identity-verification standards; Robyn Urback, The Globe and Mail, Sep. 18, 2026, “Canada opened the door to private sports betting years ago, and then walked away”; SumSub Evidence for The House of Commons Standing Committee on Heritage re: Bill S-211.

Fake ads, either for unregulated or completely phony gambling sites, continue to proliferate in Canada and further attempt to confuse consumers about which sites are regulated and which are not.

The latest, as reported by the Edmonton Journal, involves a deep-fake AI video posted on Instagram purportedly showing the father of Canadian soccer star Alphonso Davies with a vault full of cash said to be the father’s winnings from an online casino.

If the ad is clicked on, it takes the user to Oxibet, a site based in the African island nation of Comoros. Oxibet is not regulated in Canada.

Davies’ agent, Nedal Huoseh, told the Journal that the ad was “lies” and the family does not gamble.

It’s the latest escalation in fake ads that have long been found on social media platforms. Since Ontario launched a regulated online gambling market in 2022, social media ads for fake online casinos taking their names from real retail casinos have been commonplace. For example, ads for a fake Woodbine online casino are regularly seen to this day. Not only is there no regulated Woodbine online casino among iGaming Ontario’s (iGO) list of 84 regulated sites, there isn’t even a retail casino named Woodbine anymore. The casino connected to Woodbine Racetrack is called the Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto.

But, unless you’re very familiar with the official name of the retail casino, have consulted iGO’s list of regulated sites, or are careful to look for the iGO logo on the platforms that are regulated and legal, you wouldn’t know that.

Still plenty of other fake ads have promoted phony online casinos named properly after real retail casino properties. In the past, we’ve seen ads for online casinos named for Casino New Brunswick or the River Rock Casino in British Columbia. Trouble is, online casinos are not regulated in either province outside of the provincially-run lottery corporation option.

That’s not the only problem. Ads for real, yet unregulated, gambling platforms continue to be seen on more traditional broadcast platforms.

As GNC reported last week, Ozoon advertises heavily on NFL broadcasts in Canada. Ozoon is the rebranded name for unregulated site Bodog – a platform that is completely banned in Manitoba.

All of these fake ads or ads for unregulated sites are obviously trying to profit from the ill-informed consumer.

Here’s where the province’s gambling regulators need to do much more in terms of educating consumers about how to protect themselves.

Also, platforms such as Meta and even mainstream broadcasters should do much better in terms of policing the content they display. But sadly, it’s too much to hope they will do that or say no to the money from such ads. (Gaming News Canada has reached out to Meta for comment via email on several occasions over the past year but is still waiting for a reply.)

Instead, this needs to start with threatening cease-and-desist legal letters from each province’s Ministry of the Attorney General to the platforms and broadcasters that allow fake ads for phony gambling sites that attempt to defraud Canadians.

It wouldn’t hurt to also send similar letters to those legal broadcasters and social media platforms that accept ads from unregulated sites and ask them not to accept them going forward.

Such legal letters from numerous state regulators to offshore site Bovada worked surprisingly well in getting that unregulated platform to stop taking bets from U.S. citizens a few years ago. Even though Bovada was under no legal obligation to comply, the company must have calculated it could cost them more to tangle with powerful state governments than they would lose from ceasing to take bets from Americans.

Yes, laws are different in Canada, but it wouldn’t hurt to also fire off some letters to the largest offshore operators, as well, to tell them to stop taking money from Canadians.

Then the AGs need to publicly release those letters to let consumers know they are taking action and naming the unregulated platforms citizens should avoid.

Action from the AGs is of particular urgency in Ontario and Alberta where one of the main reasons to have a regulated market is to better protect consumers. If nothing is done, expect ads for fake or unregulated casinos to mushroom from here, threatening the entire foundation of the regulated market.

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Reading and reaction to new study on emergency department visits for gambling disorders

To borrow a phrase from sports parlance, there’s a need to “read and react” when it comes to government regulation.

In our many conversations with gambling experts and stakeholders over the past 55 or so months we’ve delivered this newsletter almost every week, an important virtue of a regulated industry is having the power to make changes in the name of consumer protection. We bring up the topic given the release last week of a new study by researchers at the University of Toronto - with the findings released in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine - into emergency department visits since the launch of Ontario’s regulated sports betting and igaming market in April 2022.

The researchers dug into emergency department visits for gambling disorders among Ontarians 10-105 years of age before and after the opening of the Ontario market. During the 14-year study period, 750 Ontarians made a total of 952 ED visits in which a gambling disorder was either the main or a contributing reason recorded for the trip. Close to 75 per cent of those 750 people were male.

At the end of the study, the number of visits was 154 per cent higher than expected among males 10-29. . . and 116 per cent higher than expected among males 30-44. The study also unveiled 70 per cent of ED visits for a gambling disorder involved another mental health condition or substance use.

Thanks to the graphics team at The Globe and Mail for this information in a screenshot.

Gaming News Canada received statements from our requests to the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, OLG and the Alberta iGaming Corporation about the study. Responsible Gambling Council CEO Sarah McCarthy spoke with us yesterday afternoon.

“These studies are extremely useful to the work we do at RGC,” McCarthy said. “(It) tells us where the harm is. Right now now it’s pointing to young men and that matches with our research.

“We’re focused in the right direction and able to develop programs for the right population.”

McCarthy told GNC the RGC’s campus tours of Ontario colleges and universities to provide education on responsible gambling have had more than 2,000 student activations in September.

“The response has been very supportive,” she said. “Students want to understand the risks (of gambling).”

From the office of Zee Hamid, the new Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming:

Ontario has some of the strictest guidelines and restrictions for online gaming operators advertising in the country, and we continue to take action, working with our partners to strengthen responsible gaming while protecting players across the province. Since 2018, our government has invested $421 million, including $70.1 million over the last year, to support responsible gambling public education and awareness programs, and research, as well as gambling addiction treatment.

We have also made changes to the Registrar’s Standards for iGaming, which banned the use of celebrities and/or athletes for promotional and marketing activities, with the exception of promoting responsible gaming practices and, this year iGaming Ontario has unveiled BetGuard, the new centralized self-exclusion system, which allows players to opt out of all regulated online gaming sites through one streamlined registration process in Ontario.

OLG communications boss Tony Bitonti emailed us this statement:

OLG remains committed to creating a safer gambling environment that supports players with education, resources and tools; builds trust; and reinforces our role as a socially responsible operator. We invest significantly in this critical work.

This study reinforces the importance of addressing gambling-related harm and continuing to strengthen protections for players.

Some of the ways we are improving player protections are by building on our use of player data with practical measures that support healthy play, including targeted interventions during play, proactive outreach from dedicated specialists, and additional safeguards for younger players.

In addition, OLG continues to work closely with iGaming Ontario (iGO) and the AGCO on supporting the new Centralized Self Exclusion program (BetGuard) in the province. We will continue to evolve our approach as the evidence and gambling environment change.

OLG will continue to lead with integrity with a focus on player health.

And from the AiGC communications team:

Gambling can be fun, but it can also cause harm—and we take this very seriously. Studies such as these are important in helping us understand how we can further strengthen responsible gambling supports, measures, guidelines, and harm reduction efforts within Alberta’s newly regulated iGaming market.

Viva Las Vegas. . . and Lisbon

Next week is one of the rather large variety for the gambling industry, which will see its people and marketing budgets split between the SBC Summit 2026 in Lisbon and the Global Gaming Expo in the home of the Golden Knights, Aces and Raiders.

Your resident editor-in-chief is blowing the dust off our sport coats and long trousers to take GNC on the road to Vegas for G2E. Yes, there will be some Canadian content over the expo’s three days. That includes a poolside chat (well, given it’s expected to be 35C in Vegas, it should be. . . ) with BetMGM head honcho Adam Greenblatt and Hockey Hall of Famer/broadcaster/BetMGM ambassador/Dustin Johnson’s dad-in-law Wayne Gretzky among the speakers on Tuesday morning (9 a.m. local time, Venetian Ballroom F).

First thing Monday morning, a “Regulatory Priorities and Enforcement Trends in Gaming and Sports Betting” panel has AGCO grand poobah Dr. Karin Schnarr and AGLC chief regulatory officer Dave Berry among the chatting class. Kacey Pambrun, the marketing director for the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority will join Environics Analytics VP Sophie Marai for a conversation on “From Casino Floor to Online Play: Using Data to Understand and Unlock Omnichannel Growth”. Pollard BankNote co-CEO Douglas Pollard will appear on stage with Arizona Lottery CEO Alec Thomson for “A Great Digital Lottery is a Great Retail Lottery” chat.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, Alberta minister Dale Nally and AiGC general counsel Steve Inglis will join FanDuel senior VP Cory Fox and GeoComply veep Elizabeth Cronan to discuss “Canada’s iGaming Market: Navigating Fragmentation, Compliance, and the Road to Scale”.

On Wednesday, Responsible Gambling Council CEO Sarah McCarthy will be among the panelists to talk about “From Sports Fan to Sports Bettor: Evolving Responsible Gaming for Today’s Sports Bettor”. Ilkim Hincer, the president of Canadian operations and managing director of IC360’s global advisory strategy, will participate in the SeventySix Capital Sports Leadership Show: AI + Gaming panel.

While we see no specific references to prediction markets on the list of panels for the three days of G2E, we’d be willing to bet a Swiss franc or two on PMs being mentioned more than the number 99 Gretzky wore on his jersey.

Across the ponds in Lisbon, Canadian Gaming Association president/CEO Paul Burns will be on stage with PointsBet casino boss Brooke Hilton, legal beagle Ron Segev and Snap Call Media head honcho Matthew Showell for a “Canada: Province by Province Progress” discussion next Tuesday. The next day, Burns will join Dario Evangelista (Betsson Group), Regulus Partners. . .er. . . partner Dan Waugh and Steve Hoare (Player Protection Hub) on the “Who Pays for the Evidence? Rethinking Gambling Research Funding” panel. McCarthy Tetrault senior counsel Danielle Bush is moderating a panel titled “Cross-Platform Consistency: Designing Seamless Mobile, Web & App Experiences”. And Canadian gaming industry vet Jesse Learmonth will hold the moderator’s mic for an Investor Office Hours session.

While we’re here, we’ll make our pitch (again) to conference organizers about panel sizes (full disclosure, we’re a media partner of SBC). Too many speakers and not enough time for all of them to share their wisdom and experiences across the gaming industry.

Gaming News Canada will do our best to keep up with the news that matters most to our loyal followers via our X account and in the newsletter over the next couple of weeks.

People on the Move

• Some changes at the top of ComeOn Group with Alex Woodhams coming on board as Chief Product Officer, Sara Nunes appointed General Manager for Finland, Kristoffer Ottosson as Director of IT Operations and Sherwin Jarvand is promoted to Chief Operating Officer.

• Nikos Konstakis is replacing Jordan Levin as CEO at OpenBet. Levin will move into the Chair’s role at year end.

• Marco Stotani returns to GeoComply from paternity leave and has a new business card as Chief Financial Officer.

• Interblock Gaming appoints Cathryn Lai as Chief Product Officer.

• Jean Venneman is retiring at the end of 2026 from IGT and her position as Chief Studios Officer. Jamie Knight will assume the CSO role on Jan. 1, 2027.

• Muthu Palanichamy is named Senior VP and GM of Global Systems for Light & Wonder.

• Kristina Garratt Mulligan is promoted to Chief Legal Officer at ARRISE.

• Martin Zetterlund is appointed interim Chief Technology Officer at Catena Media.

• After almost six years, Andrew Gradwell leaves FanDuel to become Senior Vice President of Interactive Capabilities of Aristocrat Interactive.

• Nicole Sullivan joins Sportradar as Vice President, Global Litigation.

• Justin Nesci has a new post at Genius Sports as Group Vice President, Advertiser Solutions.

• Clare Acin is named Vice President, Global Internal Communications at Aristocrat.

• Dan Whitlam is appointed Head of Compliance at Merkur Casino UK.

• Ahmed Sidky leaves Riot Games and his Head of Business Agility role.

• Landon Stanfield is named Head of Product Management at IGT.

• Ex-DraftKings exec Dan Iannetta joins Sentinent Jet as Vice President of Client Acquisition & Head of Marketing.

• Jason Orr is appointed Senior Director of Analytics at Hard Rock Digital. Scott Smith has a new position as Team Lead – Sportsbook Planning.

• Anthony Ladislaus departs Entain and joins Midnite as General Manager.

• Andy Anderson leaves BCLC and joins the Western Canada Lottery Corporation as Director, Retail Experience & Performance.

• Jamie Costello resigns as Director Programs at the U.S. National Council on Problem Gambling.

• Mitchell Harrison is appointed Sales Director at Altenar.

• Matt Deutsch is among the casualties in a round of job cuts at VSiN, leaving his position as Manager of Sports Programming.

• Griffin Carroll is promoted to Internal Communications Manager at BetMGM.

• Pencho Vlaskovski has a new gig at Push Gaming as a Go-To-Market Lead.

• Former Paysafe PR guru Nick Say joins Amazon Web Services as PR Manager, Canada.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• The Alberta iGaming Corporation is seeking a Senior Developer/DevOps Engineer, a Planning & Reporting Advisor, a Data Engineer, an Account Manager, Stakeholder Engagement and a Legal Counsel.

• There’s an opportunity at iGaming Ontario for a Senior Procurement Advisor.

• Pinnacle has an opening for a Senior Accountant and a Senior Software Engineer at its North York, ON, offices.

• ConnexOntario has an opportunity for a System Navigation and Information Specialist – Relief.

• There’s an opening at CP24/CTV Toronto for a Producer.

On the South Side of Lake Ontario

• Good gig alert: Aristocrat is in seek-and-employ mode for a Vice President, Global External Communications.

• DraftKings is on the lookout for a Senior Data Science Engineering Manager, Marketing.

• BetMGM is searching for a Senior Commercial Manager, Sportsbook.

• Hard Rock Digital has a remote opening for a Customer Manager – Quality & Insights and a Sports Owner.

• MGM International is looking for a Senior Manager, Responsible Gaming and a Senior Manager, Campaign Strategy.

• FairPlay Sports Media has an opportunity in New York for an Organic Performance Manager.

• Fanatics wants to find a Manager, Control Design & Assurance.

• Genius Sports is searching for a Customer Success Manager – Sportsbook.

• Xtremepush has a remote opportunity for an Account Manager.

• SciPlay is in the market for a Monetization Analyst.

• In Jersey City, JPMorganChase is hiring a Compliance Risk Management Lead – Vice President.

• Wanted at FloSports: a Vice President, Global Content Acquisition & Market Growth.

Across the Ponds

• In Chiswick, England, Light & Wonder – iGaming is hiring a Head of Partnerships (Aggregation).

• Push Gaming has a plethora of job postings these days.

• In Sliema, LeoVegas Group is on the hunt for an Operational Excellence & Enablement Manager.

• The International Tennis Integrity Agency is on the lookout for a Paralegal and Case Manager.

Reading and Reflecting

1. Erica Alini, The Globe and Mail’s personal economics reporter, wrote last week on educating her 10-year-old son about betting online and included a link to an online survey about sports betting and its impact.

2. Speaking of Canada’s national newspaper, a good chunk of its Monday Morning Halfback back-and-forth between sports editor Jamie Ross and columnist Cathal Kelly dwelled on the Sydney Sweeney ad and .sports betting

3. Reporting from Covers guy Geoff Zochodne that Pinnacle is seeing a spike in “unauthorized use” of its data at the same time it’s being bombarded with requests for partnerships involving said data.

4. OLG, Wauzhushk Onigum Nation and Gateway Casinos are getting together to build a new casino in Kenora.

5. Gaming Corps is getting together with Loto-Québec.

6. There’s a Camp Kevin (Costner) of sorts being organized by the actor, reports Jill Dorson, to bring together prediction market operators, gaming operators and tribes for constructive conversations.

7. A New York Times investigation examined DraftKings’ use of artificial intelligence to “target” bettors likely to lose.

8. A CBS News report last weekend on sports betting apps taking a “growing financial toll” on Americans faced some flak for the reporting around the dollars spent/lost on wagering.

9. Hard Rock International responsible gaming guru Paul Pellizzari crafted an op-ed for GGB Magazine on the power of people in helping problem gamblers.

10. Brett Smiley explained why the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t the place to decide the future of prediction markets.

11. Good reading from Chad Millman of The Athletic on the increasing popularity of prediction markets and some insight into their most committed customers.

12. The owner of the Utah Mammoth and Jazz told Front Office Sports scribe Ben Horney that pro sports leagues need to take a leadership role in making betting safer for consumers.

13. Dan Horn of the Cincinnati Inquirer wrote about his experiences as an online sports bettor over a two-month period.

14. A survey by U.S. News of 1,200 Americans who placed a sports bet over the past 12 months included 51 per cent of respondents saying they placed a wager to help pay their bills.

15. Brant James of Gambling Insider reported on increasing customer dissatisfaction with gambling apps being linked to a lack of bonuses.

16. Eilers & Krejcik Gaming senior analyst Bradley Allen believes sportsbooks trump prediction markets when it comes to NFL betting.

17. The co-founder and former boss of Paddy Power believes there should be larger taxes placed on online gaming and casinos companies.

18. Speaking of which, approximately $595 million (Amarican dollars) were wagered with New York sportsbooks on Week 1 of the NFL schedule.

19. Scoopage from Ryan Glasspiegel and Ben Horney at Front Office Sports on the amount of money LeBron James is getting from Polymarket to be ye olde brand ambassador.

20. Robert Linnehan and Co. at Sports Betting Dime asked readers why Americans in states with legal sports betting use prediction markets.

21. There’s data from the folks at GBG Plc on the interest in betting and fantasy for the start of the NFL regular season.

22. Speaking of fantasy football, the aforementioned Zochodne wrote that it’s still a popular pastime across the U.S. of A.

23. Speaking of four-down football, Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcast includes a bet tracking experience courtesy of FanDuel.

24. As Todd Shriber chronicled for Casino.org, the NFL is saying no to advertising by prediction markets on league broadcasts, player endorsement deals and in stadiums.

25. Reporting by Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta at the Wall Street Journal reveals that Polymarket’s hasty expansion strategy was a batting practice fastball for fraudsters.

26. Wired journalist Kate Phibbs suggests prediction markets are a “new form of media”.

27. The former compliance director at Resorts World Las Vegas has filed a lawsuit alleging he was fired for being a whistleblower on money laundering and other suspicious activity.

28. Crypto.com and Robinhood have joined the legal fight for regulation of prediction markets to be under the CFTC’s jurisdiction.

29. What’s happening in the fight against illegal gambling, Illinois style, courtesy of The Chicagoland Journal.

30. The Tunica Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana is partnering with Kalshi for a prediction markets presence. Steve Ruddock, in his Straight to the Point newsletter, believes that’s not a wise course of action on the tribe’s part.

31. Jeff Edelstein, writing for InGame, spoke with the author of the Erotic History of Advertising on the controversial ad with Sydney Sweeney and Novig.

32. Now open for business: the PokerStars Network.

33. A House of Lords committee in the UK is calling for a total ban on gambling advertising.

34. Legend and Genius Sports have launched “the home of prediction markets”.

35. There may be a money-laundering problem with California cardrooms.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, mkdodo Commercial Director Will Whitehead spoke with host Steve McAllister on the UK company’s continued expansion into North America – including Alberta – introduction of new products and other topics.

Whitehead, who joined mkodo as an account executive in 2013 and has been in the commercial director’s role for almost five years, talked about the retirement of Stuart Godfree this summer and the lessons learned from the company’s co-founder and long-time managing director. The conversation with McAllister included the introduction of mkodo’s GeoLocs product into Alberta over the summer and its presence in the Ontario market that includes collaborating with Bede Gaming to support OLG’s igaming business.

There’s also a segment on mkodo’s adoption of new tools, including Fraud Shield and the challenges and opportunities around the demand for products beyond geolocation in today’s regulated gaming industry. Whitehead also addressed mkodo’s expansion strategy for the North American regulated market.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Canada’s Sports Media Landscape Is Changing 🎙️ 🎥

• Protecting the Next Generation of Canadian Gamblers 🎙️ 🎥

• The human cost of gambling in Canada 🎙️ 🎥

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

As a partner of SBC, Gaming News Canada is offering a 30% discount code on VIP passes AND conference, networking, and business passes. Visit the summit website and use the PARLEHPARTNERVIP code when you register.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

Ontario has a new gaming minister and, despite the obvious success of the province’s open online gambling market, Zee Hamid still has a fair bit of work to do to improve the entire gambling sector.

Last week, Premier Doug Ford announced in a cabinet shuffle that Hamid, who represents the riding of Milton just west of Toronto, will replace Stan Cho as the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming (not counting the two months Doug Downey held the position in an interim role). Cho resigned his cabinet position in July after it was discovered he had charged taxpayers more than $16,000 in hotel expenses in Toronto over the past three years despite living in the city relatively close to Queen’s Park.

At the time of Cho’s resignation, the ministry – which oversees both iGaming Ontario (iGO) and the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) – was in the midst of what has been described as a “sweeping” or “high-level” review of Ontario’s gambling industry.

One presumes that work will continue under Hamid, and it should.

At the top of the list of improvements should be increased responsible gambling programming and transparency.

Every month, iGO releases financial reports about the online sector. While those reports could use details about how Ontario’s 49 online operators are faring, and they should also be released with more expediency, at least we know how much revenue the sector has produced. Since launch in April, 2022 through this August, the iGO sites – which does not include the OLG’s online platform, which has about 20 per cent of the total market – had total gross gambling revenue of $12.97 billion, producing tax revenue of $2.59 billion for the province.

What is much more of a mystery is exactly how much of that revenue is being directed toward responsible and problem gambling resources, which are essential for protecting consumers and sustaining the sector. Yes, some of the funding comes from different Ontario ministries, but, as the gaming minister, it would be great to see Hamid take the lead and set up a website that clearly shows how much the province has directed toward responsible gambling and exactly where that money goes – and also update it regularly.

After all, there is growing concern about the rise of problem gambling in the province, and increased scrutiny from the mainstream media on that file, especially around a backlash against gambling ads.

Improvements in responsible gambling was also one of the stated missions of Cho’s review of the sector. That should include not only greater funding, but also much better transparency.

The province’s centralized self-exclusion program BetGuard, which was many months in the works, also needs much better promotion.

Another mission of the review was to improve the synergies between online gambling and retail casinos. Clearly, the continued growth of online gambling – year-to-date revenue is up 118 per cent this year compared to the first seven months of 2023 – has hurt the retail sector, as well as wagering on Ontario horse racing.

One suspects improving the fortunes of Ontario’s 30 retail casinos will be a key mission for Hamid. After all, he has both tourism and gaming under his portfolio and Ford has already announced that the government’s Destination Niagara project will allow for more retail casinos to be built in Niagara Falls.

It’s important to note that retail casinos provide many more jobs in the province than online ones, and the Ford government is particularly focused on jobs during a trade war with the United States.

Supporting jobs – particularly in rural Ontario where Ford’s PCs are particularly strong – is a key reason why, earlier this year, the Ministry, via the OLG, was part of authorizing an additional $35 million annually in each of the next five years to the province’s horse racing industry, which is home to some 18,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

Hamid’s riding is home to Woodbine Mohawk Park, one of the world’s leading harness racing racetracks and the biggest of the 11 tracks in the province offering standardbred racing. The track is also home to a casino. Both may figure prominently in Hamid’s leadership of the gambling industry.

While we’re on horse racing, Hamid could do more to direct the OLG to follow through on long-ago promised plans to better integrate its products with horse racing. For example, in Sweden, the synergies between retail lottery and horse racing via its V85 product have been particularly successful. The OLG has some 10,000 retail locations where it sells its lottery products, with all proceeds going back to the province. By working with the horse racing industry to develop V85-style retail horse racing lottery products, the OLG would be doing even more to support Ontario jobs via exposure and wagering for the labour-intensive horse racing industry.

As for developing greater synergies between retail and online casinos, that could include better partnerships between physical and online sites, as seen in some U.S. jurisdictions where the bricks-and-mortar casinos are aligned with online operators.

Caesars does this well in-house in Ontario with a rewards program that allows bettors to collect points online that can be used at Caesars Windsor and its other retail properties. This will likely be the case with Hard Rock’s online rewards program and the Hard Rock Casino in Ottawa, if it isn’t already.

But Ontario’s retail casinos are dominated by two companies – Great Canadian Entertainment and Gateway Casinos. Both could do more to align their rewards programs with online operators and provide rewards that drive business to each other.

At the SBC Summit Canada in May, Cho also said improvements were needed in audits, financial oversight and anti-money laundering (AML) initiatives. Considering the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) has been ramping up fines of late, clearly AML is on Hamid’s to-do list.

While that’s important, it shouldn’t necessarily be above consumer protection on that list. That includes tighter scrutiny on gambling ads which have been a lightning rod for the sector.

One place to start is legislation banning unregulated companies from advertising in Ontario. It’s long past time the Ontario government did more to halt the social media ads for fake online casinos scamming consumers.

It’s also time the government did more to ban broadcast ads for unregulated platforms like Ozoon, which has been advertising heavily on NFL broadcasts in Canada. To make matters worse, Ozoon is the rebranded name for Bodog, which has been banned outright in Manitoba. It certainly appears the company is trying to confuse consumers in Canada with the rebrand given a general lack of knowledge about which sites are regulated and which ones are not. That’s why the province needs to do more to, at least, ban or punish outlets and platforms from accepting ads from unregulated sites trying to dupe Ontarians. Simply saying regulated sites carry the iGO logo isn’t enough when the average person doesn’t know that.

Last, and definitely not least, the Ministry needs to work with other government agencies to limit the access of prediction markets to the regulated sector – especially when it comes to prediction-based sports betting and casinos (yes, rumours are that prediction markets are trying to find a way into the casino game).

Let’s hope Hamid puts all of that on his gaming agenda.

After all, Ontario has a good thing going in its gambling sector. But much more needs to be done to protect consumers and sustain the sector so it can be an important revenue source for Ontarians for years to come.

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Political parties push for regulated gaming in La Belle Province

En français, la porte s’est légèrement ouverte.

In English, the door to regulated gambling in Québec let in a sliver of light last week when the leaders of both the Parti Québécois and the Liberal Party brought up the issue on the provincial election trail ahead of the October 5 vote. Liberal leader Charles Milliard first made public his party’s support to put the province’s alcohol and gambling regulator (Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux) in charge of “better regulation of online gambling and predictive markets” including:

• Expand the mandate of the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux so that it can license and oversee all online gambling platforms operating in Quebec;

• Subject accredited platforms to strict rules regarding advertising, addiction prevention, and the protection of minors;

• Create an independent organization dedicated to prevention and support for people struggling with gambling addiction, funded by the industry rather than by taxpayers;

• Entrust the Autorité des marchés financiers and the Régie with the joint mandate to fill the regulatory gap surrounding prediction markets, which are currently accessible in Quebec without any regulatory framework.

Parti Quebecois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon told Radio-Canada the Liberals’ plan was “brilliant” and expounded on that in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“Mr. Milliard says — and he’s right, I’ve done the research — online sports betting in Québec is a wild west,” Plamondon said. “American companies arrive, then advertise, and are not regulated.

“Ontario decided to clean up and collect a tax on these activities, and it raised an additional $300 million. It’s an excellent idea that may fly under the radar because it’s a bit original but imagine if we take $300 million and invest it in homelessness, for children who are hungry at school, for learning disabilities. We could have an immediate impact.”

There’s certainly a case to be made for bringing in regulated sports betting and igaming (the prediction markets thing is more complicated) for the purposes of delivering more revenue to the province. Québec’s auditor general has said the new government will need to find some $5 billion in spending cuts or new revenues to balance the books by 2030.

“It won’t be possible to return to a balanced budget without finding new revenues,” Ariane Gauthier, who leads the Québec Online Gaming Coalition, told Gaming News Canada in an interview. “(A regulated market) will bring a safer environment for online players and new revenues for the government on an activity that’s already occurring in Québec.

“The Liberal Party has declared it will table a bill in the first year so it is pretty serious about this. There’s an appetite for change.”

The reigning Coalition Avenir Québec, led by new(ish) leader Christine Fréchette, has been in power for almost eight years and has resisted lobbying efforts to regulate gambling in La Belle Province since Ontario launched its market in April 2022. The ruling party appears to be standing firm on recognizing Loto-Québec as the only “legal” operator. The provincial lottery and gaming corporation is also the regulator which would have to change in a more competitive marketplace (as we’ve seen in Ontario with oversight being shared by the AGCO and iGaming Ontario, and in Alberta with AGLC and the Alberta iGaming Corporation).

“That would be very important to designate an organization to be an independent regulator,” said Gauthier, the point person for the QOGC which is made up of a half-dozen operators, online casino games supplier Games Global and Apricot Investments. “New regulation would need to be applied fairly to all operators and need to be set up for success.”

Gaming News Canada reached out to Loto-Québec spokesperson Renaud Dugas, who responded in an email: “We are not going to comment on any electoral proposals.”

Helene Fortin, the former chair of Loto-Québec reiterated her support for a regulated market in a LinkedIn post yesterday. From her post:

I was encouraged to see both the Quebec Liberal Party and the Parti Québécois acknowledge the need to reconsider how online gaming is regulated. Their positions reflect an increasingly clear reality: the market has changed, technology has changed, and our regulatory approach must evolve with it.

This should not be
a debate about Loto-Québec versus private operators. Nor should it be about
encouraging more gambling. It should be about a much more important question:
How do we best protect Quebecers who choose to gamble online, regardless of
which platform they use?

Today, Quebecers can access online gaming platforms from around the world in seconds. Regulation does not create that reality. It determines how effectively we oversee it.

A Leger poll released Monday showed the Coalition falling to third place behind the PQ and the Liberals, who have 29 per cent and 23 per cent popularity respectively with decided voters. The CAQ have dropped two points to 21 per cent.

“We know (the PQ and Liberals) are both listening carefully and understand the rationale behind the regulation of private (operators),” Gauthier said. “What we see now we are obviously happy but not completely surprised. When you take the time to look at the facts and how online gaming works and with the new technologies, you cannot arrive at another solution.”

We know that there have been conversations in other provinces and we expect there will be more serious conversations now that Alberta has joined Ontario with regulated markets (except in Saskatchewan, which recently gave the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority exclusivity for online gaming through September 2029).

“In the poll the (gaming) coalition did in 2023, two-thirds of Quebecers were in favour of regulation,” Gauthier said. “Whoever forms the next government will be able to benefit from the experiences in Ontario and Alberta. Québec will have the opportunity to imprint its own culture into the regulations.

“Ontario and Alberta have proven the mechanics of the system work.”

iGaming Ontario reacts to bad actors’ use of BetGuard

The latest battle for the overseers of Ontario’s regulated market involves iGaming Ontario’s BetGuard self-exclusion brand.

The conductor and manager of the province’s regulated gambling market announced last week that “third parties” were using the BetGuard name and brand “to make misleading statements about how to opt out of all regulated online gambling in Ontario using BetGuard”.

The communications team yesterday provided Gaming News Canada with more information on its reaction to the misuse of BetGuard.

iGaming Ontario recently became aware of two incidents involving improper use of the BetGuard name. We immediately took action to address these issues and alerted the public.

Incidents like this demonstrate the importance of the regulated market, which offers mandatory consumer protections and player safeguards no matter where they choose to play. This sets our market apart from the unregulated space, where impostor websites and other bad-faith actors have no oversight.

We continue to monitor for unauthorized use of the iGaming Ontario and BetGuard names and brands. The official BetGuard website can be found at BetGuard.ca (English) or Garde-Jeu.ca (French).

A full list of regulated operators can be found on our website.

The announcement is also a reminder to be careful when accessing online casinos through Meta platforms as we continue to find fake igaming operators showing up on Instagram.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

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Major North American sports leagues unite against betting-related harassment

On Tuesday, the NFL, MLB, MLS, NBA and NHL, and their respective unions, sent a letter to state gambling regulators requesting a “crack down on betting-related harassment of athletes, coaches and families.”

The letter asks regulators to institute:

• Mandatory lifetime platform bans for those that harass those connected to sports.

• Streamlined, centralized reporting mechanisms.

• Greater operator accountability that requires platforms to “proactively monitor, flag and ban accounts linked to abusive behaviour” toward those in sports.

“Threatening the safety of an athlete or their family members over a sports bet crosses a bright ethical and criminal line, and it is entirely unacceptable,” the group wrote.

The (latest) angst over ads featuring athletes and celebs

Given the presence of Penelope Cruz, Jennifer Coolidge, Cynthia Erivo, Seth Rogan and other stars of the silver screen (do they still call it that?) attending the Toronto International Film Festival this week, it’s rather appropriate to blow the dust off the old line “we’ve seen this movie before”.

In this case, we direct you to the recent tsunami of endorsement deals involving athletes past and present, movie stars and other celebrities with prediction market operators in the land on the other side of Lake Huron. LeBron James, Eli Manning, Maria Sharapova, Pete Sampras, Sue Bird, Jeremy Piven. . . and Sydney Sweeney.

As Covers guy Geoff Zochodne reported last week, the American Gaming Association estimated in August that regulated exchanges had spent nearly $200 million on digital advertising so far this year. That number doesn’t include partnerships by Kalshi, Polymarket and Novig with sports leagues and teams (the most recent deal between Kalshi and the U.S. Open was highly criticized), and the recent rash of these endorsement deals leading into the start of the NFL regular season.

Sweeney’s “collaboration” with Novig has been come under fire from athletes in Canada and around the rest of the planet. Not surprisingly, Novig is defending the campaign.

Folks familiar with the launch of Ontario’s regulated sports betting and online gaming market in April 2022 know quite well the backlash to the wave of advertising and marketing with Hockey Night in Canada facing the most flak for its clunky attempts at bringing together the country’s iconic TV property with sports betting content. (Jonah Sigel and your humble correspondent had a chin wag about the integration of sports and sports betting content on this week’s Gaming News Canada Show.)

The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario reacted to the angst over advertising by changing the rules around the use of athletes and the overlords of Alberta’s still-new regulated market have repeatedly said they’re keeping tabs on amount and types of advertising by incoming operators.

For now, south of the border, the mantra of prediction market owners - and that also applies to the ongoing tug-of-war with the sports betting industry, state regulators, Native American tribes, elected officials, etc. - appears to have been borrowed from Rhett Butler’s comment to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

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People on the Move

• Gaming News Canada learned Monday that Alexander Bishop has left iGaming Ontario and his role as Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy.

• Elected to the Board of Directors at Esports Canada are Ash Molaei, Gabriel Pinkstone, Ivona Novak, Tamara Edwards and Rosaline Fu Wei Leung.

• After almost 20 years, most recently as General Manager and Vice President at FanDuel, Andrew Moore has left Flutter.

• Lawrence Gouett, ex of Toronto-based Millbrook Media, GameVillage and Gamesys, has founded Quest Gaming and will be the company’s Chief Executive Officer.

• Alex Gersh, ex of Sportradar and Betfair, is the new Chief Financial Officer at DAZN while Darren Waterman moves from CFO into the newly created position of Chief Business Officer. Patrick Delany is appointed Chief Operating Officer.

• ComeOn Group names Sherwin Jarvand as Chief Operating Officer and Alex Woodhams as Chief Product Officer.

• Steven Vo is promoted to Chief Technology Officer at GeoComply.

• Steve Talbot joins Xtremepush as Chief Marketing Officer.

• Hacksaw Gaming appoints Julia Waern as Chief Commercial Officer.

• Warren Jenson is Polymarket’s new Chief Financial Officer.

• Adam Chibib will be joining IGT as Chief Financial Officer on November 1.

• Kostandina Zafirovska is the new Vice President of E2E Platform Solutions at Sportradar.

• Cassandra Matilde Fernandes is appointed Associate Vice President and Manager of Financial Crime Prevention at the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority in the UAE.

• Victor Arias comes aboard FIRST.bet as Vice President of LATAM & Head of Commercial LATAM.

• Penn Entertainment names Justin Carter as Managing Director, North America.

• Octoplay appoints Camila Alves as Head of Region LATAM.

• Miguel Queiroz, formerly Head of Casino Product at BV Group, joins BetWarrior as Head of Gaming.

• Andrew Gladwell is leaving FanDuel as Managing Director, Product. Katharine Rogerson is appointed Campaign Strategy Senior Associate and Michael Maglietta is named Product Advisory Senior Manager. Averie Ikeda-Lee joins the Toronto team as a Marketing Communications Intern.

• Marc Greenblatt is appointed Senior Manager, Customer Engagement at bet365.

• Taegan Scott has a new role at the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority as an iGaming Operations Manager.

• Josiah Davis joins BetMGM as a Marketing Acquisition Analyst.

• Dayna Camilleri Clarke, ex of Game Lounge and Wildz Group, joins Growth Leads/Playersbest as an SEO Product Market Owner.

• Mandy Thompson, ex of Blackhawk Network, joins fintech business Yaspa as a Marketing Manager to support the company’s planned expansion in North America.

• Kirsten Multani is named PR & Social Media Manager at Relax Gaming.

• Natasha Cooke is appointed Manager, Talent Acquisition at the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority.

• After five and a half years, Matt Williams leaves Genius Sports to join SumerSports as a Senior Product Manager.

• NFL HQ names Hans Schroeder as Executive Vice President and Chief Media Officer.

• John Cullen is promoted to Head of Content at The Curling Group.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• With Alexander Bishop’s departure from iGaming Ontario, the conductor and manager is looking for a new Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy.

• DraftKings has a remote opportunity in the true north strong and free for a Sportsbook Operations Senior Associate. In Toronto, there’s an opening for a Manager, Integrated Marketing.

• The Alberta iGaming Corporation requires a Manager, Technology Services and a Responsible Gaming Program Analyst.

• Betty boss Chavdar Dimitrov made the pitch via the LinkedIn for Software Engineers.

• FINTRAC Canada is seeking a Senior Analyst, Workplace Tools.

• Bet99 is looking for a Creator Marketing Manager.

• Pinnacle has an opening for a Trading Systems Analyst.

• In Toronto, Red Bull is hiring a Head of Creator Marketing.

• The NHLPA has an opening in Toronto for a Commercial Lawyer.

• Your Toronto Blue Jays has a contract position available for a Manager, Ballpark Experience & Operations.

• Wanted by the Canadian Olympic Committee: a Coordinator, Marketing Partnerships.

On the South Side of Lake Ontario

• In New York, FanDuel is searching for a Commercial Analyst – Casino.

• Aristocrat Gaming has need of a Data Scientist.

• Better Collective is on the lookout for a Content Manager/Writer (Sportsbook and Prediction Markets).

• NASCAR is searching for a Senior Director, Brand Content & Production.

• The Major League Baseball Players Association is hiring a Director, Sponsorship.

• NHL HQ is seeking a Senior Manager, Partnership Marketing.

• Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios have an opportunity in Culver City, CA, for a Marketing Manager, U.S. Sports Marketing.

• The Vegas Golden Knights are in the market for a Manager – Global Partnerships Activation.

Across the Ponds

In the GLA (Greater London Area), Smarkets is seeking a Vice President, Commercial and Marketing.

In Ashkelon, Israel, there’s a Director of Business Development position available at LSports.

The company formerly known as Growth Leads has a number of remote opportunities available including a Business Development & Partnerships Manager.

EPIC Global Solutions is seeking a Senior Finance Manager.

In Malta, DAZN Bet is bringing on board a Compliance Manager.

Reading and Reflecting

1. The main players in North American professional sports are asking sports betting operations to do more when it comes to harassment and abuse of athletes.

2. Covers guy Geoff Zochodne interviewed STX founder and CEO Justin Deutsch on the Ontario operator’s plans for south of the border.

3. Betty has launched its first in-house game in Ontari-ari-ari-o and the company has plans to collaborate with “innovative” slot studios.

4. Props to the folks at the Alberta iGaming Corporation for its social media campaign on gambling responsibly, including:

5. The European-based Financial Action Task Force made public last week analysis aggregated from some 80 jurisdictions that highlights new types of criminal abuse in gambling that’s happening.

6. FanDuel issued a mea culpa among other things to customers for a malfunction of its DFS product over the weekend.

7. Martin Nevis, reporting for the iGaming Europe media outlet, wrote Playtech tripled its revenue in the U.S. and Canada in the first half of 2026.

8. Tony Maglio tapped the keys for The Hollywood Reporter and asked the question: what happened to esports?

9. Speaking of esports, Bloomberg’s Cecilia D’Anastasio reports that Riot Games has spoken with Polymarket and Kalshi about sponsorship deals.

10. Parlays reigned supreme for Kalshi in an incredibly robust opening weekend of the NFL regular season.

11. Barron’s chronicler Nick Devor put the ball on the kicking tee for the NFL schedule and the anticipated prediction market battle(s).

12. Speaking of Devor, he had a bit of journalistic scoopage last week on FanDuel and other operators making markets via Kalshi.

13. A series of new programs released Monday by DraftKings includes an advertising campaign with Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas that includes RG messaging.

14. Job cuts at bet365’s operations in Stoke, Malta and Gibraltar were confirmed last week.

15. A campaign by FDJ United in Swedish schools revealed a lack of education about the risks of gambling.

16. Finland’s version of OLG/AGLC/ Loto-Québec/BCLC/etc. is preparing for the incoming competitive regulated landscape.

17. FanDuel has a new partner for its sportsbook and prediction markets business.

18. The man behind Entourage isn’t a big fan of the Betr ad bringing back together the HBO comedy’s stars Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier.

19. Contrary to the earlier words of Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, wrote Dustin Gouker, sports are a pretty big deal for the prediction markets operator.

20. Jeff Edelstein weighed in on all the recent happenings at fantasy sports operator Underdog.

21. High Roller Technologies grand poobah Seth Young spoke with Adam Roarty of Esports Insider about the state of esports betting on the other side of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

22. Better Collective’s latest partner is Yahoo Sports.

23. Some M&A news from last week involving GameSquare and FanEngine.

24. Bad news for Kalshi with its legal wranglings in Iowa and Utah over sports contracts.

25. A smart piece from Rebecca Tauber of The Athletic on this year’s U.S. Open and the “easy” access to wagering on the best tennis players on the planet.

26. The president of Brazil is having second thoughts, for now, on regulated sports betting in his country.

27. Finally, a good read from Sportico reporter Justin Birnbaum on athletes, production companies and “media empires”.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, Jonah Sigel rejoined Steve McAllister for a wide-ranging discussion on the business of sports, sports media and sports betting.

Sigel, a Toronto Star contributor and the host of the Bleav In The Pressrow podcast, gave McAllister his thoughts on the Sportsnet/NHL partnership and the tweaks that were made over the summer to talent at Hockey Night in Canada. He was also asked about the contract status of popular Toronto Raptors voice Jack Armstrong, which appears to be related to the new ownership structure of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.

Five years after Sportsnet hired Cabral (Cabbie) Richards as executive producer of sports betting content – a move that didn’t pan out - Sigel and McAllister debated the integration of sports betting into sports media including the relationship between FanDuel and TSN, why the networks haven’t leaned into a second-screen experience that’s betting focused, and Sigel’s opinion on that information being provided around game broadcasts.

Finally, the host and his guest talked about the current state of sports media and journalism.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Protecting the Next Generation of Canadian Gamblers 🎙️ 🎥

• The human cost of gambling in Canada 🎙️ 🎥

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s gaming media roundtable dives into Alberta’s launch, PlayAlberta and Ontario’s evolving market🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

As a partner of SBC, Gaming News Canada is offering a 30% discount code on VIP passes AND conference, networking, and business passes. Visit the summit website and use the PARLEHPARTNERVIP code when you register.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

NFL bettors continue to be bullish on the Buffalo Bills, especially in our home and native land.

Professional four-down football’s regular season opens tonight with a Super Bowl rematch between the league-champion Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots. For this edition, Gaming News Canada canvassed several operators offering wagering activity in Ontario and Alberta’s regulated markets and the betting patterns heading into the regular season were quite similar from the online sportsbooks responding to our inquiries.

Information provided by BetMGM, OLG’s Proline+ product and DraftKings, along with watching last night TSN’s NFL Season Preview Show powered by the network’ss official sports betting partner FanDuel paint a similar picture when it comes to Josh Allen and Co., who’ll play in the brand spanking new Highmark Stadium this season. (By the by, we raised a Spockian eyebrow when watching a Bills-centric segment on the TSN website only to see a Hard Rock Bet pre-roll ad appear before the FanDuel-sponsored segment.)

BetMGM media insights guru John Ewing emailed GNC to let us know that while the Los Angeles Rams are the most bet-on team to win the NFL championship in all markets including Canada, “we see more interest on the Bills to win the Super Bowl in Ontario/Alberta than in the U.S. In all markets, 8.1 percent of bets and 9.7 per cent of money is on the Bills to win it all. In Canada, 15.8 per cent of bets and 20.4% of money is on the Bills. Ewing also passed along that 37 per cent of bets and 61 per cent of money is on Buffalo to capture the AFC title while other markets lean towards the Denver Broncos.

OLG communications boss Tony Bitonti put on our radar a preseason odds boost being offered on Proline+ for the Bills to win the Super Bowl, although the Rams are listed as the favourites.

From Johnny Avello, the long-time dean of trading at DraftKings: “The NFL season always draws significant betting interest, and we expect to see robust engagement across Ontario and Alberta throughout the year. With high expectations for Canadian fan favorites such as the Bills, Lions and Seahawks, along with an action-packed schedule, there will be no shortage of compelling matchups for customers to follow and engage with on our platform.”

TSN sports betting expert Domenic Padula posted yesterday about the popularity of the Rams and Bills with FanDuel bettors in Ontario and Alberta.

Also from Proline’s trading team, courtesy of Bitonti:

• Sunday’s Jaguars-Browns game is a popular Week 1 game with 97 per cent of Proline+ customers taking Jacksonville.

• “Ontario’s other team”, the Detroit Lions, are a heavy favourite with Proline players in their season opener against the New Orleans Saints.

• Tonight’s Seahawks-Patriots tilt has attracted the most wagering on the over-under.

BetMGM is also touting more than 500 betting markets for each NFL game and expanded “cash out” options.

A dearth of information from operators and regulators makes it difficult to analyze the popularity of the NFL with sports bettors in Canada, the American Gaming Association announced last week that wagering on football is expected to be flat this season. Also, Eric Ramsey, has a terrific piece in The Closing Line that points to regulated football betting being “likely to contract this season for the first time in the post-PASPA era”. Ramsey points to tax increases in some states with regulated betting, and decrease in promotional spend by sportsbooks and, of course, the presence of prediction markets for the expected decline in wagering on football.

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

FINTRAC’s latest monetary penalties come under criticism from Kinectify exec

On Sept. 3, just before breaking for the Labour Day Weekend, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) announced it had issued two monetary penalties to provincial gambling outfits in Atlantic Canada.

FINTRAC reported it had hit the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation (NSGC) with a $231,826 penalty on July 23 for three violations. FINTRAC said the NSGC:

1. Failed to report suspicious transactions where there were reasonable grounds to suspect they were related to money laundering.

2. Failed to develop and implement written anti-money laundering (AML) policies and procedures.

3. Failed to assess and document the risk on the above.

NSGC spokesperson Rachel Boomer told the Canadian Press, as reported by Devin Stevens, “there were two cases where reports were not issued to FINTRAC. She said the transactions were valued at $750 and $465 and there was no evidence of money laundering.”

In the other case, FINTRAC issued a monetary penalty of $399,712.50 on July 24 to the New Brunswick Lotteries and Gaming Corporation (NBLGC) for failing to “submit suspicious transaction reports where there were reasonable grounds to suspect that transactions were related to a money laundering or terrorist activity financing offence.”

Both the NSGC and NBLGC have paid their penalties in full.

GNC editor Steve McAllister reached out to Derek Ramm, the global head of advisory services at Kinectify Advisors for comment, and Ramm replied as follows:

“If the news reports are to be believed – the article you linked says the transactions in question were valued at $750 and $465 – then it seems to me that FINTRAC again is losing sight of the bigger picture,” Ramm wrote. “The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), of which Canada is a member, sets the minimum suspicious activity threshold at $3,000. Canada has not established a threshold but expending significant federal resources on a few hundred dollars seems a bit ridiculous.

“⁠These latest fines continue to demonstrate the fact that provincial lottery and gaming corporations are not the appropriate organization to be held responsible for anti-money laundering compliance and reporting. By my count, five Crown or First Nations agencies have received a penalty in the past year, and more will be coming. A quirk of Canada’s Criminal Code has created the ‘conduct and manage’ model, which translates poorly into the AML compliance world since most of these agencies have no interaction with customers and do not process the financial transactions. In addition, most Crown agencies have demonstrated that they simply aren’t up to the task and don’t prioritize financial crime prevention.”

Ontario, we have a failure to communicate

For the past month or so, your waffling editor-in-chief has been going back and forth so much on whether to pound the keyboard on this issue that we had to deal with a case of recurring vertigo.

Okay, the vertigo thing isn’t true. But we are going ahead with some thoughts on the shortcomings of leadership in Ontario’s regulated gaming industry when it comes to communications. That catalyst for our rant du jour? This X post – and this one - when the premier of the province expressed his gratitude for reporters not being present at a public announcement.

It also prompted us to go through the GNC archives and find an edition of the newsletter from 12 months ago when we offered some advice that leadership at the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) and iGaming Ontario (iGO) should take on an expanded role in the conversation around regulated sports betting and online gaming.

Nothing has really changed and for now, we’ll put the blame on the people at the top – which would be the elected officials in the Douglas Ford government with a not-so-flattering silence-is-golden mandate. The premier suggesting there’s never been a more transparent government is hypocrisy of Mt. Kilimanjaro heights.

We place the blame at the feet of Ford and Co. because our experience with both senior executives and the communications staffs at the AGCO and iGO have been professional and cordial. When we have a question for our coverage of the industry, the communications teams respond in a timely manner and we’ve had respectful conversations over the past five years with Dr. Karin Schnarr, Dave Phillips, Brent McCurdy and Doug Hood at the AGCO, and with (former AGCO chaps) Joseph Hillier and Ben Valido at iGO.

That’s the good. The bad:

• Schnarr was hired in August 2023 as the commission’s CEO and registrar. Despite repeated requests, we’ve yet to have her join us on the Gaming News Canada Show. Meanwhile, Dan Keene has been our guest on the podcast twice since being placed in charge of the Alberta iGaming Corporation and named CEO in mid-May.

• When we were reporting on prediction markets in Canada last month, we reached out to the AGCO and iGO with a few questions. The AGCO’s communications person directed us to the Minister of Finance’s office and iGO steered us towards the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming office. The office in charge of gaming got back to us quickly. In Alberta, however, both AGLC and AiGC provided GNC with statements instead of directing us to the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction’s office.

• The monthly market performance reports issued by iGO continue to be a source of frustration for media and industry stakeholders seeking more transparency around the numbers. Also, it’s a guessing game for reporters when the monthly reports become available since iGO stopped putting out news releases in the fall of 2024. (One member of the fourth estate told us this summer they put a reminder in their calendar every month to search for the market performance report.

• There’s a disappointing lack of activity on iGO’s communications vehicles. Five news releases since January 2025, not one X post since then, not one Instagram post since May 2025 although the organization does post in a somewhat-regular cadence on LinkedIn.

The regulating and conduct-and-manage organizations in charge of Ontario’s gaming industry are led by people with experience and expertise around the business of betting. At a time when there’s increasing scrutiny/criticism around problem gambling, advertising and marketing (including the promotion of fake online casinos on Instragram) and youth gambling, the voices advocating for a regulated industry are minimal. Also, it’s perplexing that with so many voices here in Canada and internationally lauding the Ontario model, the folks largely responsible for creating said model are kept under wraps.

Perhaps when a replacement is found for Stan Cho as the new gaming minister, a commitment to better communication will be made by way of removing the handcuffs from the people operating the industry on behalf of the provincial government.

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People on the Move

• Mira Mircheva is leaving Bally’s Corporation and her Chief Financial Officer position. Current president George Papanier will also serve as interim CFO.

• Jonas Ericson is named Chief Financial Officer at Avanti Studios.

• Michael Waterfield is appointed Chief Commercial Officer at Booming Games.

• Ruth Evans is the new Chair of the UK Gambling Commission, effective Sept. 30.

• The Western Canada Lottery Corporation promotes Adam Janssens to Vice President, Information Technology.

• Betty names Yulian Maslarski as Vice President of Live Ops for its UK business.

• Dror Damchinsky is appointed Vice President, Operational Excellence at Aristocrat Interactive.

• Midnite names Willie Lok as Vice President of Casino and Loyalty Products.

• Robert Christopher is appointed Vice President, Marketing at Fairmount Park Casino & Racing.

• Stuart Banks is departing Light & Wonder and his role as Managing Director, Global Partnerships.

• David Coletti is named Head of Global Research & Measurement at DAZN.

• North Star Network appoints Viviane Wirthmann as Head of Content.

• Louise Colclough, ex of bet365, joins Betfred as Head of Retail Compliance.

• Tamsin Suarez is named Legal Counsel at Relax Gaming.

• BetMGM appoints Darren Lynch as Senior Director, Commercial Revenue.

• Lauren Orwoll joins Sportradar as Senior Director, People Partnering, Corporate Functions & Talent Acquisition.

• Simone Gambardella, ex of PG Esports, GGTech Entertainment and Dentsu Creative Italy, joins SportFive as Senior Director, Global Brand Partnerships, Gaming & Esports.

• Mitch Bloch has a new gig at DraftKings as Director, Analytics. Jordan Moore is promoted to Social Marketing Specialist and Madison Hentosh is promoted to Senior Social Marketing Associate. Cole Koeppel is now Senior Associate, Busines Development (Teams & Leagues).

• Former SIS head of competitive gaming product Peter Camden is named Director of Fast Betting Content at Oddin.gg.

• Lance Xuereb joins Play’n GO as a Global Account Director.

• David Bearman joins the United Football League as a Sports Betting Strategist.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• In the city below Terra Cotta, Legend is hiring a Vice President, Product – Sports.

• There’s an opportunity at Pinnacle for a Senior Software Engineer.

• In Victoria, Blastworks is searching for a Senior Product Manager (Games/Live Ops).

• Bet99 is looking for an IT Systems & Security Administrator.

• The folks in charge of finance at Loto-Québec are seeking a Financial Operations Administration Technician.

• Canucks Sports & Entertainment is hiring a Vice President, Ticket Sales & Service.

• The OHL Brampton Steelheads are on the lookout for a Manager, Brand Partnerships & School Programs.

On the South Side of Lake Ontario

• Wanted at MGM Resorts International: an Executive Director, Tech Gaming Compliance.

• Caesars Entertainment is searching for a Lead Game Server Developer, iGaming.

• In New York, DAZN is hiring a Senior Paid Media Manager.

• There’s an opening at IGT for a Manager, Business Unit Finance.

• In Jacksonville, Fla., Paysafe is seeking a Product Manager.

• Wanted by the NFL Players Association: a Senior Director, Strategy and Operations.

• Among the current job postings at Bauer Hockey/Cascade Maverik are several marketing positions around social media and content creation.

• In Los Angeles, Lululemon is looking for a Senior Manager – Influencer Marketing.

Across the Ponds

• DraftKings has an opening in London for a Sportsbook Operations Senior Associate.

• Rhino Entertainment is on the lookout for a Treasury & Finance Specialist.

• EPIC Global Solutions is in the market for a Senior Finance Manager.

• Fanatics has an opening in the UK for an Editor.

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Reading and Reflecting

1. Tom Nightingale of Canadian Gaming Business sets the table for next month’s scheduled Supreme Court of Canada hearing into cross-border online gaming between Alberta and Ontario.

2. While we continue our efforts to have Richard Rawlinson join us on the Gaming News Canada Show, the managing director of DAZN Bet Canada did the Q and A thing with Yogonet.

3. Royal Vegas Casino joined the roster of regulated gaming websites in Alberta last week, bringing the number to 30.

4. The North American expansion of Games Global’s business includes Alberta.

5. A whole lot of free gas was pumped into cars at gas stations in five cities across Ontario and Alberta last week, courtesy of DraftKings’ Gameday campaign.

6. Speaking of DK, it has expanded its partnership with IC360.

7. Data released by the Bank of America Institute shows a sharp hike in online betting users this summer with Gen Z and Millennials responsible for 88 per cent of online betting activity in July.

8. Regulus Partners guy Dan Waugh pointed out the “elementary problems” with data released by the UK Gambling Commission.

9. American sports media personality Bill Simmons has learned his lesson from proxy betting.

10. Stefan Velikov of Gambling News examined the increase in American women dealing with problem gambling.

11. Paddy Power, reported the Racing Post, is closing up to 100 betting shops in the UK.

12. A case of premature compensation delivered by Kalshi from the Michigan-Western Michigan gridiron thriller on Saturday.

13. Politico’s Declan Harty delivered a thorough catch-all on the “nationwide brawl” between U.S. states and prediction markets.

14. The USTA’s new partnership with Kalshi incurred the wrath of long-time tennis scribe Ben Rothenberg.

15. The U.S. Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority has suspended a trainer after two of his horses tested positive for a banned substance while an investigation into unusual betting is ongoing.

16. ESPN’s Doug Greenberg went deep in reporting on NFL survivor pools.

17. Last week, Polymarket brought aboard Maria Sharapova and LeBron James as brand ambassadors.

18. Circa director Jeffrey Benson took the blunt route in an X post about prediction markets.

19. Continent 8 Technologies and Nutanix have expanded their technology partnership.

20. Dan Bernstein of Sportico has the details on Kalshi removing injury-related wagers from its sports offerings, at the request of the CFTC.

21. News Monday morning that Genius Sports is a partner in a new athlete-led sports media company.

22. Just before layoffs were reported on the UK side of the business, bet365 continues to grow its American footprint, announcing Monday a partnership with the Washington Capitals, Wizards and Mystics.

23. Erik Gibbs of NEXT.io reported that Star Entertainment is being closely watched by Australian gambling operators for below-average standards around responsible gaming.

24. Speaking of NEXT.io, Rory Calland reported on a . . . umm. . . report that suggests prediction markets are going to give regulators challenges when it comes to staying on top of things.

25. In a Labour Day edition of his Straight to the Point newsletter, Steve Ruddock called for stronger oversight of prediction markets south of Lake Ontario.

26. Bill Speros, tapping the letters on the keyboard for RotoWire, spent an hour interviewing Kalshi boss Tarek Mansour.

27. There’s another player joining the prediction markets. . . er. . . . market.

28. The University of Cincinnati has been cleared of wrongdoing in the Brendan Sorsby affair.

29. High Roller Technologies will begin next week testing of its prediction market product.

30. The union that represents New York Times journalists has a beef with a potential partnership between Kalshi and The Athletic.

31. Comedian/actor Kevin Hart has another endorsement deal in the gaming industry, with Pragmatic Play.

32. There’s a legal cage match going on between gaming influencers in the U.S. of A.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, Harley Redlick makes his return for a conversation with host Steve McAllister.

These days the Executive Director of the Canadian Addiction Recovery Association, Redlick explained the services provided by CARA – including its partnership with Connex Ontario - and the work he’s been doing since joining the organization in the spring.

Redlick also spoke about recent media coverage of youth gambling in Ontario, Massachusetts, the Netherlands and Sweden along with new(ish) programs by the Responsible Gambling Council to educate high-school students about the potential dangers of gambling. That led to a discussion about advertising and the use of athletes by sportsbook and online gaming operators in Ontario, where the Alcohol and Gambling Commission changed regulations around that use in 2024 and the lessons learned from four-plus years of regulated gambling in the province with Alberta’s regulated market approaching its two-month anniversary this weekend.

Finally, McAllister asked Redlick about the Osgoode Certificate in Gambling Law program he launched with lawyer and gaming industry veteran Don Bourgeois. The program will be offered again this fall with registration currently taking place.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• The human cost of gambling in Canada 🎙️ 🎥

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s gaming media roundtable dives into Alberta’s launch, PlayAlberta and Ontario’s evolving market🎙️ 🎥

• Is Alberta Canada’s biggest iGaming opportunity yet?🎙️ 🎥

• Inside Alberta’s Historic Gaming Market Launch with AiGC CEO Dan Keene🎙️ 🎥

• Alberta Goes Live: Inside Day One of Canada’s new gaming market🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

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As a partner of SBC, Gaming News Canada is offering a 30% discount code on VIP passes AND conference, networking, and business passes. Visit the summit website and use the PARLEHPARTNERVIP code when you register.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

One of North America’s biggest brands in the gambling game is taking it slow and steady when it comes to its strategy for Ontari-ari-ari-o.

Gaming News Canada learned yesterday morning that Fanatics has soft-launched its online casino product, becoming the 49^th operator to join the province’s regulated market. The company, which currently has its igaming offerings available in Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has no timeline for launching its sportsbook here.

“We led with casino because it’s fastest to market. We will follow with sports,” Conor Grant, a 30-year veteran of the gambling industry who was hired by Fanatics two years ago to lead the igaming business, told Gaming News Canada.

Fanatics has been on almost everyone’s radar to come to Ontario since the province gave the green light to regulated gambling in April 2022. Grant told us there’s a method to the methodical approach.

“We only launched a (online) casino in January 2024,” he said. “When we launch our products, we want to make sure we get into the market for testing. There’s a large casino market in Ontario and Alberta with some really good operators and competitors there.

“We want to get our product into tip-top shape.”

For now, Fanatics Casino is offering, “hundreds of games across live dealer slots and table games” from well-known suppliers including IGT PlayDigital, Evolution and Playtech, with more to come.

Of course, we asked Grant about Fanatics’ plans for Alberta.

“That’s something we will do in 2027, and that’s all I can say right now,” was his response.

Opening your digital doors with igaming makes an awful lot of sense in Ontario, where – as Dave Briggs writes a little lower in this dispatch – last month 80 per cent of handle came from online casinos. For Fanatics, a known entity across Canada thanks in large part to its jersey partnership with the National Hockey League’s 32 teams, and a notable collectibles enterprise, there’s already brand recognition in the marketplace (as the Ivey leaguers say).

So, don’t expect to see a wave of advertising and marketing until later in the year.

“We have a lot of brand trust and equity, and we’re well-recognized in sports,” Grant said. “What we bring into this market is a challenger-brand proposition we believe will cut through.”

Fanatics, according to Grant, understands that a copy-and-paste approach to Ontario isn’t a winning strategy in one of the world’s most competitive regulated markets.

“We’ve seen in our research that if we treat this like our American business, we won’t be successful. You have to make sure the proposition resonates with Canadian customers.”

“We’re not treating Ontario as a 51^st state.”

Asked about the company’s player safety strategy, Grant pointed to Fanatics being among the first gambling operators in the U.S. to ban the use of credit cards. He added that the casino product has in place the iGaming Ontario-mandated BetGuard self-exclusion program.

“It’s hugely important you take a very responsible approach to how you grow and scale your business,” he said. “We want to do the right thing by our customers.”

As we were putting the finishing touches on the newsletter, the latest Eilers & Krejcik Gaming Betting Market Monitor landed in our inbox, pegging Fanatics as an “ascendant challenger” in the online sports betting space and wrestling for the No. 3 spot with BetMGM behind FanDuel and DraftKings.

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions.

Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Saskatchewan extends online gambling agreement with First Nations

If you had a futures wager on the provincial government in Saskatchewan launching regulated gambling between now and 2029, we’re sorry.

The Scott Moe government announced Monday it has extended online gambling exclusivity to the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), via the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority (SIGA) for another three years, through September 2029.

“The gaming sector provides significant First Nations employment and supports economic development on- and off-reserve, while funding education, housing and many other priorities,” said Jeremy Harrison, the minister responsible for Lotteries and Gaming Saskatchewan. “Revenue-sharing arrangements agreed to in the GFA mean that both the province and First Nations in Saskatchewan have a vested interest in the success of the gaming sector.”

The deal also allows for a gaming centre pilot project on the Flying Dust First Nation in the northwestern end of the province. The project will allow for up to 49 slot machines.

According to SIGA’s 2025-26 annual report, mobile gaming accounted for 75 per cent of revenue, and the $31.6 million in gross gaming revenue generated by igaming was a 23.4-per-cent increase over the previous fiscal year.

Sports and entertainment won’t be regulated by securities/derivatives legislation: CSA

Well, that was quick, although we aren’t, in journalism parlance, putting a -30- on this story.

Less than 24 hours after reporting on the status of prediction markets in our home and native land, the Canadian Securities Administrators and Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization made public a “notice to provide guidance on the application of securities and derivatives legislation to certain products commonly described as event contracts, prediction contracts or prediction market contracts.”

The most relevant sentence in the CSA/CIRO release for the readers of this dispatch?

CSA staff’s view is that Event Contracts based on sports and entertainment events or outcomes should not be regulated within securities and derivatives legislation.

Canadian Gaming Association head honcho Paul Burns told us on a recent episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming that, essentially, any activity around sports by a prediction market business is betting and should be overseen by gaming regulators.

“The Canadian Gaming Association welcomes today’s guidance from CSA and CIRO staff. It brings clarity to a question that matters a great deal to Canadian consumers, provincial governments, and the licensed gaming industry: sports wagering is sports betting, whatever the platform, and it belongs within the framework that provinces have built specifically to regulate it,” said Burns in a dispatch from the association.

Also:

Sports wagering carries risks that provincial gaming regulators are specifically equipped to manage. Robust know-your-customer checks, anti-money laundering controls, responsible gambling safeguards, and integrity monitoring to detect and deter collusion or match manipulation are not incidental features of a well-run sports betting market — they are the foundation of one. These protections have been built and refined over years by provincial regulators working directly with licensed operators, and they do not appear automatically simply because a product is labelled a “contract” rather than a “bet.”

The CGA has long held that sports wagering, in whatever form it takes, should be offered only through provincial gaming regulators, and that the framework governing a product should be determined by what it does, not by what it is called. Today’s guidance affirms that principle, as CSA and CIRO have drawn a clear and sensible line: the distinction between a sports contract and a sports bet should not be reduced to semantics.

In case you missed last week’s newsletter, a white paper created by Wealthsimple’s two senior legal beagles, the case was made for gaming regulators to steer clear.

. . . sports outcomes, should be assigned to gaming regulation while the rest stay under securities regulation. This is unworkable and does not reflect the structure of these contracts or markets. A contract on the outcome of a soccer match and a contract on the level of inflation are, mechanically, the same instrument. Each is a binary contract that derives its value from an underlying event, and each reaches a Canadian client through a chain of intermediaries.

Dividing up the regulatory oversight of derivatives instruments that operate in identical ways, and differ only by subject matter, is the wrong approach. It would be unprecedented in Canada. We do not operate in a system where securities issued by telecommunications companies or banks are regulated differently than securities issued by mining companies or technology companies. Securities are securities, and issuers must all follow the same set of rules, no matter the industry they operate in.

As of our deadline last night, we hadn’t seen a response from Wealthsimple to last week’s CSA/CIRO announcement.

The Logic’s finance reporter Claire Brownell, in a LinkedIn post, very nicely provided a trio of possibilities on what could happen next.

As of today, our . . . er. . . prediction is that Canadian stakeholders won’t take the same mud-packed path as its neighbours on the south side of Lake Ontario. Those waters were muddied even further last week with the legal wranglings around prediction markets likely headed to the Supreme Court and no end in sight to the fight between the gambling industry and PMs.

Oh yeah, and the NFL regular season is just around the corner.

Ontario online gambling market still exploding, sets revenue record for online casinos

More than four years in, Ontario’s online gambling market continues to boom, and online casinos are driving the explosion.

July figures released last week by iGaming Ontario show it was not only the second-best month in history based on gross gambling revenue, but the total of $413.6 million is also up more than $100 million – or 33 per cent – compared to July of 2025.

The record total of $425.4 million was set in December of 2025. July was the fourth straight month that exceeded $400 million and the seventh time in the last nine months.

Online casino revenue of $330.4 million in July was an all-time record for Ontario and accounted for 80 per cent of the total revenue in the month. It was the fifth straight month and the eighth time in the last 10 months that online casino revenue has $300 million.

Revenue for sports betting was $77.8 million in July, down marginally from $78.6 million in June. July is, typically, a slower month for sports betting. However, year-over-year, the July figure was up 48 per cent from $52.7 million in July of 2025. That is likely due to the World Cup being held this year in June and July. Still, the most recent month’s total is down significantly from the November through January period dominated by football, basketball and hockey. November of 2025 was the first and only time online sports betting revenue has exceeded $100 million.

Some other notable figures:

Year-to-Date (through July 2026 compared to first seven months of 2025)

• Total online gambling revenue of $2.7 billion up 26 per cent from $2.2 billion

• Total online casino revenue of $2.2 billion up 30 per cent from $1.7 billion

• Total online sports betting revenue of $533 million up 19 per cent from $449 million

Year-to-Date compared to the first seven months of 2023 (the first full year the market was open)

• Total revenue is up 118 per cent compared to January through July of 2023 ($1.24 billion)

• Online casino revenue is up 59 per cent compared to January through July of 2023 ($890 million)

• Online sports betting is up 69 per cent compared to January through July of 2023 ($315 million)

Lifetime totals:

• Total online gambling revenue: $12.97 billion

• Online casino revenue: $9.81 billion

• Online sports betting revenue: $2.9 billion

• Online poker revenue: $265 million

• Tax revenue from online gambling: $2.59 billion

  ---

One month in: Reflections from Alberta’s newest regulated market

A month-plus after launching in Alberta, Betty is already seeing the value of entering Canada’s newest regulated iGaming market.

From conversations with players to community activations and day-to-day engagement, the first month has reinforced the importance of understanding local audiences while continuing to deliver an experience rooted in trust, transparency and responsible gaming.

While it’s still early days, Alberta has demonstrated many of the characteristics of a modern regulated market, giving operators an opportunity to build meaningful relationships with players from the outset.

“The first month in Alberta has reinforced the importance of listening,” says Andrea Stodart, Vice President of Marketing at Betty. “Every conversation with players, whether online or in person, helps us better understand what they value and where we can continue improving the experience.”

As Alberta’s regulated gaming market continues to develop, Betty says those early learnings will help shape its approach to future innovation, player engagement and long-term growth in Canada.

AGCO monetary penalties to operators now exceed $1.5 million

Thanks to a $100,000 monetary penalty issued last week to NorthStar Gaming, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) has now issued more than $1.5 million in such penalties to online gambling companies since Ontario’s market opened in April, 2022.

As we reported last week, in the last 52 months, the AGCO has issued monetary penalties to 17 different operators. It also issued a five-day suspension, but no financial penalty, to PointsBet.

The $100,000 penalty to NorthStar Gaming (Ontario) Inc. was for “alleged failures to comply with provincial anti-money laundering (AML) requirements,” read a press release. It was the second monetary penalty NorthStar has been handed by the AGCO.

In the most recent case, “NorthStar Gaming’s own AML policies identified a player’s disclosed occupation as high risk and required the player to be classified as high risk and undergo Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD), including verification of source of funds, once the player’s lifetime deposits reached $25,000.

“The player opened an account with NorthStar in March 2024 and reached the $25,000 deposit threshold within the same month. Despite the player’s disclosed occupation and the threshold being reached, NorthStar did not classify the player as high risk, initiate the required EDD assessment or verify the player’s source of funds.

“The AGCO’s compliance review was prompted after the player was charged by police in connection with Project Outsource, a joint law enforcement effort targeting criminal activity, including extortion and violence, in the towing industry.”

The commission’s latest disciplinary act caught the attention of Derek Ramm, the global head of advisory services for Kinectify and a Canadian Gaming Association board member, whose LinkedIn post prompted some debate.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

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People on the Move

• After 52 months in the Vice President, Brand & Marketing Officer’s chair at OLG, Maxine Chapman is leaving to become President and CEO at Destination Ontario.

• Fredrik Ogren is leaving Betsson Group and his Chief Technology Officer post.

• Former Continent 8 Technologies North American sales head Aidan Rees-Williams is appointed Chief Revenue Officer at Viadex Global.

• Oksana Tsyhankova takes her leave from Soft2Bet as Chief Commercial Officer to join Cyprus-based NDA in the same role.

• Booming Games appoint Michael Waterfield as Chief Commercial Officer.

• Josh Champion, ex of Betting Hero, is the new Head of Growth at PlayerProps.ai.

• Marissa Carbone Hayes is named Head of Marketing at GamesBeat.

• Tanya Kane has a new title at Flutter Studios as head of Studio Operations.

• Cecilia Scott is leaving the American Gaming Association and her role as Senior Director, Marketing & Industry Communications.

• Ian Rowe has a new title at BCLC: Director of Lottery.

• Paul Adams leaves his Senior Manager, Casino Operations role at BetMGM to join Hard Rock Digital as Director of Revenue for its Ontario enterprise.

• Jay Berger is promoted to Director of Product at FanDuel and Tom Winrow-Jones is named Director, Trading Operations & Protection.

• Jorge Morales is named Director of Americas at Games Valley.

• Graeme Savill is appointed Head of Business Development at Backseat Gaming.

• DraftKings appoints Caitlin Brosque-Hewitt as as Financial Crimes Investigations Senior Associate.

• David Del Bianco bids adieu to Playtech to become Money Laundering Reporting Officer at SuprNation.

• Fanatics promote Anil Ramchand to Senior Treasury Manager.

• Masooma Dhoajiwala is named a Responsible Gaming Officer at Momentum.

• Mike Breen joins the Editorial team at NEXT.io.

• Quinn Allen has a new position at Legend as an Editor with Sportsbook Review.

• Seth Waterhouse comes on board at Games Global as a Senior Market Strategy Manager.

• We Are Social introduce Josh Stein as Chief Creative Officer and Curtis Diggins as Group Director, Sport.

• The Hockey News appoints Shannon Ross as Deputy Publisher.

• USports, the national governing body for Canadian university sports, promote Tara Hahto from her current position as Director of Compliance and Eligibility to Chief Operating Officer.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• There’s a remote opportunity for a Chief Compliance Officer to help a business with its work in Finland and Canada.

• Lahal Management has an opening in Coquitlam, B.C., for a Director, Compliance – Casino Management.

• FINTRAC Canada is hiring a 10-pack of Risk Oversight Analysts.

• The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario is searching for a Legal Counsel.

• Canadian media outlet The Logic is looking for a Manager of Client Partnerships.

On the South Side of Lake Ontario

• Wanted by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority: a Vice President of Digital and Content Marketing.

• FanDuel has room for a Senior Product Analyst at its New York offices.

• DraftKings has a remote opportunity in Massachusetts for a Lead Analyst, People Analytics.

• In Hollywood, Fla., Hard Rock Digital is hiring a Manager, Corporate Strategy – Hispanic Audience.

• Red Bull has a position available for a Senior Manager, Gaming Player Marketing.

• Microsoft is seeking a Senior Director, Gaming – Measurement and Insights.

• NFL HQ is on the hunt for a Vice President, Product & Design.

• In New York, Jomboy Media is hiring a Brand Sponsorship Manager.

• Wanted at The Seattle Times: a Sports Multiplatform Editor.

• Abe Madkour and the gang at Sports Business Journal are seeking a Reporter, College.

• Sports Illustrated in on the lookout for a Sportswriter to cover the WNBA and NCAA women’s hoops.

Across the Ponds

• Among the current openings at Betty are a Head of LiveOps, a Head of Payments, and a Head of AML, and also for a Senior Data Scientist.

• Relax Gaming in searching for a Head of Product.

• Entain is in the market for an AI Director and an AI Transformation Manager.

• Better Collective is looking for a Sales Director, Gaming, Esports & Sports Partnerships (UK & Europe).

• In Melbourne, BetMakers Technology Group is searching for a Marketing & CRM Specialist.

• In Gibraltar, BVGroup is hiring an E-Gaming Content Manager.

• TikTok has an opening in Israel for a Business Partnerships Lead (Gaming).

• West Ham United is in hiring mode for a Head of Content.

• The International Olympic Committee is seeking a Sports Data Specialist.

Reading and Reflecting

1. Just as we hit the Send button on the newsletter this morning, a media advisory landed in our inbox. “Toronto drivers can fill up for free today as DraftKings brings its Gameday Fuel initiative to Danforth Gas & Wash in Scarborough.

   DraftKings will provide free gasoline for passenger vehicles from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET, while supplies last.”

2. Mark Keast reported for Casino.org the pointed words from the elected official in charge of Alberta’s regulated market for the chair of the BCLC about his criticism of the Ontario and Alberta regulated gambling models.

3. In his just-released autobiography, Canadian media personality Rick Campanelli opens up about his addiction to gambling.

4. A nice bit of chronicling by Tom Nightingale on the most popular sports and online casino games in the early weeks of Alberta’s regulated market.

5. In his Not The Public Broadcaster blog, Bruce Dowbiggin points at sports betting as the catalyst for the end of “absolute” sports fandom.

6. Financial Post columnist Jack Mintz had an at-times confusing take on legal gambling in Canada and taxation. To clarify the situation in Ontario’s regulated market, the provincial government has in place a 20-per-cent gross gaming revenue share with operators (excluding OLG), which also pay federal and Ontario corporate income tax on profits.

7. Courtesy of Geoff Zochodne’s X account, Circa Sports boss Derek Stevens had an update on Canadian visits to Vegas.

8. ESPN gambling beat reporter David Purdum delivered last week a must-read feature on a University of Cincinnati student who became addicted to betting.

9. American sports media personality Bill Simmons admitted on his podcast last weekend to using his daughter’s boyfriend to place wagers – a no-no.

10. In the latest poll conducted by The Athletic, Zack Meisel reported on the experience of MLB players with backlash they receive from social media and betting buffoons.

11. It took longer than expected but the NFL has its sports betting partnerships in place for the 2026 season and beyond.

12. The Australian government is putting more teeth into its rules around sport integrity.

13. According to reporting and analysis by CNN, young American adults between 18 and 21 have traded an estimated $5.4 billion with Kalshi this year.

14. There’s new research in the U.S. that the number of diagnosed gambling disorder cases has risen more than 60 per cent in states with legal sports betting.

15. There’s reporting in New York Times on the road towards the elimination of skill games in Pennsylvania.

16. There was reporting of the exclusive variety Monday by Front Office Sports scribe Ben Horney of the United States Tennis Association’s new U.S. Open partnership with Kalshi. Count long-time tennis journalist and CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim among the non-enamoured crowd with the announcement.

17. A PGA Champions Tour player was suspended last week for betting on. . . . golf. As my much, much better half says, you can’t fix stupid. By the by, Covers is tracking incidents involving athletes and betting on sports.

18. On a somewhat related note, can’t we all agree that offering bets on a sporting event played by children goes beyond the pale?

19. Kindbridge Research Institute has released a new report examining gambling behaviours and other issues among first responders in the U.S.

20. Scott Longley made a guest appearance on iGaming Business.com to do some keyboarding about the rise of the betting development “shop”.

21. It’s full steam ahead for DraftKings’ prediction markets product in California, where sports betting is verboten.

22. Speaking of DK, it has launched a new marketing campaign featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas getting together for a road trip.

23. BetMGM’s new “It Happens Here” campaign features Don Draper/Paul Marks/Roy Tillman/Vice Admiral Cyclone Simpson/St. Louis Blues super fan.

24. Also, exclusive reporting from Fortune’s Camila Grigera Naon on DraftKing co-founder Matt Kalish receiving a multimillion-dollar marketing deal from the operator for his new business.

25. Daniel O’Boyle reported for InGame on BetMGM’s new app containing a few features from prediction markets.

26. Dave Michaels of The Wall Street Journal has the latest on insider trading concerns on prediction markets.

27. Someone isn’t all that excited about the San Francisco Giants’ partnership with Kalshi.

28. Jeff Edelstein dug deep for InGame into the ties between prediction markets and the business of sports betting information.

29. Fanatics is a little lighter in the digital wallet for its dealings in Colorado with a self-excluded gambler.

30. The owners of Bede Gaming are keen to do business in the land-based casino market in France.

31. Bet365 is up and running in West Virginia.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, investigative journalist/author Rob Csernyik joined host Steve McAllister.

Csernyik’s book A Losing Hand: The Human Cost of Canada’s Gambling Epidemic was released earlier this summer and is the result of his reporting on the economic and social consequences of gambling – and researching gambling-related suicides after being awarded a Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Reporting in 2022. The Nova Scotia native also recently tweaked a section of his book for a an op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail on gambling among Canadian youth.

McAllister asked Csernyik what motivated his work on gambling and his investigation into the links between gambling and suicide across Canada. The book also includes telling the history of gambling in this country and the role of governments in legalizing sports betting, casino gaming, lottery and online gaming.

Csernyik also spoke about the final chapter of the book - A Path Forward - which includes a call for “provincial and national stakeholders (to) create solutions to limit the human costs of gambling”.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• How AI and regulation Are reshaping sports betting and iGaming 🎙️ 🎥

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s gaming media roundtable dives into Alberta’s launch, PlayAlberta and Ontario’s evolving market🎙️ 🎥

• Is Alberta Canada’s biggest iGaming opportunity yet?🎙️ 🎥

• Inside Alberta’s Historic Gaming Market Launch with AiGC CEO Dan Keene🎙️ 🎥

• Alberta Goes Live: Inside Day One of Canada’s new gaming market🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

As a partner of SBC, Gaming News Canada is offering a 30% discount code on VIP passes AND conference, networking, and business passes. Visit the summit website and use the PARLEHPARTNERVIP code when you register.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

If your humble correspondent had put aside a loonie for every time prediction markets have been mentioned in this weekly dispatch throughout the first eight months of 2026, we would have the monetary means to treat our much, much better half to a five-star dinner at Don Alfonso 1890 in T.O. And if we had deposited in our digital wallet another loonie for every time there’d been a lawsuit filed in the U.S. involving a PM, well . . .

The past fortnight or so we’ve reached out to several parties on this side of the border to try and deliver to our loyal readers as clear as possible a look at prediction markets in Canada – today and tomorrow. They are here now, although sports, politics and elections are verboten under the regulations set by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA, and overseers of the provincial securities commissions across the country). The Globe and Mail’s Alexandra Posadzki recently delivered a well-reported piece on the arrivals of PMs, Canadian style.

Unlike the chaos that prediction markets have unleashed in the U.S. (a phrase that rhymes with buster buck comes to mind), there appears to be a common-sense approach that will most likely lead to companies such as Wealthsimple being able to offer action around sports and entertainment. ICYMI, the financial tech/online brokerage business has released its Wealthsimple Predict app with back-end support from U.S. PM business Kalshi.

When Paul Burns joined us on a recent episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, the Canadian Gaming Association president/CEO pointed out that there’s a clear regulatory path regarding prediction markets here, unlike the quagmire in the U.S. involving federal and state governments, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and, of course, the current White House administration.

Gaming News Canada reached out to several stakeholders over the past three weeks about the regulation of prediction markets. The Canadian Securities Administrators wouldn’t get into specifics about whether it has had conversations/correspondence with Wealthsimple and/or other prediction market businesses and directed us to an advisory it posted back in April with the current rules around PMs.

Our email requests to speak with someone at Wealthsimple have gone unanswered. In Alberta and Ontario, the only two Canadian provinces with regulated online gambling, GNC contacted AGLC, the new Alberta iGaming Corporation, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) and iGaming Ontario. The two Ontario agencies responsible for the province’s competitive market both passed the proverbial buck to the offices of the finance minister and the minister of tourism, culture and gaming.

From AGLC:

AGLC is committed to offering Albertans innovative choices while ensuring that operators are held to a high, regulatory standard. As the market continues to evolve, we are working with industry partners to determine where prediction markets and event contracts align with provincial gaming legislation.

The AiGC emailed GNC a statement from CEO Dan Keene:

“AiGC continues to follow conversations around prediction markets, and we look towards our regulators AGLC and ASC for any direction that may arise,” Dan Keene, CEO AiGC.

And this from the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Gaming:

“We continue to monitor developments related to prediction markets along with reviewing the applicable legal and regulatory frameworks.

“To be part of Ontario’s regulated online gaming market, operators must enter into an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario and be registered with the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario before offering games to players.”

The CGA has met with Wealthsimple and other businesses either offering or wishing to offer prediction markets. As Burns told us on the podcast, PMs are coming and there needs to be proper regulation of them.

“What’s gone on in the U.S. is that prediction market players are building their compliance and regulatory models as they go,” he said. “It’s like building a car on the freeway.

“I’ve seen some positive signs from Wealthsimple. They’re coming at it from a better place than some of the other players in the market, but they’re one, and there will be others. That’s why we need to have standards.”

Among the issues up for debate these days is regulating the sports side of prediction markets. In a recently released white paper authored by the company’s chief legal beagle and deputy general counsel, Wealthsimple makes it crystal clear its PM product should come under the purview of securities, and not gaming, regulators.

From the white paper:

“. . . . a gaming operator taking the other side of a bet against its customer does not pose such a risk to the financial system that derivatives data reporting is required, and gaming regulation is designed for that bilateral relationship. However, as noted above, prediction markets are not “bets” against a house. They are two-sided markets that require capital adequacy, segregation of funds, clearing integrity, and market surveillance. These are financial derivative risks, which securities regulators are uniquely equipped to manage. A gaming regulator has no framework for them.

This brings us to the specific proposal that certain contracts, such as those on sports outcomes, should be assigned to gaming regulation while the rest stay under securities regulation. This is unworkable and does not reflect the structure of these contracts or markets. A contract on the outcome of a soccer match and a contract on the level of inflation are, mechanically, the same instrument. Each is a binary contract that derives its value from an underlying event, and each reaches a Canadian client through a chain of intermediaries.

The CGA’s Burns sees it differently. “Sports should remain part of the gaming regulatory regime.”

Other issues include:

• Are securities commissions equipped to properly monitor/regulate putting down money on sporting events?

• Will there be protections put in place for safe use of these products?

• What are the parameters around this new type of gambling? Geoff Zochodne reported last week on a company called Volatility Shares that is “proposing exchange-traded funds that would invest in future contracts tied to indexes measuring NHL team performance.”

• There’s been a flurry of sponsorship deals in the U.S. involving prediction market operators and the sports industry – with the NHL and MLB taking the lead. Media companies continue to yearn for new streams of advertising revenue. There are sports betting operators now offering prediction markets in the U.S. including DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics. Will any/all of those factors influence a race to expanded prediction markets without the necessary guardrails in Canada?

We will continue to follow the proverbial bread crumbs that drop regarding this story.

Is your iGaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

CAMH study: Ontario youths report dramatic increase in online gambling

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is reporting that Ontario students are reporting slightly reduced rates of mental distress but, at the same time, indicated a dramatic increase in online gambling.

CAMH has conducted the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey on students between grades 7 and 12 every two years since 197. The latest findings, released Monday, are from its 2025 survey and show 46 per cent of respondents reported a “moderate to serious level” of psychological distress in 2025. That’s serious, but it is down from 51 per cent in 2023.

Also down is reported alcohol and drug use. Students also reported they are waiting longer before trying alcohol or drugs.

The survey revealed, however, one in 10 students had placed online sports bets in 2025. That’s up sharply from one in 100 in 2017.

Also, almost one-quarter of students reported seeing or hearing advertising for online gambling sites every day.

About seven per cent of respondents reported betting money on gambling activities other than sports betting – such as online casinos or poker.

Finally, some 20 per cent of respondents said they had gambled in some fashion in the past year.

Lead investigator Hayley Hamilton said the increase in online gambling comes in the same time frame in which the province launched an open online market and, despite age restrictions on sites, “the students are finding a way to gamble.”

The 2025 survey included 11,108 students in grades 7 to 12 in 1,147 classes in 246 schools in 42 school boards. The students completed anonymous online questionnaires between December 2024 and June 2025.

AGCO operator fines since launch approaching $1.5 million

The latest fine issued by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) had us doing some quick math. The $70,000 fine issued on Aug. 20 to Booming Games (Malta) Limited, “after prohibited auto-play functionality was made available to Ontario players on multiple slot games for several months” pushes total AGCO fines since the open market launched in April, 2022 over $1.4 million to $1.405 million.

In the last 52 months, the AGCO has issued fines to 17 different operators. It also issued a five-day suspension, but no monetary penalty, to PointsBet.

Keep in mind, some of these monetary penalties may have been reduced or eliminated in the appeals process. These figures just reflect the AGCO’s original notice of penalties being issued for a variety of offences:

Date Operator Fine

03-May-22 BetMGM and PointsBet $78,000

30-Jun-22 DraftKings $100,000

25-Aug-22 Unibet $48,000

20-Apr-23 Bunchberry, Mobile Inc., LeoVegas $70,000

20-Jun-23 BV Gaming and Fitzdares $30,000

10-Aug-23 Apollo Entertainment $100,000

09-Nov-23 PointsBet $150,000

16-Oct-24 NorthStar $20,000

26-Mar-25 BetMGM $110,000

26-Jun-25 Casino Days $54,000

07-Oct-25 theScore $105,000

08-Jan-26 FanDuel $350,000

12-Feb-26 PointsBet 5-day suspension

06-Aug-26 Betty Gaming $120,000

20-Aug-26 Booming Games $70,000

TOTAL $1,405,000

As for Booming Games, the AGCO said the violation involved an Auto-play feature which, “allows a player to automatically play an online slot machine without the player having to manually initiate each spin. Ontario prohibits auto-play on slot games because removing the need for a player to actively initiate each wager can reduce opportunities to pause, assess their play and decide whether they want to continue gambling.”

According to Canadian Gaming Business reporter Tom Nightingale, Booming Games will not appeal the fine.

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

Midnite hires former FanDueler to lead incoming Canadian business

Midnite is about to strike in Ontario.

OK, OK, perhaps a week away from the keyboard delivered a case of writer’s block. But we digress.

The UK sportsbook and casino operator wants to expand beyond His Royal Highness’s home – and Ireland – with a special focus on our home and native land. And it will do so with the help Dale Tang, who this week was named as Midnite’s general manager for Canada. Tang was a Day One’er with Dale Hooper and the gang at FanDuel Canada, leading the operator’s commercial, analytics and retention initiatives and being in the middle of FanDuel’s Alberta launch last month.

According to a news release that landed in our inbox yesterday: “Tang will lead Midnite’s Canadian market strategy, overseeing the operator’s plans to launch the brand in regulated Canadian markets, pending licensing approvals. His appointment represents an important step in Midnite’s international expansion as the company looks to build on its momentum in the UK and Ireland.”

“Dale’s appointment marks an exciting milestone in Midnite’s journey to disrupt the industry,” said Midnite founder and CEO Nick Wright. “The regulated Canadian market is a huge opportunity for us to expand beyond the UK and Ireland, and bringing Dale on board is a clear signal of our ambition to build a truly localized, next-generation sports betting and casino experience that puts player protection at the front and centre.”

From Tang, who will be based in Toronto, and before FanDuel spent three years at OLG:

“The opportunity to build something new in a market I know and care deeply about was simply too exciting to pass up. Midnite has established itself as a brand with a clear vision on how to deliver an exciting proposition for players. I’m looking forward to being a part of the team that helps establish Midnite as a responsible and trusted brand that resonates with Canadian consumers.”

According to reporting by David Bartram at Casino.org, Midnite has yet to receive its licence from the AGCO and AGLC. As of today, there are 48 operators delivering 83 online gambling websites to Ontarians and in Alberta there are 29 sports betting and igaming brands now up and running. Those numbers don’t include OLG and AGLC’s digital gaming products.

What Betty learned from meeting Canadians face-to-face this summer

For digital-first brands, some of the most meaningful player interactions don’t happen online.

This summer, Betty connected with thousands of Canadians through activations at Rock the Park, Bluesfest and sampling events across Alberta. Each event reinforced the importance of meeting people where they are, creating opportunities for authentic conversations, answering questions and introducing the brand in a more personal way.

Rather than focusing solely on reach, Betty views in-person events as an opportunity to better understand player expectations and strengthen connections that extend beyond a single interaction.

“As a digital-first brand, some of our most valuable conversations happen face-to-face,” says Andrea Stodart, Vice President of Marketing at Betty. “Meeting players at community events gives us a deeper understanding of what resonates, what questions people have and how we can continue creating experiences that feel approachable, transparent and relevant.”

As Canada’s regulated gaming market continues to evolve, those real-world conversations are helping inform how Betty approaches marketing, community engagement and the overall player experience.

Fanatics coming to Ontario

More than four years after Ontario launched an open, regulated online gambling market, big names are still choosing to enter the sector.

The latest is Fanatics. Tom Nightingale reported for Canadian Gaming Business that Fanatics has been approved by the AGCO and will enter the Ontario market after completing an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.

Once it does, it will become the 49th operator while providing the 84th legal online gambling platform in the province.

People on the Move

• Corey Goodman has the “interim” removed from his Chief Executive Officer’s title at NorthStar Gaming. Chin Dhushenthen resigns as Chief Financial Officer and Ben Powell is named interim CFO. Also, former absolutebet exec Krisztina Kalla is appointed Vice President of Compliance.

• We reported a fortnight or so ago that Lindsay Slader was departing GeoComply. The former GC veep announced last week she’s joining UBank as Chief Growth Officer.

• Karen Moorhouse will walk away at month’s end from her Chief Executive Officer position with the International Tennis Integrity Agency.

• Ana Vrabic Verdir is appointed Group Chief Executive Officer at Hacksaw Gaming.

• Francesco Rodano says arrivederci from Playtech and his Chief Sustainable Gambling Officer post.

• Alon Eshed is named Chief Commercial Officer at Aloplay.

• High Roller Technologies appoint Thomas Scaria as Chief Product Officer.

• Eric Thomson is the new Senior Vice President of Marketing & Partnerships at Churchill Downs Racetrack.

• Finnish operator names Craig Armes as Executive Vice President, Gaming Technologies.

• Former FanDuel executive Fiona Power is the new Chief Commercial Officer for The Unit. Mark O’Hare is promoted to Chief Revenue Officer.

• Light & Wonder promotes Stacy Phillips to Senior Vice President, Global Operations & Supply Chain.

• Fanatics appoints Mike Swisher as Vice President, Media Strategy.

• Taylor Gebron is promoted to Vice President, Trading at Betr.

• Aristocrat Interactive appoints Alice Timson as Vice President, Aggregation.

• ALT Sports Data promotes Emily Reyes to Vice President, League Solutions.

• Craig Turner will leave Entain and his Head of Studio role at the end of next month.

• Stephen Welch is named as Head of Advertising at iGaming News and Roxanne Harding comes on board as an Editorial Assistant.

• Aiden O’Sullivan is named Head of Business Development at OpenBet.

• Genius Sports appoints Alexis Zinberg as Director of Global Events and Angela Hoye as Vice President, Communications. Also, Jessie Cooper is named Senior Vice President, AI & Platforms.

• Savannah Davis is the new Director of Business Operations at OpTic Gaming. Grace Tye is named Manager of Partnership Activations.

• Giannis Papakonstantinou is appointed Director of Sportsbook Product at Altenar.

• Pawel Blazejewicz is named AI Enablement & Adoption Lead at Continent 8 Technologies.

• Allie Rask bids farewell to the Responsible Gambling Council and her Senior Program Analyst role.

• Ryan Whelpley is appointed Corporate Counsel, Gaming Regulations at DraftKings. Christopher Paquin comes aboard as Financial Crimes Specialist.

• Monish Bhambhani, ex of PointsBet, joins Blazesoft as a Senior Product Manager.

• Neal Bellinger has a new role at Hard Rock Digital as Manager of Fraud Analytics.

• Former Uber veep Travis VanderZanden joins Polymarket as Chief Growth Officer.

• Robbie Middlestadt bids adieu to BetMGM and his role as Senior Digital Marketing Associate to join Google as an Account Strategist.

• Former SBCer Erin Gallagher joins Press Box PR as a B2B Account Director.

• Adam Kaufman is hired by USA Today to lead its sports betting coverage.

• Ex-Nike director Daniel Switzer is named Vice President, Global Marketing at MLB HQ.

Classified (Jobs) Information

On the Home Front

• Big gig alert at Woodbine Entertainment for a Vice President, Marketing, Brand Content and Live Experiences.

• Wanted by the Responsible Gambling Council: a Director, Prevention Programs and a Senior Manager, CRM & Audience Operations.

• There’s an opening at iGaming Ontario for a Senior Advisor, Strategy and Corporate Affairs.

• FanDuel has an opportunity in Toronto for a Communications Senior Associate.

• In Toronto, Entain is hiring an AML/ATF Compliance Officer – Canada.

• The Alberta iGaming Corporation is searching for a Cybersecurity Analyst and a Junior Accountant.

• The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario is seeking an Information Management Lead and a Specialist, Payroll and Benefits Administrator.

• DraftKings has a spot available for a Sportsbook Operations Senior Associate.

• Bet99 is looking for an Affiliate Associate.

• The Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority is seeking a Data Analyst.

• Red Bull Canada is on the hunt for a Brand Specialist, Events & Creative.

• The Globe and Mail is hiring a Reporter to cover stories around the impact of artificial intelligence on the world.

• Reuters has a hybrid opening in Toronto for a Sports Reporter.

• There are several job postings with Bauer Hockey/Cascade Maverik Lacrosse.

• The Edmonton Oilers are hiring a Team Reporter and Producer.

• Wanted by the Ottawa Senators: a Senior Fullstack Developer.

• True Sports is in need of a Creative Designer.

South of the Border

• DraftKings has an APB out for a Vice President, iGaming Revenue Operations and is also looking for a Senior Associate, Digital Casino Partnerships.

• Aristocrat is seeking a Vice President, Data Science.

• ProphetX has a hybrid opportunity for a Director, Solutions Engineering.

• Riot Games wants to hire in Los Angeles a Principal, Growth Lead.

• BetMGM is searching for a Senior Gaming Analyst.

• Hard Rock Digital is in the market for a Senior Manager – Social Media.

• DraftKings is on the lookout for a Senior Associate, Digital Sports Partnerships.

• In Vegas, Caesars Entertainment has an opening for a Product Compliance Manager.

• Better Collective is hiring a Manager – Affiliate Partnerships, U.S.

• Wanted at NBA HQ: a Senior Manager, Gaming Product & Creator Programs.

• DAZN has a hybrid opportunity in New York for a Chief Editor.

• Puma is searching for a Senior Director, Global Entertainment & Influencer Marketing.

• In New York, Minute Media is seeking a Senior Product Manager, Consumer Growth & Fan Engagement.

Across the Ponds

• Legend is looking for a Group Head of Finance.

• In Sliema, bet365 has an opening for a Head of In-House Games.

• NEXT.io is searching for a Director, Artificial Intelligence.

• Betty has a whole bunch of openings on its London team.

• Boyle Sports has a hybrid position available in Ireland for a Safer Gambling Officer.

• Genius Sports has an opportunity in London for a Product Marketing Manager, Betting.

• The International Testing Agency in Lausanne, Switzerland, is hiring an Intelligence Analyst.

SBC Summit brings together the most senior decision-makers from across the global gaming industry, including operators, regulators, suppliers, affiliates, investors and media leaders.

As a partner of SBC, Gaming News Canada is offering a 30% discount code on VIP passes AND conference, networking, and business passes. Visit the summit website and use the PARLEHPARTNERVIP code when you register.

Reading and Reflecting

1. Your collegial dispatcher was Mike Eppel’s guest on the In This Economy podcast for a chin wag about the business of gambling in the true north strong and free.

2. On the one-month anniversary of Alberta’s new market, the AiGC delivered some thoughts and layers from head honcho Dan Keene.

3. There’s an update from Covers journalist Jori Negin-Shecter on the Douglas Ford government’s strategy for casinos in the Niagara region.

4. The August 17 King’s Plate delivered some bullish metrics on the betting side for Woodbine Entertainment including a $1.24 million win pool.

5. Canadian Gaming Business chronicler Tom Nightingale interviewed Pure Casino Entertainment boss Brad Belhouse about the company’s entry into Alberta’s regulated igaming market.

6. For now, NorthStar Gaming CEO Corey Goodman told Nightingale, the company’s business is focused on strengthening its Ontario operations.

7. Speaking of Nightingale, he caught up with some igaming advocates south of the border for an update on efforts to expand legal sports betting and online gaming.

8. Speaking of which, the never-ending chase of regulated online gaming in New York continues to be of the elusive sort with no end in sight.

9. In its interim Q2 report, Better Collective announced “broad-based growth” led by North America and the men’s World Cup also delivering an expected boost in revenue.

10. Joe Streeter of iGaming Expert caught up with Bet99 boss Jared Beber and asked him about Alberta and channelization.

11. Davis Giangiulio and Ananya Chetia did the double-byline thing for CNBC reporting on hedge funds joining the prediction markets maze.

12. Political writer David Moscrop had a Substack piece about sports betting now being used by Gen Zers as an “investment” strategy.

13. FanDuel is a little lighter in the digital wallet, compliments of Iowa’s gambling regulator.

14. Steve Ruddock, in his Straight to the Point newsletter, summarizes the ham-handed handling of prediction markets so far by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

15. A Gallup poll reveals Americans are betting less than they did a decade ago. The aforementioned Ruddock provided his own thoughts on the survey.

16. There’s a report now available courtesy of Taylor & Francis on “understanding funding-related bias in gambling research”.

17. Casino Reports journalist Brian Joseph has a five-part series looking at money laundering in Nevada.

18. Good reading from Covers guy Geoff Zochodne on the overwhelming number of options available in the U.S. today for sports bettors.

19. Speaking of worthy perusing, we recommend Marcus DiNitto’s weekly wagering roundup for Gambling Insider.

20. ESPN’s David Purdum had reporting on an investigation by the U.S. Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority into unusual betting on five races in New Jersey and New York.

21. Luke Miller reported for The Federalist on money being spent by online gambling operators in advance of U.S. state elections.

22. Everton footy player has been charged with violating the UK Football Association’s betting rules.

23. You’ll need a subscription to read Neil Clark’s op-ed for The Spectator making the case for betting shops in the UK.

24. Earlier this month, the IRS put out a news release that linked illegal gambling offences to $126 million in laundered money over the past 12 months.

25. Fanatics is getting together with the NFL as an official sports betting partner.

26. Speaking of the NFL, Yahoo senior sports betting analyst has a fun read on the biggest winning wagers over the past eight years.

27. A second investigation has been opened into the alleged betting activity of a former Arizona Cardinals scout.

28. Bet365 this week unveiled its new “We know betting” marketing campaign.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, host Steve McAllister took a virtual trip down under to speak with Waterhouse VC’s Chief Investment Officer, Tom Waterhouse.

Waterhouse, whose family has been involved in the business of betting for more than a century, spoke about his own personal path through the industry and what led him down the road from a 20-year-old bookmaker in 2003 to delivering value for investors through the gambling industry and authoring the regular Waterhouse VC Update on NEXT.io.

Among the topics discussed was the current state of the global economy and its impact on the sports betting and gaming industry, the shifting sands of regulated gambling jurisdictions, the role of artificial intelligence within the industry, and Waterhouse’s take on Ontario and Alberta’s regulated markets. And oh yeah, we asked Waterhouse to weigh in prediction markets.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s gaming media roundtable dives into Alberta’s launch, PlayAlberta and Ontario’s evolving market🎙️ 🎥

• Is Alberta Canada’s biggest iGaming opportunity yet?🎙️ 🎥

• Inside Alberta’s Historic Gaming Market Launch with AiGC CEO Dan Keene🎙️ 🎥

• Alberta Goes Live: Inside Day One of Canada’s new gaming market🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.

On a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show hosted by Bede Gaming, host Steve McAllister welcomed back the Global Gaming Director for GBG Plc, Rebekah Jackson.

Jackson spoke with McAllister about GBG’s involvement in the launch of the new regulated gambling market in Alberta, including a conversation she had with AGLC Chief Regulatory Officer Dave Berry back in May at the SBC Summit Canada. GBG also has some early numbers on the work it’s doing in the western Canada province. GBG, which has also been a very active participant in Ontario’s regulated marketplace, is also lending a hand to operators preparing for launches in Finland’s incoming regulated sports betting and online gaming industry, and other countries.

Also discussed was GBG’s latest products, including Loquate, and the company’s work in other sectors around the world. And, not surprisingly, that segment included much talk about the use of artificial intelligence.

Is your igaming platform truly driving your digital growth? Choose a provider that aligns directly to your ambitions. Click here to find out what other global operators have to say about the unparalleled partnership of Bede Gaming.

Worth A Watch & Listen

Our most popular Gaming News Canada shows from the past few months.

• Can Wealthsimple disrupt Canadian iGaming through prediction markets?🎙️ 🎥

• Canada’s gaming media roundtable dives into Alberta’s launch, PlayAlberta and Ontario’s evolving market🎙️ 🎥

• Is Alberta Canada’s biggest iGaming opportunity yet?🎙️ 🎥

• Inside Alberta’s Historic Gaming Market Launch with AiGC CEO Dan Keene🎙️ 🎥

• Alberta Goes Live: Inside Day One of Canada’s new gaming market🎙️ 🎥

Alberta’s move to a regulated iGaming model on the 13th July of this year represents a significant step forward for Canada’s digital gaming market, setting clear expectations for robust identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance from day one.

As the market takes shape, you can be confident you’re working with a proven partner. We already support more than 65% of licensed operators in Ontario, helping them meet FINTRAC‑compliant KYC requirements at scale, without compromising speed or player experience.

For more on GBG Plc, visit our website.

What Ontario’s experience can teach Canada’s next regulated market

More than three years after the launch of Ontario’s regulated online gaming market, the industry has evolved significantly. Increased competition, greater player choice, and enhanced responsible gaming measures have helped shape one of North America’s most closely watched iGaming jurisdictions.

For Betty, those lessons are especially relevant as Alberta prepares to open its own regulated market.

“Ontario has shown what’s possible when operators compete on product, experience, and player trust,” says Chavdar Dimitrov, CEO of Betty Gaming Canada. “The market has matured considerably over the past three years, and we’re excited about the opportunity to bring those learnings to Alberta as the province prepares to enter its next chapter.”

As Canada’s regulated gaming landscape continues to evolve, operators, regulators, and players alike will be watching closely to see how Alberta builds on the foundation Ontario has established.

Stay up-to-date with the latest news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter, ensuring you never miss out on breaking updates.

To discuss our coverage of your company’s news and announcements and to become an advertiser on Gaming News Canada, please contact steve@gamingnewscanada.ca.