Robert Kowalski, our Customer Success Manager for North America, recently joined a CasinoCanada roundtable exploring what Alberta’s opening means for Canadian iGaming. Below, we share Robert’s perspective on the market’s early development, the role of content and player experience and what other provinces could learn from Alberta. Read the full roundtable on CasinoCanada.

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What has been your initial impressions of Alberta as a market, and what are you expecting to be some of the biggest stumbling blocks as the market matures?

Alberta is really interesting because it gives us the first opportunity to see how a competitive iGaming model develops in Canada outside Ontario.

There was already a significant online gaming audience in Alberta before regulation. The province estimated that around 70% of online gambling activity was taking place with unregulated operators, so this is not a market where players are suddenly discovering online gaming for the first time.

The bigger job now is moving more of that activity into the regulated environment and giving players good reasons to stay there.

It is still very early, so I think one of the biggest mistakes would be trying to read too much into the first few weeks or assuming Alberta will simply follow Ontario's path. There are obviously lessons from Ontario, but Alberta needs to develop as its own market.

For operators and suppliers, there is also the normal work that comes with entering any newly regulated jurisdiction. You have registration, technical standards, player protection requirements and the wider compliance framework to work through. Alberta has put quite a detailed structure around that from the outset.

Once that initial phase settles, the more interesting question will be what players actually respond to. That is when we will start learning much more about content preferences, product mix and how operators choose to differentiate themselves.

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What does a successful Alberta market look like in 12 to 24 months' time?

For me, the biggest measure of success will be whether Alberta can move a meaningful amount of existing online play into the regulated market.

Operator numbers matter, but having lots of brands is only one part of it. You also want a competitive market where players have genuine choice and where operators are investing in the quality of the overall experience. I think over the next 12 to 24 months the conversation will naturally move away from who has launched and towards what operators are doing differently.

Content will become a much bigger part of that. Players today are used to digital entertainment that is immediate, simple to access and available whenever they want it. That behaviour does not stop when they open a betting or gaming platform.

Virtual sports fit quite naturally into that environment because they complement live sport rather than depending on it. They give operators another sports based experience that can be available throughout the day and can work across both sportsbook and broader gaming audiences. If, in 12 or 24 months, Alberta has strong movement towards regulated operators, a healthy competitive landscape and operators starting to differentiate through content and player experience, I would see that as a successful market.

What does Alberta's launch mean for the wider Canadian iGaming landscape?

I think this is where Alberta becomes particularly important. For more than four years, Ontario has been the main reference point whenever the industry talks about regulated competitive iGaming in Canada. Alberta now gives us a second market to learn from.

That means we can start looking at what carries across provinces and what does not. Ontario has already shown that there is significant demand for regulated online gaming in Canada. Alberta can now help us understand whether some of the same operator strategies, content choices and player behaviours translate into a different provincial market.

From a supplier perspective, that is valuable because Canada is not one homogeneous market. You can have technology and content that scale nationally, but how you position that content and how players engage with it can still vary by province.

Alberta also gives other provinces another real world example to look at if they are considering changes to their own iGaming models. That does not mean every province will follow Ontario or Alberta, and I would be cautious about predicting that. Gaming regulation in Canada remains provincial.

But having two competitive regulated markets gives the industry a much better picture than having one. Ontario showed that the model could operate at scale. Alberta now gives us the chance to see how well it can travel.