During its second-quarter earnings call Thursday morning, PENN Entertainment CEO Jay Snowden said he expects Alberta’s online gambling market to open within months and feature a tax rate similar to the one in Ontario’s open market.
“We don’t have an exact date on Alberta,” Snowden said. “And I don’t want to speak, obviously, for the government or the regulators there. But we’re thinking sometime towards the end of this year or early ‘25 is kind of the rough timeframe.”
Alberta announced in June that it planned to launch an open online gambling market modelled off the one in Ontario and featuring online casinos, sports betting and poker.
In April of 2022, Ontario opened Canada’s only open online gambling market. The sector is currently home to 50 operators offering 80 different gambling sites. It is one of the most successful gambling jurisdictions in North America.
So, it is little wonder Alberta is choosing to follow that model. That includes Ontario’s 20% tax rate on online gambling. All that means Alberta could be one of PENN’s top online markets in all of North America.
“Given the success we’ve had in Ontario and given that Alberta will have very similar tax rates, as we understand it, and it will have both [online sports betting] and iCasino, we think it’s going to be a really important North American market for us, probably a top three or four market for us,” Snowden said.
PENN operates theScoreBET in Canada
PENN operates theScore BET in Canada and ESPN BET in the U.S., with theScore’s Toronto office providing the proprietary technology platform for both sportsbooks.
“We would anticipate that the success that we’ve seen in Ontario with theScore and theScore BET we would be able to replicate that in Alberta,” Snowden said. “TheScore is a very popular brand throughout Canada. It’s not just a Toronto or Ontario thing.”
PENN acquired theScore from Ontario’s Levy family for $2.1 billion (US) in 2021. The Levys remained with PENN until April of this year. The family’s exit from PENN was announced in February.
TheScore’s popular media app has provided integration between sports news and theScore BET gambling platform. PENN has used the same playbook in the US in its efforts to drive consumers from the ESPN sports news platform to the ESPN BET gambling app and then onto the more lucrative online casino.
