GGPoker Was Ready for Alberta. Now It's Pulling Away

A few months ago, GGPoker appeared to be have had its heart set on a return to Alberta. It registered with the province, waited through the transition to regulated online gambling and looked like one of the obvious names to eventually join the new market.

This week, it changed its mind.

This October reversal was not something we saw coming. 

GGPoker stopped serving Alberta players when the province opened its regulated iGaming market in July. By August, GG International Limited had secured registration with Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis, a crucia step towards coming back as a licensed operator. 

At that point, a regulated Alberta version of GGPoker looked more like a question of when than if.

As of this week, GGPoker dropped those plans, saying the numbers simply do not work under Alberta’s current poker setup. The province requires licensed poker rooms to keep Alberta players in their own pool, essentially cutting them off from GG’s much larger international network.

For an operator that's built its brand around huge tournament fields and cash tables that run around the clock, that's a fairly fundamental problem.

GGPoker also poured some cold water on what had seemed like Alberta’s obvious future fix. Even if Alberta eventually combines its poker pool with Ontario, GG says that would still not create enough traffic for the type of room it wants to run.

That said, the poker company hasn't completely closed the door on the province. If Alberta can eventually connect to international shared liquidity, GGPoker says it would reconsider.

When Alberta originally decided to tackle iGaming, the province wanted operators inside a regulated market, and over the summer it got them moving in that direction. Poker players, however, lost access to several international networks in the process.

PokerStars shut Alberta players out of its international platform on October 13. Partypoker did the same.

888poker went the other way. It left the international pool but immediately launched a regulated Alberta-only platform, making it the first operator to actually put a local poker room live.

All this gives Alberta one of the more unusual poker market this November. 888 is in. PokerStars says it is coming back. Partypoker is gone. And GGPoker, which looked like it might become one of the province’s biggest entrants, has decided it would rather wait than launch a room without enough players.