GGPoker Changes Its Mind on Alberta, and It's Bad News for Local Poker

GGPoker was supposed to be one of the first names arriving in Alberta’s new regulated poker market. Instead, it became the latest one leaving.

This week, the operator scrapped its planned launch only months after registering in the province, and its explanation goes straight to the problem Alberta has been trying to solve since day one: there simply are not enough players.

GGPoker’s Alberta story looked a lot more promising in August. The site had stopped accepting Alberta play when the province opened its regulated market in July, but GG International Limited then appeared on Alberta’s registry the following month.

For most of the poker world, that was as clear a message as any. All GGPoker had to do was register, complete the remaining commercial process and return with a regulated Alberta product within the coming months. Then this week, we found out the final step wasn't happening.

GG has now withdrawn from the launch, saying an isolated Alberta poker room does not have enough liquidity to make sense.

The real surprise is that adding Ontario into the mix doesn't save the idea. Alberta has been playing around with the idea of a future shared player pool with Canada’s other major regulated iGaming province, which would dramatically increase the number of available poker players.

According to GGPoker, it still would not be enough. The operator wants international shared liquidity before it seriously considers Alberta again.

So after spending the summer looking like a future entrant, GG is now sitting outside the market waiting for the rules around the market itself to change.

Online poker needs people more than almost any other gambling product. A blackjack table can deal cards whether one person logs in or 10,000 do. Poker can't.

A room with too few players means empty cash tables, sit-and-gos that take forever to start and tournaments that struggle to support attractive guarantees. 

Alberta players have already lost access to several international poker networks during the transition. 

PokerStars closed its international platform to the province in October. Partypoker also left. 888poker became the first operator to make the full switch, launching an Alberta-only regulated room instead.

PokerStars has since announced plans to return through PokerStars on FanDuel, creating the possibility that Alberta will eventually have at least two licensed poker platforms. GGPoker will not be the third under the current rules.

There is a strange irony to where Alberta ended up. The province built a regulated market partly to bring offshore and international operators into a local system. In the end, or at least for now, that local system  is the reason not to launch.