Alberta’s transition window for grey-market online gambling operators has closed, with around 50 regulated sites now live in Canada’s second provincial open iGaming market. Any site still taking wagers from Albertans without approval is now operating illegally, and provincial authorities say they are preparing to act.

The province’s regulated market launched on 13 July 2026. Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) granted operators a grace period of up to three months on a case-by-case basis, provided they could show a path to compliance. That period ended on 13 October.

Counting the market

Reported totals vary slightly depending on timing. A spokesperson for the Alberta iGaming Corporation (AiGC) told Casino.org that 51 approved sites were live from 30 operators, while cautioning that the number could change during the day. Other outlets put the tally at between 48 and 50 sites. Canadian Gaming Business reported that more than 60 sites are expected by 2027.

The final figure fell short of earlier projections. Before the deadline, the provincial government had suggested the count of licensed sites could rise from about 35 to around 60 by October.

Before the new regime, PlayAlberta, run by AGLC, was the only legal online casino in the province, although offshore brands operated openly in the grey market. The iGaming Alberta Act, passed in 2025, created a competitive framework broadly modelled on Ontario, where private operators contract with a provincial body rather than holding conventional licences. Ontario opened its market in April 2022 and now has dozens of operators live, giving Alberta a benchmark for how quickly a regulated market can absorb former grey-market brands.

To operate legally, companies must register with AGLC and also sign a commercial agreement with AiGC, the Crown corporation that oversees the market. Registration carries a C$50,000 application fee and a C$150,000 annual fee for each site, according to Covers.

Who is in and who is out

Super Group runs several brands in the province, and Apollo Entertainment operates seven casino brands. Stake secured its licence ahead of the deadline. PointsBet, by contrast, is registered with AGLC but has not finished its commercial agreement with AiGC, so its site is not yet live; the company said this week that its Alberta launch is planned for the second half of its financial year.

In poker, PokerStars is leaving the province, at least for now, according to Gaming News Canada. 888poker has launched what it describes as Alberta’s first regulated online poker room, while GGPoker has no current plans to offer poker in the province.

“Alberta’s regulated iGaming market exists to protect Albertans,” said Dan Keene, chief executive of AiGC, adding that he looked forward to working with operators moving away from the “illegal grey market”.

Enforcement to come

The provincial government says it will pursue operators that remain in the unregulated space, although it has not set out specific measures. Cease-and-desist letters and pressure on payment processors have both been floated.

“AGLC has several investigative options available,” said Lynden McBeth, a spokesperson for the regulator, adding that it could not discuss operational techniques publicly in order to protect investigations.

Ontario, which opened its market in 2022, offers one model. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario has fined registered suppliers whose content was found on unauthorised sites, including two C$40,000 penalties in May. Whether Alberta follows a similar route, targeting suppliers and payment providers rather than offshore operators directly, will be the next signal of how hard it intends to push.

Pennsylvania’s tens of thousands of unregulated skill game terminals are now illegal after state lawmakers failed to agree a regulatory framework before a court-imposed deadline expired. Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) set 13 October as the final date for businesses to remove the machines and said officers would begin seizing devices from 14 October.

The deadline flowed from a June 2026 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which found that the machines commonly marketed as skill games fall within the definition of slot machines under the state’s Gaming Act. The decision reversed a series of lower-court wins for the industry. The court stayed enforcement for 120 days to give the General Assembly time to legislate, and later refused a bipartisan request to extend that window to February 2027.

Seizures and criminal exposure

PSP has warned that businesses still hosting the terminals face seizure of the machines, forfeiture of related cash and potential criminal charges. Holders of liquor licences could also face administrative action that may affect those licences. Police have said that simply switching off or unplugging a machine on the premises will not count as compliance.

The state has published guidance for operators of bars, clubs, convenience stores and other venues on a dedicated skill games resources page. A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) told iGaming Business that casinos and truck stops cannot keep or install skill games even if the board were to inspect them. Only PGCB-approved slots and video gaming terminals (VGTs) are legal.

Scale of the problem

Estimates of the number of skill game terminals in Pennsylvania range from 50,000 to more than 70,000, comfortably more than the roughly 25,000 regulated slot machines in the state’s casinos. The machines have been untaxed, while casino slots are taxed at 54%.

Regulated slots generated $427m in gross revenue and $145m in state tax in the first two months of the 2026-27 fiscal year, according to PGCB data. VGTs at licensed truck stops added $6.7m in revenue and $2.8m in tax over the same period.

“There are very few parts of Pennsylvania that don’t have these games in them,” Susan Hensel, a gaming attorney and former PGCB director of licensing, told iGaming Business in July.

Bills stall in Harrisburg

Lawmakers considered several approaches during the stay, including higher tax rates on machine revenue, flat per-terminal fees, caps on numbers and restrictions on where the machines could be placed. The leading proposals, HB 2213 and SB 1079, would impose a $500 monthly fee on each terminal and cap the statewide total at 50,000 units. Supporters estimate the bills would raise around $300m a year, but neither has gained traction.

The current two-year legislative session adjourns on 30 November, leaving a narrow window for any revival. Casino operators have long argued that skill games cannibalise regulated slot revenue, while small businesses, veterans’ groups and social clubs say the machines have become a vital source of income.

The industry’s main supplier, Pace-O-Matic, had argued for years in court that the outcome of its games depends on player skill rather than chance, an argument that succeeded in several lower courts before the Supreme Court rejected it. With legislation stalled, suppliers and venue owners face a choice between removing machines and risking prosecution while they lobby for a late bill.

For now, enforcement rather than legislation will shape the market. How aggressively state and local police pursue seizures in the coming weeks, and whether any operators mount fresh legal challenges, will determine how quickly the terminals disappear from Pennsylvania’s venues.

Spain’s gambling regulator, the Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ), has reopened public consultation on its plan to replace operator-by-operator risk detection with a single, mandatory model that every licensed online operator must run on its customers. The move comes days after the government separately tightened payment checks on online gambling accounts through an amendment to Spain’s anti-money laundering regulation.

The DGOJ published the notice on 13 October, inviting comments on a revised draft resolution approving the “mechanism for detecting risk behaviour” among players. Submissions must be sent to the regulator’s Subdirectorate General for Gambling Regulation between 14 and 22 October 2026, seven working days.

Second round after data protection review

The draft was first put out for consultation between 28 August and 25 September 2025. According to an agreement signed by director general Mikel Arana on 9 October, a second round was needed after the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) issued report 015/2026 on 15 June 2026, prompting changes mainly to how personal data is handled and to players’ rights to information and review.

The regulator said the amendments do not alter the mechanism’s purpose or essential elements, and justified the shortened deadline by the earlier consultation and the publication of a consolidated text with an explanatory note.

According to that note, the DGOJ has produced a data protection impact assessment, limited the model to a closed set of data drawn from activity on the operator’s platform, and excluded external sources, clinical data, questionnaires and personal communications. Operators would be barred from using the data, the calculated variables or the resulting risk categorisation for commercial, promotional, advertising, segmentation, profitability or credit purposes, and must keep the processing functionally separate from their other systems.

Players flagged as at risk would receive more information about the result and could ask the operator to review the underlying data, the calculation and the measures applied, with a further complaint route to the DGOJ. The regulator would also carry out periodic evaluations and could revise variables, rules or thresholds if it detects loss of effectiveness or recurring errors.

How the model works

The underlying design is unchanged. Under the technical annex to the draft, operators must run a model trained and supplied by the DGOJ, based on the XGBoost gradient-boosted decision tree technique, across all of each player’s accounts during the first seven days of every calendar month. The model looks back over a 183-day window and uses 48 standardised variables built from deposits, withdrawals, stakes, winnings, session data and self-exclusion requests.

Sporadic players are exempt, while some patterns trigger an automatic risk classification without further checks. Any player whose predicted probability meets or exceeds a fixed threshold of 0.3312868 is categorised as at risk. That status triggers the safer gambling measures required under Royal Decree 176/2023 for at least six months, and is lifted only if a later monthly run no longer detects risk. The resolution would take effect two months after its publication in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE).

The project has drawn resistance from the industry. Online gambling associations Jdigital and AEJAD lodged objections with the European Commission earlier this year, arguing, according to Spanish trade reports, that a single algorithm ignores differences between betting, poker and casino, risks high rates of false positives and imposes significant adaptation costs. AEJAD described the model as a “black box”.

Payment ownership checks from 28 October

Separately, Royal Decree 813/2026, approved by the Council of Ministers on 6 October on the proposal of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Business and published in the BOE on 8 October, amends Article 21 of the regulation implementing Law 10/2010 on the prevention of money laundering. For online gambling operators, verifying a customer’s identity will now require checking that the holder of the payment method used for deposits and withdrawals is the holder of the gambling account.

The decree enters into force on 28 October 2026. Players already registered with an operator will have six months to make the changes needed for the check to be carried out. During that period they can keep depositing with their existing payment methods and keep playing, but they cannot withdraw winnings.

If the check has not been completed when the six months expire, operators must unilaterally terminate the contract, notify the DGOJ and return the player’s balance, including any winnings withheld in the meantime. Operators get the same six-month period to adapt their technical systems.

The two measures add to a heavy compliance agenda for Spanish licensees, which are also preparing for the joint cross-operator deposit limits approved by the government in June. Once the consultation closes on 22 October, the DGOJ will review submissions before finalising the resolution, while operators face a 28 April 2027 deadline to bring existing customers’ payment methods into line.