Ontario Already Proved a Gray Market Can Be Out-Competed. Almost Nobody Copied It.
Four years after opening, Ontario pulls 91% of players onto licensed sites, ahead of Michigan and New Jersey. Alberta is trying the same approach. Most US states never built the option to try.
Written by Alberta just opened its market. Right now, the regulator's own guess is that 7 in 10 players there still use unlicensed sites. That's the starting line.
Ontario already ran this race
Ontario opened in 2022. Four years later, 91 out of 100 players there now use licensed, regulated sites. Not by suing anyone. It built a market good enough that people chose to leave the gray market on their own.
Compare that to two US states running the same kind of licensed system. Michigan sits at 75 out of 100. New Jersey sits at 73. Both real, both far short of Ontario's 91.
Why the US can't just copy it
One law from 2006 is a big part of the answer. It's called UIGEA. It cut off the banking pipes gray-market sites used to run on. Ontario never had that problem to begin with. Its own gray market was smaller and weaker on day one. The US never built one clean door into legal betting either. Ontario did. The US built fifty different half-built doors instead, one per state, each one different.
What Alberta is betting on
Alberta is trying the Ontario way anyway. Compete, don't sue. Say it lands anywhere close to 91 out of 100. That's real, hard proof this approach works outside Ontario too. It's also proof the states suing prediction markets right now weren't necessarily choosing the best tool. Litigation might just be the only tool most of them ever built.
Where we could be wrong
Ontario and Alberta aren't identical markets. Population, existing gray-market strength, and political appetite for competition all differ. Alberta could land well short of 91 for reasons that have nothing to do with strategy. And UIGEA is a real structural wall for US states. Even a state that wanted to copy Ontario exactly might not legally be able to.