News

Sunday, 05 December 2010 10:51

Residents of Quebec will be free to gamble as much as $9,999 per week when Loto-Quebec's new gambling website opens its doors to paying customers on 1st December.

The new online casino and gambling website which went live at the weekend and will start accepting paying customers from the beginning of next month is expected to attract a lot of business and generate new revenue of as much as $50m in 2012. There are a wide variety of casino games available that includes the hugely popular poker game of Texas Hold'em. The website that sports the domain espacejeux.com is expected to attract up to 20,000 gamblers by Christmas.

Loto-Quebec officials have seen revenue drop in recent years while a number of initiatives to attempt to regenerate them have been in the main unsuccessful. However, they are not treating the expected $50m boost as a big thing, as the company reported their consolidated revenue for the three months leading up to 28th June this year as $925m. Rather, they see the additional revenue stream as merely an added bonus which goes toward fulfilling the company's mandate.

The main reason slated for creating the online gambling site was to try and divert players away from the 2,000 or so illegal gambling websites and to a controlled and legally registered site that provides the customers with far more protection for the province's citizens.

Originally, Loto-Quebec was to partner with a combined venture of the B.C. Lottery Corporation and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation which would have covered legal online gambling in several provinces. However, most of those pulled out leaving Loto-Quebec to join the B.C. Lottery Corporation in creating a lucrative joint platform that will offer poker to their players.

This joint platform is located in Montreal and provided by GTECH subsidiary, G2. They will provide software for the management of customer accounts that is designed by software company OpenBet Ltd. They will also supply a number of cyber table games for the project.

Only adults who are registered and have been verified as Quebec citizens will be allowed to gamble on the Espacejeux website. This is a similar set up to the way British Columbia allows its citizens to gamble on the province's website which currently provides table games only. As soon as the common platform becomes active, gamblers in Quebec can join B.C. players at the virtual tables.

Despite the go ahead, public health directors in Quebec are still opposed to online gambling. The venture is to be assessed over three years by a monitoring committee appointed by the government.