HotTakes picked a specific moment to lean hardest into in-person, unglamorous marketing: the day Alberta's regulated iGaming market went live. The company handed out 500 orange HotTakes cowboy hats and staffed its own booth across three of the Calgary Stampede's biggest venues, the same grassroots approach that built HotTakes' original Ontario base.
The company had one real advantage this time: timing. HotTakes entered Ontario more than a year after that market launched, whereas in Alberta, it showed up on day one of regulation with an existing free-to-play user base already in place. The activations stayed narrowly scoped too, promoting only free-to-play contests and content in person, with real-money promotion reserved for users who had explicitly consented to marketing and cleared KYC.
HotTakes co-founder Tyler Amirault laid out the thesis behind this approach on the BettingStartups podcast back in February 2025: "the affiliates that are going to win are the ones that are actually creating new high value bettors," not the ones fighting over existing wallet share. Alberta, HotTakes says, is close to a clean test of that idea.
The company breaks a newly regulated market into three groups: people who were already betting offshore, true beginners who need time to ramp up, and a middle group it considers the real opportunity, bettors who were ready to play but held back by the lack of a regulated, trusted option.
BettingStartups caught up with Amirault about the early learnings from Alberta. "People haven't built a relationship with any operator yet, so they represent real short-term payback on ad spend," he said, positioning HotTakes as the trusted route operators use to reach that group first. The other two groups need different things: offshore bettors already know how to bet and just need a reason to switch, while true beginners need education before they're active at all, something the company says its content is built to provide too.
Alberta is explicitly framed as the near-term push, a broad top-of-funnel play. While every operator in the province runs the same playbook of big launch promotions aimed at the same audience, Amirault argues it gets harder for users to tell one experience from another. That's the gap the company wants content to fill once the initial rush settles.
HotTakes has built an AI-assisted engine it calls Articles to help its editorial team publish faster, pulling together line movements, deep links, and market context around a story. The company is emphatic that the tooling sits behind its own sports writers and curators rather than replacing them. The AI's job is speed, not authorship, and every story is built to deep-link into HotTakes' contests and betting features.
The idea traces back further than this launch. HotTakes co-founder James White described wanting exactly this kind of connected ecosystem, "a business with a bunch of different legs" including "brands, podcasts," on that same February 2025 episode. Articles, the company says, is that plan finally showing up: "It's the same vision, but a more connected version of it."
The bet is that the two moves compound. Alberta brings in bettors who don't yet have a relationship with any operator, while Articles and the rest of HotTakes' ecosystem gives people a reason to open the app between games. Earn that habit, HotTakes says, and it becomes a "mindshare moat" rather than just another affiliate funnel.
Disclaimer: Jesse Learmonth, the founder of BettingStartups, is an advisor to HotTakes in his personal capacity.
