The Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) is an organization which operates lottery games in Atlantic Canada. It is owned jointly by the four Atlantic provincial governments: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. ALC's headquarters are located in Moncton, New Brunswick. All profits returned by ALC are distributed to the provinces for their general funds.
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History
ALC was founded in 1976, shortly after the founding of government lotteries elsewhere in Canada. While ALC's first games were only played on a regional basis, it quickly joined the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation, which offered national draws. Although it has been slow to adopt its versions of draw games available elsewhere (such as Pro-Line, which was in the rest of the country several years before it was in Atlantic Canada), ALC has been seen by some as an innovator in lottery technology. In 1988 they became the first lottery organization in the world to print a bar code on all draw and scratch tickets, allowing for instant verification of a prize. In 1990, they introduced the first legal video lottery terminals in Canada. The introduction of PlaySphere in 2004 allowed users to play the lottery over the Internet, another first. In 2007, Atlantic Lottery Corporation was named one of Canada's Top 100 Employers, as published in Maclean's magazine, the only provincial gaming authority to receive this honour.[1]
Games and Products
- Draw Games:
- Lotto 6/49 (national) — draws every Wednesday, and Saturday
- Lotto Super 7 (national) — draws every Friday
- Tag (a 6-digit number attached to other draw tickets)
- Atlantic 49 (a regional draw played in conjunction with Lotto 6/49 that uses the same format) — top prize is always $1,000,000.
- Pik 4 (a "mini-Keno" draw using the Lotto 6/49 numbers)
- Keno Atlantic
- Atlantic PayDay (a draw of 4 numbers out of 70 in which the top prize is an annuitized $500,000 paid out two weeks at a time)
- Bucko (played three lines at a time with a possibility of combination wins) — Draws everyday with a top prize of $20,000.
- Sports betting:
- Pro-Line
- Over-Under
- Props
- Other conventional games:
- Scratch-n-Win (scratch tickets, including recurring draws such as Set For Life)
- Breakopen (Pull-tabs)
- Video lottery terminals
- Internet-based games:
- PlaySphere (allows for draw games and sports betting to take place over the Internet)
ALC also owns the Charlottetown Driving Park Entertainment Centre; harness racing track, slot machines, Poker tables located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
