Amaya: Canadian casino provider gone since 2017

Key facts about Amaya

• Identity: Amaya Inc., a Quebec company incorporated on 30 January 2004 as 9138-5666 Québec Inc., with its head office at 7600 Trans-Canada Highway in Pointe-Claire.
• Company names: five successive names, from 9138-5666 Québec Inc. to Gametronix Systems Inc., then Amaya Gaming Group Inc., Amaya Inc. and finally The Stars Group Inc. on 1 August 2017.
• Model: a provider built by acquisition rather than in-house creation, with four companies absorbed between 2011 and 2014.
• Building blocks: Chartwell Technology in July 2011, CryptoLogic in April 2012 for $35.8 million, Cadillac Jack and the Ongame network in November 2012, Diamond Game in 2014.
• Catalogue: titles branded Amaya are really CryptoLogic and Chartwell productions, grouped under a commercial label for just three years.
• Pivot: the PokerStars and Full Tilt buyout closed on 1 August 2014, for US$4.9 billion, turned the provider into a debt-laden operator.
• Exit: the B2B arm was sold to NYX Gaming Group on 31 July 2015 for C$150 million, then passed to Scientific Games on 5 January 2018, a group renamed Light & Wonder in 2022.
• End: absorbed by Flutter Entertainment on 5 May 2020, after the name change to The Stars Group.
• Website: no official site. The domains amaya.com, amayagaming.com and starsgroup.com all redirect to flutter.com, checked on 22 September 2026.
• Licences: no entity under the name Amaya, CryptoLogic or Chartwell in the UK Gambling Commission register of 2,639 holders, nor among Alderney's 20 licensees.
• Trademark: AMAYA remains registered in Canada until June 2031 in the name of AMAYA INC., while the European mark filed by the same company has lapsed.
• Courts: 23 charges brought by Quebec's securities regulator against David Baazov in March 2016, with a stay of proceedings ordered by the Court of Quebec on 6 June 2018.

Amaya: the story of a Canadian casino provider that became The Stars Group

Amaya Inc. is a Quebec company incorporated on 30 January 2004 as 9138-5666 Québec Inc. It became a casino provider through a run of buyouts between 2011 and 2014. It sold its entire B2B business on 31 July 2015, was renamed The Stars Group on 1 August 2017, then absorbed by Flutter Entertainment on 5 May 2020. As of 22 September 2026, no official Amaya website exists. Not one of the regulators we checked lists an entity under that name. No game collection can be attributed to the brand either. This page is an archive record, best read alongside the full overview of providers listed on Kynox Casino.

Why does this page not link to any casino?

Let us say it before you go looking for the button, because there is none. You will find no operator list on this Kynox Casino page, no conversion filter, and certainly no demo versions. This is not an oversight. It is the only position that holds up against what the documents show.

Amaya stopped publishing games on 31 July 2015. That is the day it sold its last two provider subsidiaries. The commercial brand disappeared on 1 August 2017. A provider that no longer produces, no longer distributes and appears in no regulator's register cannot be presented as an active supplier. As for the demo engines, they ran on the CryptoLogic and Chartwell platforms. Those were sold in 2015 and absorbed twice over. Nothing public remains.

When you read elsewhere that a casino is "powered by Amaya", you are almost always looking at a page written before 2015 and never updated since. We chose to document rather than recycle.

Where can you test equivalent formats today?

The historic game library rested on three families: the slot, the table and video poker. If the format is what interests you, you can try video poker from other providers or head to the slots you can test here, where the demos still run.

From 9138-5666 Québec Inc. to The Stars Group: the chain of company names

This is the point every French-language profile misses. It is written in plain sight in the annual information form the company filed with the American regulator. Amaya was not founded under that name. It began life as a numbered company, carried a forgotten name for six months, then changed names four more times.

Incorporation took place under Part IA of Quebec's Companies Act, with the registered and head office at 7600 Trans-Canada Highway in Pointe-Claire. These details sit in the 2015 annual information form filed on EDGAR, a document nobody seems to have opened before writing about this provider. The American filing number that once carried Amaya now belongs to Flutter. That gives you the legal continuity at a glance.

On the market side, the company moved from the TSX Venture Exchange to the main TSX board on 1 October 2013 under the ticker AYA, as its listing record confirms.

Not to be confused with the other Amayas

The name turns up elsewhere. Amaya is a Basque first name, a Spanish surname, and it was also the name of a web browser built by the W3C. More recently a company with no connection to gambling, AMAYA DÉVELOPPEMENT HOLDING, filed two European trademarks on 1 June 2026 covering cosmetics, jewellery and leather goods. If you stumble on a recent news item under the Amaya name, the odds are it has nothing to do with casinos.

A Pointe-Claire company turned acquisition machine

David Baazov, who ran the group, applied a simple and brutal method: buy existing providers instead of building one. Credit where it is due, though. The Canadian trademark register shows a claimed use in Canada since January 2008 for gaming revenue tracking software. That is well before the first acquisition. Amaya was making something before it became a buyer.

The geographic neighbourhood is still alive where Amaya went dark. Quebec is home to the cabinet manufacturer also based in Quebec, and North America still has a Canadian studio in production today.

You will also come across the other Canadian workshop in our directory, which still releases games. Amaya was never really a creative workshop.

The timeline of deals

Chartwell then CryptoLogic and the other B2B building blocks

Chartwell came from Calgary, Alberta, and supplied casino platforms to leading European operators. Renamed Amaya (Alberta) Inc., it brought slots and tables, but also the instant-win formats that matter to studios working the scratch card format and to the online bingo niche and its suppliers.

The acquisition that carries the most weight is still CryptoLogic. Founded in Toronto in 1995 by brothers Andrew and Mark Rivkin, it had launched the industry's first real-money client, InterCasino, back in 1996, before moving to Dublin. Its game library covered slots, tables and above all video poker. That territory now belongs to providers filed under electronic poker and to providers who build table games in software.

That 1995 date deserves a pause. CryptoLogic belongs to the generation of providers born before 2000, the one that invented the online casino before the term really existed. Amaya bought a piece of industrial history, then sold it three years later. That is the kind of detail that irritates me, because it says a lot about how this industry treats its own heritage.

Then came the land-based arm. Cadillac Jack built floor machines in Georgia, and Diamond Game made lottery terminals. At that point the group looked more like a conglomerate than a provider, with one foot in the world of providers that came out of the physical machine estate.

PokerStars changes everything in 2014

On 12 June 2014, Amaya announced the acquisition of Oldford Group. That was the parent company of PokerStars and Full Tilt, for US$4.9 billion. The deal closed on 1 August 2014. Overnight, a company of a few hundred staff became the world's leading online poker business, with an enormous debt to clear. Its own annual filing put the figure at close to 100 million cumulative registered customers.

The rest was written in advance. To pay it down, it had to sell.

The B2B exit and the scattering of the catalogue

On 31 July 2015, Amaya closed the sale of the Toronto brand it bought in 2012 and of Chartwell to NYX Gaming Group for C$150 million, made up of C$110 million in cash and C$40 million in exchangeable preferred shares, according to the closing press release. Cadillac Jack had already gone to AGS for C$476 million, a deal announced on 30 March 2015.

The content then joined the Open Gaming System. That was the aggregation platform which also carried the other studio that moved under the NYX flag, a provider distributed through the same channel and a Sydney studio plugged into this distribution network.

On 5 January 2018, the American group that absorbed NYX completed its acquisition. The whole thing was split between the digital division that inherited the Open Gaming System and the sports betting arm of the same group.

Scientific Games became Light & Wonder in 2022. The acquired heritage ended up mixed in with a land-based catalogue picked up by the same parent company and with a British name inherited through successive buyouts. By that stage, nobody can tell you which title originally carried the Amaya logo.

So the titles listed under Amaya in directories are in fact CryptoLogic or Chartwell productions, released before 2015 and grouped under a commercial label for the three years the group owned them. Many of them sat with the family of providers filed under video format. No official list was found as of 22 September 2026, and no catalogue figure can be sourced on that date.

The scenario is not unusual. It echoes a comparable catalogue takeover on the Microgaming side, except that the Amaya name survived nowhere. For a reader, the outcome looks like another studio whose trail stops dead or a British provider that shut down.

One period detail to place it all. When these titles were genuinely running, Canadian players paid with deposit solutions born in Canada and Europeans with a prepaid voucher long since gone. Both payment methods tell the same decade as the provider.

Is there an official Amaya website?

No. And that is not guesswork. It is a finding anyone can verify, domain by domain and register by register.

The historic domains and their redirects

The group's three domain names are still held, but they now serve only to redirect to the current owner, which is Flutter Entertainment. The last capture of amaya.com in the web archives dates from 28 July 2017, four days before the name change.

What the regulator registers say

The UK Gambling Commission public business register held 2,639 licence holders on the day of the check. The Alderney licensee list, the jurisdiction where CryptoLogic had been certified since 2004, held 20. Neither lists an entity under any of the three names.

The Amaya trademark is alive in Canada and dead in Europe

Here is the detail I was not expecting. A commercial trademark can outlive the company that carried it, and that is exactly what is happening here. In Canada the AMAYA word mark is still registered in the name of AMAYA INC., at the Pointe-Claire address, with an expiry set for June 2031. In Europe, the figurative mark filed by the same company has lapsed.

You can check the Canadian AMAYA trademark record and the lapsed European record yourself. The Canadian database was up to date as of 16 September 2026.

The reading is simple. Somebody still pays to keep this name alive in Canada, without running a single product under it. In Europe, nobody pays any more. If you are looking for a European casino powered by Amaya, the answer sits in that table row.

The Baazov case and the end of the commercial brand

In March 2016, Quebec's Autorité des marchés financiers filed 23 charges against David Baazov and two associates, for insider trading and attempts to influence the share price of Amaya Gaming Group. The chief executive stepped back, then resigned in August 2016.

On 6 June 2018, Judge Salvatore Mascia of the Court of Quebec ordered a stay of proceedings against all defendants, on the grounds that trial fairness had been compromised by the regulator's repeated failures in disclosing evidence. This is not second-hand reporting: the regulator published it itself. It did not appeal.

The case did not kill the Amaya provider, which had already been sold three years earlier. It simply sealed the reputation of a name that nobody at The Stars Group, and later at Flutter, had any interest in reviving.

What is left of Amaya in 2026?

An address in Pointe-Claire. A trademark paid up until 2031. An American filing number now held by Flutter. A few hundred web pages nobody has reread in ten years. That is all of it, and it is already a lot for a numbered company that became owner of the biggest poker network in the world inside a decade.

If you landed here hoping for a list of online casinos, the right move is to start from the casino and not from the provider. An operator licensed in your own jurisdiction, with a verifiable licence and readable withdrawal terms, beats chasing a ghost. We document this page because the question keeps coming back, not because there is anything to sell behind it.

Source: checks carried out on 22 September 2026.

FAQ: Amaya

What was the Amaya casino provider?

Amaya was an online casino provider based in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. The company never built its collection itself. It assembled it by buying other providers between 2011 and 2014, mainly Chartwell Technology and CryptoLogic. It left the business on 31 July 2015.

Does Amaya still exist in 2026?

No. The company was renamed The Stars Group on 1 August 2017, then absorbed by the Irish group Flutter Entertainment on 5 May 2020. No entity trades under the Amaya name in the gambling sector any more.

Who bought Amaya?

Flutter Entertainment, at the end of a two-step chain. Amaya first rebranded as The Stars Group in 2017, then Flutter completed its acquisition on 5 May 2020. Separately, Amaya's casino provider business had already been sold in 2015 to NYX Gaming Group, which Scientific Games bought on 5 January 2018.

Does Amaya have an official website?

No. The group's three historic domains, amaya.com, amayagaming.com and starsgroup.com, all redirect to flutter.com, checked on 22 September 2026. The last readable version of amaya.com in the web archives dates from 28 July 2017.

Why can you no longer find an Amaya online casino?

Because Amaya has supplied no operator since 31 July 2015, the date it sold its last two provider subsidiaries. Pages still advertising Amaya casinos were generally written before that date and have not been updated since.

What is the difference between Amaya and CryptoLogic?

CryptoLogic is a Canadian provider founded in Toronto in 1995, behind the industry's first real-money online casino. Amaya bought it in April 2012 for $35.8 million, then sold it in 2015. Titles presented as Amaya games are therefore, for the most part, CryptoLogic or Chartwell productions relabelled for three years.

What happened to the Amaya games?

They passed to NYX Gaming Group on 31 July 2015, then to Scientific Games in January 2018, a company renamed Light & Wonder in 2022. The catalogue was folded into a much larger set and the Amaya label disappeared. No official list of these titles was found as of 22 September 2026.

Does Amaya hold a gambling licence?

No, none at all. The UK Gambling Commission public register, which held 2,639 licence holders on 22 September 2026, returns no result for Amaya, CryptoLogic or Chartwell. The Alderney licensee list, the jurisdiction where CryptoLogic had been certified since 2004, returns none either.

Is the Amaya trademark still protected?

Yes in Canada, no in Europe. The AMAYA word mark remains registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in the name of AMAYA INC., with an expiry set for June 2031. The European mark filed by the same company has lapsed, a situation confirmed on 22 September 2026.

Sources:

• Amaya Inc. 2015 Annual Information Form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission
• Amaya Gaming Group Inc. stock exchange listing record, Toronto Stock Exchange
• Amaya Completes $150 Million Sale of Chartwell and Cryptologic to NYX, press release of 31 July 2015
• Amaya announces sale of Cadillac Jack to AGS for C$476 million, press release of 30 March 2015
• Baazov et al. case, the Court orders a stay of proceedings, Autorité des marchés financiers
• UK Gambling Commission public business register
• Alderney Gambling Control Commission eGambling licensee list
• Canadian AMAYA trademark record, CIPO database
• TMview, the shared database of trademark offices
• Flutter Entertainment, current destination of the historic domains