LC International Casinos brands include Foxy Bingo, Bwin, Cheeky Bingo and Gala Bingo. LC International Casinos is also known as LC International Limited, licence number 54743 which operates 13 active sites, 0 white labels and 2 inactive brands. This is 15 online casinos in total.
If you know your oats when it comes to sports betting, you won’t need to ask who or what LC International Limited is. It’s the supergroup that was formed when old high street favourites Ladbrokes and Coral merged in 2015, bringing together two titanic iGaming websites and more than four thousand physical betting shops. As such, it’s one of the biggest sports betting companies in Europe. Since then, the company has only grown bigger and is now part of something that takes it way beyond the reach of just Ladbrokes and Coral – LC International Limited is now part of Entain plc.
We’ll get into what Entain plc is and who else is part of the family a little further down the page, but for now, let’s talk about where LC International Limited and how it came to be as big as it is today.
19th Century Beginnings
LC International Limited can be traced all the way back to the founding of Ladbrokes. That means going back in time a very long way because Ladbrokes is the oldest betting company in the world, stemming from a business that was incorporated in 1886. Coral is positively youthful compared to Ladbrokes but is still one of the old-timers of the gambling world, having opened in 1926. The original Ladbrokes wasn’t interested in accepting bets, though – it collected commission for horses and jockeys and was so-named because the horses in question trained at Ladbroke Hall in Warwickshire. The first Ladbrokes office opened close to The Strand in London in 1906, moving to glamorous Mayfair a few years later.
While the Ladbrokes brand is seen as the betting choice of the working class today, it was anything but that in its earliest incarnation. From its inception until the 1950s, Ladbrokes catered only to aristocrats, operating a very exclusive gentleman’s club in central London and turning away anyone who wasn’t deemed well-heeled enough to enter. Even then, though, Ladbrokes was making history and challenging stereotypes. From 1919 until 1956, its principal representative and partner was Helen Vernet. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to be involved in horse racing at the time – let alone in such a senior position.
Changing with the Times
Everything changed for Ladbrokes after the end of the Second World War. The post-war economy was one of austerity, and the client base was dwindling. Ladbrokes was up for sale and was eventually acquired by Mark Stein for a mere £100,000 in 1956. One of the first things Stein did was change the company’s approach to bookmaking, opening the doors to entire classes of customers who’d previously been excluded. Stein aggressively expanded the business, opening Ladbrokes betting shops outside London when the law changed to permit such things with the introduction of the Betting and Gaming Act in 1961. By 1973, Ladbrokes had more than one thousand shops.
The final big Ladbrokes act under Stein’s management was to acquire Vernon’s Pools in 1989, giving the company a position of dominance in the football betting market. Growing older and feeling his work was done, Stein retired in 1994. Ladbrokes was under new management again – and bigger changes were coming.
Enter Coral
It took Ladbrokes two attempts to purchase Coral, its longtime rival. The first attempt was made in 1998, with a price of £363m agreed between the two companies. The Government of the time wasn’t a fan of the acquisition, though, and ordered Coral to be immediately sold off again after taking advice from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which found the takeover to be anti-competitive.
Gambling laws (and merger laws) changed numerous times over the next few years, so Ladbrokes came back for another bite at the Coral cherry in 2015. By this time, Coral belonged to the same group of betting businesses and websites as Gala Bingo and was known as the Gala Coral Group. There was still a lot of red tape to fight through, but Ladbrokes eventually got the deal done in November 2016. The entire Gala Coral Group was brought in-house, and the business was renamed Ladbrokes Coral Group Plc, later becoming LC International Limited to reflect the company’s growing interests abroad. Having paid big money to acquire a major rival, the people in charge of Ladbrokes were probably quite surprised when their own business was targeted for a takeover in December 2017. The £4bn bid on the table came from GVC Holdings – and it was accepted.
Becoming Entain Plc
Shortly after acquiring LC International Limited, GVC Holdings changed its name to Entain Plc. The Isle of Man-based company employs more than fifteen thousand people and brings in revenue of more than £4.2bn per year thanks to its multitude of market-leading betting brands. Aside from Ladbrokes and Coral, Entain Plc also owns and operates Bwin, Party Poker, Party Casino, Gala Bingo, Gala Casino, and many more.
Buying LC International Limited was just the latest development in a long-running string of acquisitions by Entain, which has since bought Canada’s Avid Gaming for £175m and the Dutch iGaming company BetCity for £450m. With a presence in America thanks to a partnership with MGM Resorts International and ever-expanding operations in South America and the Far East, Entain Plc continues to grow on what feels like a week-to-week basis. Thanks to the enormous number of sports betting companies under its umbrella, its dominance in that market is unchallenged.
LC International Limited and the UKGC
Being an Entain Plc company means that LC International Limited is fortunate enough to hold multiple licences, enabling it to operate in almost every territory in the world where online gambling is legal. From the point of view of customers in the UK, though, the most important of the many licences that the company holds is the one it has from the UK Gambling Commission under account number 54743. The operator’s current UKGC licence has been in force since 2019, but it isn’t a clean one.
In August 2022, the UKGC announced the results of a compliance assessment performed on LC International Limited. The regulator concluded that the operator had failed to comply with several conditions of its licence, including those that govern the prevention of money laundering, those which are intended to minimise the risk of customers experiencing harm from gambling, and those that govern how and when customers can operate multiple accounts with the same betting company. While the regulator stopped short of handing the company a formal fine, LC International Limited agreed to divest £544K of ill-gained funds and pay a staggering settlement of £13.4m in lieu of a fine. Further conditions have also been attached to the company’s licence.
The Top LC International Limited Sites
Ladbrokes
We’ve already discussed Ladbrokes at length while we were discussing the origins of LC International Limited above, but the point remains that this is one of the largest and most complete iGaming sites in the world. Ladbrokes may have started with sports betting, but there’s so much more to its website today. The majority of people who visit Ladbrokes may still do so to bet on sports, but doing so is far from the only option available to them when they arrive.
The growth of the Ladbrokes brand has allowed the iconic red-fronted betting company to pursue plenty of other avenues over the years, resulting in the opening of Ladbrokes Bingo and Ladbrokes Poker, both of which are popular within their own fields and exist as mini-sites within the larger Ladbrokes website. There’s also a full casino attached to the site and plenty of promotions for each individual area of it. The long and short of it is that you can indulge in every kind of iGaming at Ladbrokes – there’s little need to ever play anywhere else.
Coral
Much like Ladbrokes, we spoke a lot about Coral when we were talking about the origins of LC International Limited. The two brands spend decades at each other’s throats on the British high street, but they now find themselves stablemates on the same roster and have plenty of things in common. The Coral website was given a full redesign after the company was acquired by LC International Limited, and it now looks more than a little like a blue version of Ladbrokes itself.
We can draw plenty of comparisons between Coral and Ladbrokes. Just as Ladbrokes Bingo and Ladbrokes Poker exist, so does Coral Bingo and Coral Poker. The only difference is that they haven’t caught on in quite as big a way as they have at Ladbrokes. You can still bet on almost anything your heart desires at Coral, though, and while it may never knock Ladbrokes off its perch, it’s still one of the biggest and most trusted names in sports betting.
Party Casino
If Party Casino existed on any other casino network, it would be the biggest site on it. It’s only because Ladbrokes and Coral have been around for so long and are such well-known household names that it finds itself in third place. Party Casino might not quite be a household name in its own right yet, but it’s getting there. Recent years have seen the brand embark on some high-profile, big-money sponsorship and advertising endeavours, including a lucrative partnership with the McLaren Formula 1 team.
If Party Casino is guilty of any missteps, it’s the fact that it might be trying to do too much. As the name implies, Party Casino is a casino, not a sports betting site. There’s no need for it to have a sportsbook attached to it, and nor would anyone expect to find one there. There is a sportsbook, though, and we can’t help but feel that it gets in the way more than it brings any benefits. The number of slots and casino games at Party Casino is enormous, and that probably ought to be what the site focuses on rather than stretching itself to cover other areas.
Gala Spins
When Gala first came up with Gala Spins, it was supposed to be a complement for the far-more-popular Gala Bingo brand. Since then, you could argue that Gala Spins has gone on to become more popular than the brand that birthed it. This is one of the UK’s top online slots sites, and is well-known thanks to a long-running series of television adverts. If you asked the average person in the street to name a few online casino sites, there’s a reasonable chance that Gala Spins would be one of the names they came up with.
All casinos change with the times, and Gala Spins has been no exception. While slots are still its main focus, and comfortably so, there’s now a Slingo section for those who enjoy that particular combination of slots and bingo. Whether that section would be better suited to Gala Bingo than Gala Spins is a question for other people to debate. Intant-win scratchcards have also found their way onto the Gala Spins site, as have live game shows. The collection of games on offer isn’t quite as expansive as that of Party Casino, but there’s still plenty of range and depth. Plenty of the games at Gala Spins are exclusive, so you can have iGaming experiences here that can’t be matched elsewhere.
Foxy Bingo
The only conceivable way you won’t have heard of Foxy Bingo before is if you don’t have a television. Very few iGaming brands have featured on television as much as Foxy Bingo has, and once the brand’s mascot, “Foxy,” has been seen, he’s never forgotten. We say “he” because Foxy is usually male, although he was briefly played by Hollywood star Heather Graham as part of a marketing campaign for the launch of the Foxy Bingo sister site, Foxy Games. For many people, the first exposure they had to the Foxy Bingo brand was when it was the sponsor of the former ITV daytime Jeremy Kyle show.
Very few iGaming sites that were designed to be bingo sites have stuck exclusively to bingo as the years have gone by. Most of them have found the need to add slots and other casino games in order to stay relevant and retain customers. Foxy Bingo has gone down that route, which begs the question of what Foxy Games is. If it’s bingo you’re after, though, you’ll find that Foxy Bingo has a plethora of exclusive rooms, many of which have unique themes and plenty of which have large jackpots. Bingo can be played for almost any price at Foxy Bingo, and with almost any number of balls you want to play it with.
