Online Poker Ready for a Comeback in Ontario?

Ontario’s Court of Appeals left online poker in the province some much-needed breathing room yesterday, as they found that players within the local legal market would not be breaking the law if playing peer-to-peer games with those from outside of Canada. The decision will also have a large effect on the daily fantasy sports market there as well.

Four out of five judges agreed with a model put forward by the Ontario government and headed up by Doug Downey, the current Attorney General of Ontario. After more than a year of deliberations, the court has decided that, indeed, folks in Toronto could square off in a game of poker against, say, someone in Detroit, or really any legal international venue.

Current law had held that peer-to-peer iGaming and sports betting was only allowed within the province itself, but with slightly more than 16 million inhabitants, many online poker operators found themselves facing limited liquidity and small player pools. 

Some of the same operators in Ontario, including BetMGM and PokerStars, had found a workaround in their US markets through a Multi State Internet Gaming Agreement (MSIGA), which allows for states with legal online poker to enter into agreements that allow them to share that liquidity and players.

This has dramatically increased prize pools, tournament fields, and even cash game participation in states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Ontario, however, is currently the only Canadian province with legal iGaming, hopefully to be joined by Alberta late next year or early 2027. 

Still, even with Alberta’s population of nearly 5 million being added in the medium term, it was obvious that both regulators and poker operators alike would need to search a bit further afield to find the population of players they were looking for, and the US and, more broadly, the international markets beckoned. 

Now with a decision in hand from the Ontario Court of Appeals, it’s quite likely that this discussion will continue on to the Supreme Court of Canada. Both the Canadian Lottery Commission and the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake fiercely opposed the decision and have 30 days to file an appeal.

Online poker is currently just a relatively modest $66 million in revenue in 2024 and was flat over 2023, while iGaming itself grew 36%. The interesting question is if poker platforms are eventually allowed to operate something akin to an international MSIGA, is whether that small market share came from poker players preferring to play in grey market games that already offered much larger liquidity and player pools.

Studies as recent as 2022 showed almost 70% of gambling in the province was taking place on unregulated sites. By 2024 only about 16% of respondents admitted to gambling solely on grey market sites, but another 20% on top of that admitted to gambling on a mix of legal and grey market. 

The question at the back of everyone’s  mind then, are a large number of online poker players in Ontario, unable to find cash games or tournaments with the desired player pools or prize money, turning to offshore competition, and if so, will the lure of international peer-to-peer gaming be enough to lure them back to licensed, regulated, and taxed sites in the province?