By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · May 27, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
TORONTO - The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and iGaming Ontario said last week that the proportion of Ontario residents wagering exclusively on the province's regulated online gambling sites has climbed to 91.1 per cent, the strongest channelization figure produced by the regulators since the regulated market launched in April 2022 and a 7.4-percentage-point jump from a comparable Ipsos survey conducted a year earlier. For online poker, which sits inside the regulated framework but is also the most liquidity-sensitive product in the building, the headline figure is good news with a structural caveat that the broad-strokes report does not unpack.
The new study, conducted by Ipsos between March 30 and April 20, 2026, surveyed 2,012 Ontarians aged 19 and older who had wagered real money online at any time in the preceding three months. Of those respondents, 91.1 per cent reported having placed at least one bet on a site licensed by the AGCO, while 8.9 per cent reported playing exclusively on unregulated, offshore sites. The Ipsos report represents the fourth annual round of channelization research commissioned by the two agencies and follows the 83.7 per cent figure published in April 2025 for the second-anniversary period.
The Quotes That Will Be Used
Dr. Karin Schnarr, the AGCO's Chief Executive Officer and Registrar, said in the agency's accompanying statement that it was "encouraging to see more and more Ontarians choosing regulated sites when they gamble online," adding that the result "builds on previous Ipsos findings and signals continued progress in the province's regulated iGaming market." She noted that the AGCO "remains committed to addressing the residual illegal market and ensuring regulated operators meet Ontario's strong regulatory standards."
Joseph Hillier, named earlier this year as the permanent President and CEO of iGaming Ontario, said the figure pointed to "growing confidence among Ontarians in the province's regulated market, which offers mandatory player protections and safeguards across all regulated sites that the unregulated market does not."
Ontario's Attorney General, Doug Downey, framed the result in international terms. "These results are clear," he said in a statement provided to media. "Ontario is an international leader in upholding a safe, competitive, and regulated online gaming market." He added that "the framework introduced four years ago was designed to protect players, expand consumer choice, and curb illegal gambling," and described the result as evidence that "Ontario's world-class online gaming model continue[s] to support jobs, innovation, and economic activity across the province."
The Trend Line
The four-year arc of Ipsos channelization data for Ontario is now long enough to read meaningfully. The pre-launch baseline cited by the provincial government in 2022 estimated that approximately 70 per cent of online gambling in the province took place on unregulated sites. Within the first year of regulation, that flipped: the 2023 round of the same study found 85.3 per cent of online gamblers had used a regulated platform. The figure rose modestly to 86.4 per cent in 2024 before sliding to 83.7 per cent in 2025, a small enough movement that it sat within the survey's stated margin of error.
The 2026 jump to 91.1 per cent is therefore the first material year-over-year improvement in the channelization series since the launch period. Industry analysts have credited a combination of factors: the AGCO's enforcement work with international counterparts targeting unregistered operators marketing to Ontarians, the expanding product range from regulated operators, and the steady widening of payment-channel availability through providers like Interac e-Transfer, PayPal, and Apple Pay. The 91.1 per cent figure puts Ontario in the same range as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and Spain, which are usually cited as the international benchmark for regulated-market channelization.
Cumulatively, the province's regulated framework has now processed more than C$103 billion in wagers and produced more than C$4.2 billion in gross gaming revenue since the April 2022 launch, according to figures Hillier cited in the same release.
Where the Survey Does Not Help
The Ipsos sample frame is "Ontarians who have wagered real money online in the past three months," and the questionnaire treats online gambling as a single category. The published report does not break out channelization by product, which means the headline 91.1 per cent figure includes sports betting, online casino, table games, slots, and peer-to-peer poker as one number. Industry-side estimates have long held that channelization in regulated peer-to-peer poker tends to run lower than channelization in online casino and sports betting, because poker is unusually dependent on liquidity and offshore operators have continued to provide larger combined player pools than any single ring-fenced jurisdiction can offer.
That structural dynamic is well documented. Ontario's regulated online poker pool typically runs between 1,500 and 2,500 concurrent cash-game players through the busy evening hours, according to traffic tracked on our Ontario poker traffic index. Internationally licensed operators such as the global GGPoker, ACR, CoinPoker and Bovada continue to advertise larger combined pools that some Ontario players, particularly mid-stakes and high-stakes regulars, choose to access despite the absence of provincial consumer protections. The Ipsos study captures this category as "unregulated" but does not separate poker players from sports bettors or casino players within the 8.9 per cent.
The provincial government has been candid about this gap. Pre-launch policy work conducted by the Ministry of the Attorney General specifically called out poker as the product category most likely to underperform the broader channelization average, on liquidity grounds. The Ontario Court of Appeal's 4-1 November 2025 opinion in support of international pooled liquidity, now before the Supreme Court of Canada, was driven almost entirely by exactly this analysis.
What 91 Per Cent Means in Practice for the Poker Market
For the six regulated operators listed on our best poker sites in Ontario page, the 91 per cent headline is, on balance, supportive. It is the strongest single piece of evidence the province has produced that the ring-fenced framework is working in aggregate, and it removes one of the rhetorical weapons that critics of the model have used to argue the regulated market is ceding too much ground to offshore competition. AGCO and iGaming Ontario will use the number heavily in conversations with Alberta as the bilateral MOU on shared liquidity covered in yesterday's report moves forward, and again with international regulators interested in the Ontario model.
For players, the practical effect is closer to none. The number does not by itself change tournament guarantees on GGPoker Ontario, PokerStars Ontario, BetMGM Poker, 888poker, PartyPoker, or Bwin. It does not enlarge cash-game pools. It does not accelerate the migration of mid-stakes regulars off offshore operators. What it does do is strengthen the case that the existing Ontario framework deserves continued investment and trust, including the heavy lifting required to build a Canadian shared-liquidity environment.
It also intersects directly with the launch of BetGuard, the AGCO's centralised self-exclusion platform, earlier this month. A 91 per cent channelization figure means that 91 cents of every dollar the Ipsos sample wagered online flowed through operators required by their AGCO registration to integrate with BetGuard, recognise voluntary self-exclusion, and apply the marketing-suppression provisions that come with it. The corresponding 9 per cent runs through operators that have no such obligation. The framing of channelization as a player-protection metric, rather than a market-share metric, is the angle Schnarr and Hillier are now pushing in regulatory forums.
The Methodology, Briefly
The Ipsos study is a stratified online panel survey carried out in two waves between March 30 and April 20, 2026. The respondent universe was Ontarians aged 19 and older who had wagered real money online at any time in the previous three months. The sample size of 2,012 produces a maximum margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points at a 95 per cent confidence level for the headline result. Subgroup analyses within the report carry larger margins. The questionnaire asked respondents to identify the platforms they had used by brand, and the Ipsos analytics team coded each named platform as regulated or unregulated against the AGCO's list of registered operators as of the survey date.
One important methodological note: the survey measures whether respondents have used at least one regulated site in the recall period, not the proportion of total wagers placed through regulated sites. A respondent who places one C$5 bet on a regulated platform and C$10,000 on an offshore site is counted in the 91.1 per cent. The Ipsos report acknowledges this, and the AGCO's own annual reports have historically tracked wager-share figures separately for that reason. Both measures have moved in the same direction over the four-year series.
What Comes Next
The AGCO's near-term enforcement work focuses on a relatively short list of offshore operators that continue to advertise to Ontario players in violation of the registered-operator requirement. The regulator confirmed earlier this year that it has begun co-ordinating with international counterparts on cross-border enforcement, an initiative that brought down the marketing footprint of several offshore casino brands in late 2025. The poker-specific list, which centres on a small number of US-facing sites that retain Canadian customers, has been a slower file to move.
The next data point in the channelization series is expected in spring 2027. Before then, Ontario will see the Alberta market launch on July 13, the result of the Supreme Court of Canada's eventual decision on the international pooled-liquidity reference, and the rollout of new BetGuard integration milestones. Each of those will pull at the 91.1 per cent figure, in directions that are difficult to model in advance.
For now, the most useful way to read the result is this: Ontario's regulated market is performing as designed in aggregate, the poker carve-out within that performance remains lower for liquidity reasons that no amount of marketing or enforcement can fully solve on its own, and the bilateral and constitutional files now moving alongside the channelization data are the levers most likely to close the residual poker gap.