By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · August 27, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
CHELMSFORD, Ontario - Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited launched six live dealer table games at Gateway Casinos Sudbury on August 25, 2026, becoming the first gaming facility in the Greater Sudbury market to offer live-dealer pit gaming and adding three house-banked poker variants to Northern Ontario's regulated live-gaming footprint. The launch, confirmed in a Gateway press release issued from the property at 400 Bonin Road in Chelmsford, adds Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Mississippi Stud and Four Card Poker to the venue's existing slot and electronic-table-game floor. The launch also creates approximately 24 new dealer, floor and pit jobs, and it lands with the property scheduled for extended evening and weekend hours.
The launch is the most consequential expansion of the Greater Sudbury regulated live-gaming footprint since the Chelmsford facility itself opened at the former Sudbury Downs harness track site on November 26, 1999. It also lands at an inflection point for Ontario's broader live-poker geography, with the Great Canadian Ajax and Pickering Casino Resort strike now at day 28 and no tentative agreement in view, and with the WSOP Super Circuit Canada in progress 540 kilometres east at the Playground Poker Club in Kahnawake, Quebec.
What Launched and What Did Not
The six-table pit at Gateway Casinos Sudbury is weighted toward blackjack, with three of the six positions dedicated to the classic bank-versus-player game. The remaining three tables are all house-banked poker variants: one table each of Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Mississippi Stud, and Four Card Poker. All six are live-dealer positions, replacing what had been an all-electronic table-game floor at the venue since it opened.
Notably, the launch does not add a peer-to-peer poker room to the property, and it does not add a peer-to-peer poker tournament schedule of any kind. Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Mississippi Stud and Four Card Poker are all bank-versus-player products, in which each seated player competes only against the house rather than against other players at the table. That is a materially different product from the ring-fenced peer-to-peer game that constitutes the online regulated Ontario poker market, and from the peer-to-peer live cash game and tournament format offered at the Ontario Casino Woodbine, Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto, and, until the current Unifor Local 1090 strike closed it on July 31, Pickering Casino Resort.
The regional consequence is that Northern Ontario recreational players now have a live-dealer poker-variant option approximately five hours by car north of the Ontario Casino Woodbine, but they still have no peer-to-peer poker room north of Greater Toronto. That geography is unchanged by the Sudbury launch.
| Table | Game | Format | Player vs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blackjack | Bank-versus-player | Dealer |
| 2 | Blackjack | Bank-versus-player | Dealer |
| 3 | Blackjack | Bank-versus-player | Dealer |
| 4 | Ultimate Texas Hold'em | House-banked poker variant | Dealer |
| 5 | Mississippi Stud | House-banked poker variant | Dealer |
| 6 | Four Card Poker | House-banked poker variant | Dealer |
Source: Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited press release, August 25, 2026.
Hours, Location, Jobs
The pit runs Monday through Thursday from 4:00 p.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday from noon to 2:00 a.m., and Sunday from noon to midnight. Slots and electronic table games continue to run on the property's existing 24-hour schedule (Sunday to Thursday 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., Friday and Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m.). The venue is at 400 Bonin Road in Chelmsford, on the former Sudbury Downs harness racing track site inside the City of Greater Sudbury, and it is reachable from central Sudbury via Highway 144 or from the Trans-Canada Highway 17 via Highway 6.
The 24 new jobs, per the Gateway release, are dealer and floor positions and represent a materially larger single hiring event for the Sudbury property than any in recent years. Gateway framed the launch as "a significant investment in Greater Sudbury's entertainment and hospitality sector", and neither the operator nor the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario has disclosed either the anticipated table drop or the expected gross gaming revenue contribution of the new pit.
How Ontario Regulation Treats These Games
All three poker variants added at Sudbury are governed by the AGCO's Registrar's Standards for Gaming, the same framework that governs Ontario's regulated online gaming market. Under those standards, house-banked poker variants must publish house-edge disclosures at the table, follow prescribed randomisation procedures, and meet operator-side monitoring obligations. The AGCO's active enforcement register, which added the Booming Games CA$70,000 penalty on August 21 and the Betty Gaming CA$120,000 penalty on August 6, does not currently list any pending action against Gateway. Gateway operates 31 gaming venues in Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta and has a stable AGCO compliance record over the past twelve months.
House-edge, as a matter of published disclosure, differs sharply across the three poker variants added at Sudbury. Ultimate Texas Hold'em carries a house edge of approximately 2.19 per cent per hand assuming the trips optional bet, per standard actuarial disclosures. Mississippi Stud is rougher, with a base-game house edge in the 4.9 per cent range depending on strategy discipline. Four Card Poker's house edge sits closer to 2.85 per cent under optimal play. Peer-to-peer live cash-game poker, by contrast, carries no house edge in the traditional actuarial sense: the operator's return derives from rake, and skilled players can generate positive expected value net of rake in a way that is not available in any of the three house-banked variants.
Regional Context: Northern Ontario Live Poker
Gateway Casinos Sudbury sits inside a Northern Ontario live-poker landscape that has been, and remains, materially thinner than the Greater Toronto Area's. The nearest peer-to-peer poker room to Sudbury remains the Ontario Casino Woodbine at 555 Rexdale Boulevard in Toronto, approximately 380 kilometres south. The Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto at 3450 Dufferin Street runs peer-to-peer poker daily and has been the province's flagship WSOP Circuit venue since GGPoker and Great Canadian's exclusive Ontario partnership was announced in January 2025.
Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, North Bay and Timmins collectively have no peer-to-peer poker option. The launch of live-dealer table games at Sudbury therefore materially closes a regional recreational-play gap for casual players interested in the poker-variant genre, while leaving the peer-to-peer live-poker gap unchanged. For Northern Ontario players who prefer peer-to-peer poker, GGPoker Ontario, PokerStars on FanDuel, BetMGM Poker, 888poker, PartyPoker and Bwin all remain the practical daily-play routes.
The Sudbury Pit vs. the Online Regulated Market
The economic weight of the Sudbury pit sits several orders of magnitude below the online regulated Ontario market. iGaming Ontario's regulated online market produced CA$400.6 million in operator revenue in June 2026 on CA$9.46 billion in cash wagers, with peer-to-peer poker specifically producing CA$5.2 million in revenue on CA$126 million in handle. The Sudbury live-dealer pit, at six tables running approximately eight to ten hours per active day and a table drop that Ontario land-based casinos typically clear at CA$3,000 to CA$8,000 per position per day, will produce a single-digit fraction of one per cent of Ontario's monthly regulated online gaming revenue by any reasonable back-of-envelope estimate.
That is not a criticism of the launch. It is a reflection of the underlying structural asymmetry between Ontario's regulated online market, which serves approximately 1.3 million active player accounts across the province, and Ontario's regulated live-gaming footprint, which serves a materially smaller pool of physically-present players at any given moment. Live pit gaming remains a materially profitable business at the property level, and the introduction of a live pit at Sudbury is precisely the kind of expansion Gateway has previously used to lift a property's per-visitor spend, average dwell time, and food-and-beverage attach rate.
Related Northern Ontario Coverage
- Ottawa poker rooms guide
- London Ontario poker rooms
- Toronto poker rooms
- Pickering Casino Resort poker room closed, strike day 11 (August 10)
- Is online poker legal in Ontario? Full legal guide
Sources
- Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited press release, "Gateway Casinos Sudbury Launches Live Table Games", August 25, 2026. Contact: Sandra Shechter, Manager, Media and Public Relations, Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited.
- Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited newsroom archive, entry dated August 25, 2026 (Billy Hur).
- Yogonet International, "Live dealer tables debut at Ontario's Gateway Casinos Sudbury", August 27, 2026.
- G3 Newswire, "Gateway Casinos Sudbury launches live tables", August 26 to 27, 2026 (Phil Martin).
- Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, Registrar's Standards for Gaming.
- iGaming Ontario, monthly market performance report, June 2026.