iGaming Ontario Posts Record CA$9.9 Billion July Handle and CA$414 Million in Operator Revenue as Peer-to-Peer Poker Becomes the Only Product Category to Shrink Year-on-Year

By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · August 29, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen

TORONTO - iGaming Ontario, the AGCO subsidiary that operates the province's regulated online-gaming market, released its July 2026 market-performance data on August 27, reporting total cash wagers of CA$9.9 billion and non-adjusted gross gaming revenue of CA$414 million. Both figures are the highest ever recorded for a single month since Ontario opened its competitive regulated market in April 2022. The handle number is up 30.7 per cent year-on-year against July 2025's CA$7.56 billion; the revenue number is up 33.1 per cent against July 2025's CA$311 million. Monthly active player accounts reached 1.365 million, a 44 per cent year-on-year increase.

The July revenue number is the second-highest month on record in dollar terms, trailing only the CA$426 million posted in December 2025. Average revenue per active player account fell 7.6 per cent to CA$303 as the market's active player base expanded faster than aggregate spend. The provincial market has now cleared CA$82.7 billion in cumulative handle and CA$3.2 billion in gross gaming revenue since launch, per figures cited by Tribuna's report on the July release.

Product Breakdown: Casino and Sports Set Records, Poker Retreats

Online casino remained the market's dominant vertical in July. It accounted for 89 per cent of Ontario's total handle at CA$8.8 billion, up 30.2 per cent year-on-year, and 80 per cent of revenue at CA$330 million, up 31 per cent. Online sports betting captured 10 per cent of total wagers at CA$992 million, a 44.2 per cent year-on-year increase, and its non-adjusted gross gaming revenue climbed 47.2 per cent to CA$78 million, or 19 per cent of the market. Peer-to-peer poker rounded out the remainder with roughly 1 per cent of handle and 1 per cent of revenue.

The poker numbers are the outliers. Ontario players wagered CA$116 million in peer-to-peer online poker in July, down 16.5 per cent year-on-year against July 2025's CA$139 million. Non-adjusted gross gaming revenue for the vertical was CA$5.3 million, down 10.2 per cent year-on-year against July 2025's CA$5.9 million. It is the only one of the three vertical categories reported in the release to record a year-on-year decline in either handle or revenue.

Four Consecutive Months of Poker Decline

July is the fourth straight month in which Ontario peer-to-peer poker has moved backwards, and the pattern has now stretched across the entirety of the province's summer schedule. Poker handle hit an all-time monthly Ontario record in March 2026 at CA$183 million, with revenue of CA$8.0 million, per figures cited in prior monthly reports. The market has fallen every month since. April dropped to CA$128 million in handle and CA$5.3 million in revenue, a month-on-month handle decline of 30 per cent. May and June both stayed in the mid-CA$120-millions on handle and near CA$5.2-CA$5.4 million on revenue. July's CA$116 million is the lowest monthly poker handle since the December 2025 CA$141 million was itself a nine-month low.

The percentage share of handle occupied by poker is also compressing. In the first full year of Ontario regulation, peer-to-peer poker averaged close to 2 per cent of total market handle. In the FY 2024-25 second-quarter release, poker sat at 2.2 per cent of total wagers. In the July 2026 release, poker is closer to 1.2 per cent. That relative shrinkage reflects both an absolute drop in poker volume and a very rapid absolute expansion of casino and sports handle around it.

Why Poker Is Sliding While the Rest of the Market Booms

Three factors, in combination, explain most of the divergence. The first is that Ontario's peer-to-peer poker rooms are ring-fenced under a strict provincial-liquidity rule. Players must be physically located in Ontario to be seated at a cash-game table or in a multi-table tournament, and Ontario players cannot be pooled with players in any other jurisdiction, whether in Canada, in an American compact state, or internationally. That constraint puts a hard structural ceiling on tournament guarantees, cash-game rake, and peak-hour concurrent players in a way it does not for online casino or sports.

The second factor is the direct consequence of a corporate move made earlier this year. Flutter Entertainment migrated its PokerStars Ontario operation into the FanDuel platform in May, formally decommissioning PokerStars.ca as a stand-alone room on May 7 and completing the withdrawal-and-migration window on June 4. Ontario players who were still active on the legacy PokerStars.ca platform were either redirected onto PokerStars-branded product served through FanDuel or churned out of the market. July is the first full month in which the segmentation impact of that migration lands entirely inside the reporting window. The room mix in Ontario now looks meaningfully different from what it looked like when the July 2025 comparative was written: GGPoker, BetMGM Poker, 888poker, PartyPoker, Bwin, and PokerStars on FanDuel now share the same six-room list on paper, but the underlying player flows have shifted.

The third factor is the July calendar itself. July 2025 caught the WSOP Main Event schedule in Las Vegas, when Ontario players following the live series traditionally ramp cash-game and online-tournament activity as they satellite in or grind alongside the broadcast. July 2026 caught the same live event, but with an unusual Canadian counterweight: the run-up to the WSOP Super Circuit Canada at Playground Poker Club in Kahnawake, which opened August 26 with a CA$10-million-guaranteed live Main Event. Any Ontario grinder building live bankroll for the largest live-poker guarantee ever staged on Canadian soil is, by definition, not building an online cash roll on an Ontario-only site.

The Alberta Overlay

Underneath the ring-fenced-liquidity story is a live regulatory case. On August 12, GGPoker's Ontario-licensed parent NSUS Group received Alberta's first regulated online poker licence from the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission, per prior reporting from The Lines. GGPoker has not launched in Alberta, and Ontario players cannot yet be pooled with Alberta players even on the same operator. That gating is subject to the outcome of an appeal now scheduled for oral argument at the Supreme Court of Canada on October 7, 2026. The Court is being asked to determine whether Ontario, and by extension Alberta, can lawfully share peer-to-peer liquidity with each other and with jurisdictions outside Canada under the current provincial-lottery framework.

If the Supreme Court affirms the Ontario Court of Appeal's November 2025 finding that shared liquidity is constitutionally permissible so long as iGaming Ontario retains conduct-and-management control, the operational unlock could arrive as early as the 2027 fiscal year. Until then, every peer-to-peer poker figure in every iGO monthly report is a figure produced by a market of one province, roughly 15.5 million people, with a poker-active universe estimated at fewer than 40,000 unique monthly players across all six rooms combined. That is the ceiling the July 2026 print bumped into.

What the July Print Means for Ontario Poker Rooms

None of the six rooms disclose Ontario-specific handle or rake, so the top-line iGO number is the cleanest read of the market that exists. What the report tells us in operational terms is that the sum of all six operators' Ontario poker cash-game and tournament activity produced CA$5.3 million in rake and tournament fees in July, or roughly CA$170,000 per calendar day divided across six licensed operators. That works out to something on the order of CA$28,000 per operator per day in gross poker revenue, before promotional cost, before customer-acquisition cost, and before the fixed platform and compliance overhead of running an Ontario-licensed poker product.

Rooms respond to those economics by consolidating tournament schedules, shortening peak windows, and reducing overlay-eating guarantees. GGPoker's Ontario satellite ladder into the WSOP Super Circuit Canada Main Event is one example of the kind of large-guarantee promotion that gets absorbed into the P2P revenue line when it works. So is BetMGM Poker's Grind Rewards loyalty programme. But absent liquidity relief, the ceiling holds. Ontario's peer-to-peer poker vertical has now spent an entire year proving out that its ceiling sits between CA$5 million and CA$8 million per month in revenue, with a rare CA$8-million spike in March 2026 associated with the live World Series of Poker Main Event build-up.

What Comes Next in the Reporting Cycle

iGaming Ontario has committed to a monthly release cadence, with each month's numbers published in the final week of the following month. The August 2026 report is expected in the final week of September 2026. That release will be the first monthly print to capture activity across the entire live-tournament run of the WSOP Super Circuit Canada, which will conclude in Kahnawake on September 12 with the closing hyper-turbo. Ontario grinders who satellited into the CA$10-million live Main Event through the GGPoker Ontario ladder are already inside the reporting window, and the online-cash counterpart to any live series traditionally shows up as a soft dip in the online-tournament handle line while the live series is running, followed by a partial recovery in the two to three weeks after.

The macro question that the numbers do not answer is whether Ontario's peer-to-peer poker floor is CA$100 million per month or CA$120 million per month. Four months of decline through July suggests the market has not found its natural bottom yet. If the September print (August data) prints in the CA$105-CA$115 million range on handle, the argument that Ontario poker needs a structural liquidity unlock rather than a seasonal patience arc gets materially harder to counter. If it prints back above CA$130 million on the strength of the WSOP Super Circuit Canada spill-over, the seasonal-noise argument survives. October 7 is the earliest date on which the province could get regulatory news that changes the ceiling.

Regulatory Enforcement Backdrop

The July report also lands against the busiest three-week AGCO enforcement window Ontario has seen since regulation launched. On August 6 the Registrar issued a CA$120,000 penalty to Betty Gaming for underage-account failures. On August 20 the Registrar issued a CA$70,000 penalty to Booming Games for a prohibited auto-play feature on multiple slot titles. On August 27, the same day iGaming Ontario published July's record numbers, the Registrar issued a CA$100,000 penalty to NorthStar Gaming for anti-money-laundering control failures related to a single high-risk player who deposited CA$189,395 over fifteen months. Three material penalties, CA$290,000 in aggregate, all inside the same three-week window in which the market itself expanded 30 per cent year-on-year.

None of those enforcement actions directly touches an Ontario poker room. But the composition of the release matters editorially. AGCO is signalling, in public, that the growth of the market is not going to be permitted to arrive without operator-integrity friction. Every one of the six Ontario poker operators is bound by the same Registrar's Standards under which those three penalties were issued.

Related Coverage

• AGCO fines NorthStar Gaming CA$100K for AML control failures (August 27)
• Supreme Court of Canada sets October 7 hearing on Ontario shared-liquidity appeal
• Sebastien Proulx wins WSOPC Canada Event #1 Kickoff for CA$56,000
• Compare all six AGCO-registered Ontario poker rooms
• Ontario poker monthly tracker

Sources

• iGaming Ontario Market Performance Report for July 2026, published August 27, 2026, at igamingontario.ca/en/operator/market-performance-report-monthly.
• Tribuna.com, iGaming Ontario reports record-breaking July with $7.1b handle, August 28, 2026.
• Sportsbetting Dime, Ontario Online Casino Revenue Reaches Record $330.4 Million in July, August 28, 2026.
• rg.org, Ontario iGaming March 2026: Record $9.59B Handle, $388M Revenue, historical comparison for the March 2026 poker peak.
• The Lines, GG Poker Secures Gaming License for Poker in Alberta, August 18, 2026.
• Prior iGaming Ontario monthly market performance reports, April through June 2026, for month-on-month comparison.