By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · June 1, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
TORONTO - The regulated Ontario online gaming market entered its fifth year of operation with one of the more contradictory monthly market reports in its short history. iGaming Ontario, the stand-alone Crown agency that conducts and manages the province's open-sector online gambling market, published its April 2026 monthly market performance report on the evening of May 27, recording a record month for total gaming revenue while also recording the largest single-month contraction in peer-to-peer online poker since the same set of figures began to be released on a monthly cadence.
The headline number across the regulated 51-operator market was a total non-adjusted gross gaming revenue of $405.4-million for the month of April, the regulator's highest monthly figure on record and up 29.4 per cent on the same month in 2025. Cash wagers across casino, sports betting and peer-to-peer poker totalled $9.31-billion. The number of active player accounts on the regulated network reached 1.265 million, up two per cent on March, while the average revenue per active account climbed to $321, up 11.8 per cent year-over-year, according to the trade publication Casino.com's first-look analysis of the report.
The Ontario poker line of the report sits awkwardly inside that record-setting headline. Peer-to-peer online poker recorded $5.3-million in non-adjusted gross gaming revenue in April, down 24 per cent from $7-million in March. Cash wagers on the peer-to-peer poker network fell to $128-million, down 30 per cent from $183-million in March. As a share of the total regulated market, peer-to-peer poker accounted for approximately one per cent of revenue and 1.4 per cent of cash wagers, the lowest poker share since iGaming Ontario began publishing the monthly cadence in early 2024.
The Numbers in Context
The headline 24 per cent month-over-month decline in poker revenue is not, on its own, the kind of single-month swing that would normally draw a feature treatment. Ontario peer-to-peer poker has fluctuated between $5.1-million and $7.2-million in monthly NAGGR across most of fiscal 2024-25, and a $5.3-million April reading on its own is broadly in line with the lower end of that band. What makes the April figure unusual is the gap between it and the rest of the market. Online casino non-adjusted gross gaming revenue for the month came in at $314.1-million, down just one per cent from March, with handle of $8.14-billion, down two per cent month-over-month, and a market share of 77 per cent of total revenue and 87 per cent of total handle. Sports betting was the strongest performer of the three verticals, recording $86-million in revenue, up 40 per cent on the previous month against a handle of $1.04-billion that was itself down three per cent.
The asymmetry is the story. Active player accounts grew month-over-month. Total wagers across the regulated network slipped by only three per cent. Average revenue per active account rose. Casino held its share. Sports betting added share. Poker, alone among the three verticals, gave back close to a third of its previous month's cash wagers and nearly a quarter of its revenue.
Why the Poker Number Moved
Three factors explain most of the April peer-to-peer poker contraction, and none of them is, by itself, sufficient to account for all of it.
The first is the absence of a marquee tournament series in the regulated Ontario calendar across April. GGPoker Ontario, the AGCO-registered operator that carried the bulk of the Ontario peer-to-peer poker market across the month, ran the conclusion of its Spring Online Series across the final week of March and the first three days of April, with the centrepiece event awarding a guaranteed $250,000 to a single Ontario-resident winner. After April 3, the GGPoker Ontario tournament calendar reverted to its standard weekly rotation. Online poker traffic and rake-pool data on the third-party tracker PokerScout, which is published as an independent measure of network sizes, recorded a corresponding step down in seven-day moving cash-game average from roughly 720 connections at the end of March to roughly 540 in mid-April. That step is the largest single-month drop in the Ontario PokerScout cash-game average since the regulated market opened in April 2022.
The second is the run-up to the PokerStars Ontario shutdown. The operator announced on May 5 that it would close its existing customer-facing platform on May 7, 2026, with player balances accessible until June 4 and the relaunch on the FanDuel platform to follow. The announcement, while published in May, came at the end of a several-week internal communications period in which PokerStars Ontario players received account emails outlining the closure and the FanDuel migration. The behavioural pattern on similar pre-shutdown migrations recorded in other regulated jurisdictions, most recently the PokerStars-to-FanDuel transition in Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania across March and April 2026, has been a sharp step-down in tournament volume and cash-game traffic across the four to six weeks preceding the platform's closure date. The Ontario April reading is consistent with that pattern.
The third is seasonal. The 2026 World Series of Poker schedule, which opened in Las Vegas on May 18, drew a meaningful share of the Ontario high-volume regulated player base off the provincial online tables across the back half of the month and through late May. The seasonal off-ramp to the WSOP is a recurring annual factor in Ontario peer-to-peer poker data, although in this year the effect is concentrated more sharply because of the WSOP's expanded online satellite calendar on GGPoker Ontario, which channels qualified Ontario-resident players into the Las Vegas live calendar rather than spreading their tournament play across the entire month.
The April Poker Number, Compared
For year-over-year context, April 2025 peer-to-peer poker NAGGR landed at $5.9-million, with cash wagers of $144-million, according to the prior-year iGaming Ontario monthly report. The April 2026 reading therefore represents a 10 per cent year-over-year decline in revenue and an 11 per cent year-over-year decline in wagers. Across the four-year history of the regulated Ontario market, peer-to-peer poker has never grown its absolute revenue share above approximately two per cent in any given month. The vertical's pattern over that history has been one of slow, mostly flat absolute growth alongside rapid expansion in casino and sports betting, and the result has been a quietly contracting share of a rapidly growing total market.
The October 2025 figure of $5.6-million, which at the time set a record for monthly Ontario poker revenue, looks, by the April 2026 read, like the highwater mark of the regulated market's first four years. The next several monthly reports will determine whether April was a one-month anomaly driven by the PokerStars transition and a seasonal step-down, or whether it marks the beginning of a longer-running contraction in the provincial peer-to-peer poker market.
What This Means for Ontario Players
The immediate practical takeaway for players physically located in Ontario who play their poker on regulated provincial sites is that the operator landscape is undergoing a structural reset across May and June, after which the April reading should be considered, at best, a snapshot taken at a moment when the largest secondary operator was about to leave the market and the eventual third entry was still in pre-launch. The PokerStars Ontario shutdown on May 7 removed approximately fifteen to twenty per cent of the addressable peer-to-peer poker market overnight, depending on which measurement method is used. The FanDuel Poker Ontario launch on June 3 is expected to restore most of that capacity within four to six weeks of going live, on the assumption that the platform will inherit the player liquidity of the closed PokerStars Ontario operation in the same way the U.S. version of the FanDuel Poker platform inherited PokerStars Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania liquidity earlier this spring.
Until that recapture happens, the practical Ontario peer-to-peer poker market is concentrated more heavily on GGPoker Ontario, BetMGM Poker Ontario and 888poker Ontario than at any point since regulated market opened in April 2022. The April 2026 monthly report is, in effect, a reading of the regulated market on the eve of a structural change. The May and June numbers, which will be published in late June and late July respectively, will read very differently.
The Channelization Reading
The total revenue figure of $405.4-million for the month also carries an embedded channelization measurement that the AGCO has been tracking publicly since early 2025. The province-wide channelization rate, defined as the share of total Ontario online gambling activity conducted through AGCO-registered operators rather than unregulated offshore sites, sat at 91 per cent across the most recent AGCO-iGaming Ontario quarterly tracking period, with the AGCO's stated channelization goal for fiscal 2026-27 set at 95 per cent. The April monthly report did not include a refreshed channelization estimate. The combined gaming-vertical breakdown does, however, give an indirect reading. The 21 per cent share of monthly revenue captured by regulated sports betting against an estimated total Ontario sports-betting market of roughly $100-million in monthly revenue, by Vixio modelling, implies a channelization rate in the high eighties for that vertical alone. The peer-to-peer poker channelization rate, separately measured, is the vertical that AGCO has consistently flagged as the lowest of the three at a high-seventies-to-low-eighties channelization, primarily because Ontario-resident players who want access to international player liquidity, which is not yet authorised in the regulated market, continue to migrate part of their bankroll to offshore networks such as those operated outside the AGCO licensing perimeter.
The pending Supreme Court of Canada appeal of the November 2025 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that authorised the province to share peer-to-peer poker liquidity with international networks remains the single regulatory variable that, when resolved, will most directly affect the trajectory of the peer-to-peer poker channelization rate in 2026 and 2027. The court has not yet released a hearing date.
The Read
One month of data is not a trend. The April 2026 monthly market report should be read by Ontario poker readers as a snapshot of a regulated market that, on its casino and sports betting verticals, is at a record high, and that, on its peer-to-peer poker vertical, is in the middle of a structural reshuffling. The 24 per cent month-over-month decline in poker NAGGR is the headline number. The 30 per cent decline in cash wagers is the more telling number, because it indicates that the contraction is being driven by reduced player participation rather than by tournament variance or rake-structure changes. The next two monthly reports, covering May and June, will determine whether the April reading was, on balance, a one-month transitional anomaly or the start of a longer-running contraction in the regulated provincial peer-to-peer poker market.
This newsroom's working assumption, on the strength of the FanDuel Poker Ontario launch on June 3, the resumption of the regulated Ontario peer-to-peer poker network at full operator count by mid-summer, and the seasonal effect of the WSOP returning Ontario-resident players to the provincial online tables in late July, is that the May report will read worse than April, the June report will read approximately the same as April, and the July report will record the resumption of the regulated peer-to-peer poker market's slow upward trajectory. The longer-run trajectory of the vertical, however, remains contingent on the Supreme Court's eventual ruling on international liquidity and on the legislative response of the Standing Committee on Heritage and Trade's final recommendations on the Bill 107 advertising rules, which remain the two single largest structural inputs into the regulated Ontario poker vertical for the remainder of this fiscal year.