An ongoing court battle in the Court of Appeal for Ontario is headed for a ruling later this year on whether players on the province's regulated online poker sites will be able to compete with players on similarly regulated international poker sites.
On one side are the province's official online-gaming overseer, iGaming Ontario, and major international operators such as PokerStars corporate parent Flutter and GGPoker corporate parent NSUS.
On the other side are gambling regulators for British Columbia and officials from seven other official provincial lotteries, who are seeking to block Ontario's efforts to change the status quo.
These entities contend that the international platforms of some Ontario-regulated sites are already accepting Canadian players and that some Ontario-licensed platforms are targeting gamblers in other provinces via advertising.
Ontario and the online poker operators seek clarity regarding Canada's federal gaming laws regarding who can play on any province's regulated sites. Those laws state that one province's online sites may not accept players from other Canadian provinces that lack a regulatory scheme, but the law lacks any mention of accepting or barring players from other countries that do offer regulated online poker and other peer-to-peer games, such as daily fantasy sports (DFS).
GGPoker lobbied Ontario to push the issue
Spurred by meetings early this year with legal counsel working for NSUS, Ontario's regulators have come to agree that the current interpretation of Canada's online gambling laws is overly strict and that its players should be able to compete against those from other countries who participate from well-regulated gambling jurisdictions.
That battle has been underway since February. Last month, Ontarian officials filed an order in council in the appellate case, which lays out the situation and then asks the court to rule on a single question: "Would legal online gaming and sports betting remain lawful under the Criminal Code if its users were permitted to participate in games and betting involving individuals outside of Canada as described in the attached Schedule? If not, to what extent?"
Large increase in revenue through player pooling
The stakes are significant. If interpreted favorably, access to an international player pool would significantly increase the revenue derived from Ontario's players. GGPoker and PokerStars, which offer the widest variety of games and stakes and offer the most global traffic, would likely post the largest gains in percentage terms. And it would be a shot in the arm that Ontario's online poker niche needs. Though it's Canada's most populous province, with over 15 million residents, that's still barely sufficient for a small number of poker sites to operate.
Another hope expressed by Ontario's officials is that by allowing access to a greater variety of games and stakes, the province will continue to erode the presence of unregulated or lightly regulated 'grey market' sites. Before Ontario revamped its licensing scheme, research indicated that 70 percent of Ontario's online gambling traffic went to unregulated international sites. Today the province, which has also threatened many unlicensed operators, believes it has reduced that unregulated-site share to about 15 percent.
Ontario-branded sites could change form
Ontario's online poker players already participate on Ontario-only sites, but should the province receive a favorable ruling, the structure beneath the branding would likely change. Instead of being standalone sites, offerings such as GGPoker Ontario (ggpoker.ca) and PokerStars Ontario (pokerstars.ca) would instead become true skins of the sites' international dot-com platforms.
In GGPoker's case, it's possible, perhaps even likely, that today's ggpoker.ca and the WSOP's Ontario-only site, wsop.ca, would be merged into a single skin. The two sites would be redundant under a player-pooling arrangement and a merger would allow the WSOP, which will soon become GGPoker-owned, to eliminate such offerings as Ontario-only WSOP bracelet and Circuit series.
As described in the schedule attached to Ontario's order in council, it appears that it would be necessary for the province's players to access a global platform through such a firewalled skin where only Ontarians could register. Player registration and identity verification, account funding, anti-money laundering, anti-cheating, and other tasks would remain the responsibility of iGaming Ontario, but the same tasks for players in other jurisdictions would be handled through the sites' existing structures with other regulators.
