Best Canadian Betting Sites
Best Sites of 2020 for Canadian Gamblers.
Cities such as Toronto and Montreal are large and modern but Canada has vast expanses of uninhabited territory. In fact, it’s the second-largest country on the planet in terms of total area.
While isolated cities such as Yellowknife and Whitehorse may not be meccas for gaming, there are enough urban and developed areas to allow for online gambling in Canada. In this article, we’ll be looking at our top choices for Canadian online gamblers, the laws regarding Internet casinos, as well as some basic demographics about the people who play them.
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- All of These Sites Accept Customers from Canada!
The 13 Best Canadian Betting Sites – Complete Guide By ThePuntersPage.com General Guides Unsurprisingly for such a sports-mad nation, sports betting in Canada is extremely popular. 888Sport: One of the best sports betting sites in the UK also has a large footprint in Canada. 888 Sports has both sports and racing odds on offer and has some specific free bet offers available. 888Sports is on our top 10 betting sites list because they are extremely trustworthy and cater to a large audience, including casino and poker. Sport is a huge part of culture in Canada, meaning that it comes as no surprise that Canadian betting sites are in-demand more than ever before. Whether you are looking to bet on action from the NHL or your favorite team from the NBA, this page will deliver the best Canadian sports betting sites available today.
Our Top Recommended Canada Gambling Sites
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Is Online Gambling Legal in Canada?
Prior to the rise of the Internet, laws regarding gambling in Canada were much simpler. Each province determined individual policies, whether they involved bingo, casino gaming, or lotteries (horse racing was the lone exception). The Internet crosses such boundaries, however, making regulation a trickier situation.
The legality of a Canadian resident placing a wager at an offshore gambling site that accepts Canadians is still unclear. While the providing company might be in violation of some law, there’s yet to be a private citizen prosecuted for such activity. As of this writing, well over 1,000 gambling websites make their services available to residents of Canada. (Although there’s a bill in Quebec that, if it goes through, would prevent Quebecers from online gambling sites without the government’s approval.)
Federal law has also determined that provinces may operate their own gaming sites as long as residents from neighboring regions are prohibited. This has led to lottery tickets being sold online and limited forms of sports betting conducted by state-run organizations such as Proline.
In 2004, the first entirely legal casino was launched within the borders of Canada. Owned and operated by the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, PlayNow.com is available to residents in the provinces of Manitoba and British Columbia. A few years later, Quebec got in on the action by launching a similar endeavor named Espacejeux.
Popularity of Internet Gambling in Canada
The following information comes from a study designed to determine the overall popularity of Canada gambling sites. Participants in the poll were asked to name the forms of gaming they had taken part in during the previous calendar year, and this is a percentage breakdown of their responses.
- Lotteries – 92.9%
- Instant win tickets – 67.5%
- Electronic gambling machines – 33.9%
- Bingo – 10.4%
- Sports betting – 8.9%
- Table games at casinos – 8.1%
- Poker and games where players bet against each other – 8%
- Betting on horse racing – 5.1%
- Online gambling – 3%
- Trading stocks and futures– 2.8%
As the above information indicates, online gambling has a long way to go before it’s the most popular option for Canadians. It should come as no surprise that the two most successful choices—lotteries and instant win tickets—are sold in land-based locations where customers go to buy common items such as food and beverages.
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Details about Canadian Online Gamblers
Another study was recently conducted to provide insight into the demographic makeup of Canadian gamblers. While this information is constantly changing and evolving, it does paint a vivid picture.
For starters, the average income of a Canadian citizen who engages in online gambling is $74,600, which is about $20,000 higher than their non-gambling countrymen. This amount is also greater than the income of the average international gambler, which says something about the strong economy of Canada.
The average age of an online gambler in Canada is 35.5. This is along the same lines as land-based players in the nation, but it tends to be much younger than the average international online customer. As a nation, it appears that all types of gambling appeal more to the younger generation; according to another study, 10% of Canadian teens gamble online.
An online gambler in Canada is likely to be male, and the study indicates that this gender accounts for 82.4% of Internet players within the nation. This is in sharp contrast to gamers on an international level, where females participate at a much higher rate.
Within the nation’s provinces and territories, the popularity of online gambling varies wildly from one place to the next. The lowest was Prince Edward Island, where few gamblers appeared to be interested in playing online. Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, Ontario, and Saskatchewan also had low rates of interest. New Brunswick and British Columbia, meanwhile, has higher levels of participation than average.
Canadian online players tend to have a higher education than their countrymen. This comparison does not hold up on an international level, however, as the average player has a slightly better education than their Canadian counterparts.
Kahnawake Gaming Commission
The Kahnawake are an Indian tribe of around 8,000 that live on territorial lands in Quebec. They’re also one of the leading names in online casino licensing, as they formed the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in 1999.
By receiving a license from the commission, an online gambling site may provide services from an approved hosting facility, as well as relocating equipment and personnel to the Kahnawake lands. A rigorous background check must be passed in order to obtain a license, as well as an annual fee of $25,000 (plus an additional $5,000 for each employee listed as a key component on the application).
Four types of licenses are available, although only three apply to the average Internet casino. The commission currently maintains almost 30 licenses for online gaming, with leading names including Bodog and Intertops.com. The services available from these clients include everything from bingo and sports betting to poker.
In addition to providing a license for online gaming establishments, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission helps resolve player disputes. A yearly report on these deliberations is posted on their website, providing a degree of transparency not shared by most of their counterparts. For example, 2013 saw the commission handle 252 valid complaints, with 110 rulings in favor of the player.
If you’re looking for the best Canadian online gambling sites, you’ve found the most honest, legitimate source for that information on the internet. If you’re like us, you’re tired of visiting banner farms with barely readable sentences masquerading as useful information. That’s why we’ve created this resource, and that’s why we think you’ll find it useful.
Our editors, researchers, and writers have years of experience and know-how specifically related to the top Canadian online gambling sites. We’re experts in all kinds of gambling games, including table games like blackjack, craps, and roulette. We’re also knowledgeable about gambling machines like slots and video poker. Our goal is to combine that expertise with our knowledge of gambling in Canada to create the web’s premier resource for Canadian gamblers. But why would you need such a guide?
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How We Help Canadian Gamblers
After all, can’t you find countless gambling sites that accept bets from Canada?
Sure, you can. The problem is that not all of these sites are trustworthy. Some sites have wonky random number generators that don’t produce truly random results. Some of them have legitimate random number generators but lousy customer service, slow payout times, and unrealistic bonus requirements.
We’ve done the research to provide you with recommendations about which Canadian gambling sites offer the best player experience. Our combined decades of experience in the industry make us uniquely qualified to provide such recommendations.
In other words, we only provide recommendations for the top Canadian online gambling sites.
But we provide more than just reviews and recommendations. You’ll also find countless how-to guides for gambling games, sports betting tips, picks, and advice, and even insights into how the industry is evolving over time.
We’re also thoroughly modern in our approach. We understand that many, if not most, of our readers, are placing bets on a smartphone or other mobile devices, too.
Best Canada Gambling Sites by Province and Territory
You’ll find plenty of so-called Canada gambling sites guides which purport to offer the best choices for Canadian gamblers, but many of them just offer a blanket list of sites that are best for the entire country. They ignore the fact that Canada is actually made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories, each of which has its own character and laws regarding online gambling games.
One of the things we do is offer recommendations to our Canadian readers organized by their location. All the sites suggested have been editorially chosen on the basis of how suitable they are for our audience there, as well as having been carefully vetted for reliability, trustworthiness, and integrity.
We offer recommendations for each of the following provinces:
We also offer recommendations for these territories:
Here’s the great news about the market in Canada, too-you’ll find more options than people in other countries when it comes to choosing Canada-focused online casino sites. Be sure to visit our (forthcoming) specific guides for each of the provinces and territories by clicking on the links.
Canada Gambling Laws – Can You Gamble Legally in the Country?
One of the first questions most beginning online gamblers ask is whether it’s legal for them to gamble online. Laws change constantly everywhere, of course, but we make a concerted effort to offer only the most up-to-date information about Canada gambling laws.
It’s beyond the scope of this specific page to provide you with everything you need to know about every aspect of gambling law in Canada, but we can provide you with general information. You can click on the links to the other pages in this section for specifics about gambling law in specific provinces and territories.
The basic rule of thumb related to gambling legalities in the entire country is that gambling is illegal if it’s not licensed by the Canadian government in some way.
Prior to 1970, gambling in Canada was almost exclusively operated by organized crime organizations. As laws changed, more organizations became authorized by the Canadian government to offer certain kinds of gambling to Canadian citizens.
In 1985, the provinces and territories were also given authority to regulate specific types of gambling like lotteries and slot machines.
Illegal gambling in Canada consists of activities like running a betting company without a license or cheating at any game of chance in an attempt to defraud another party.
These are serious offenses where the federal government is concerned. You can go to prison for up to 5 years for violating some of these, but most offenses aren’t so strict. Most gambling offenses carry a maximum term of 2 years. Some of them only see fines of up to $5000 and 6 months in prison.
But none of these laws make it illegal for a Canadian citizen to place a bet online or play a slot machine on the internet.
Choosing the Top Canadian Online Gambling Sites
The first step to choosing the appropriate gambling site is understanding what your goals are. If you only want to play poker and bet on sports, signing up for a casino that only offers slot machine games is probably the wrong choice-even if the casino in question has the best reputation and payouts in the industry.
On the other hand, you might only be interested in playing poker. You can find sites that cater to that need, too. Specific poker players have specific goals, too, and those should be accounted for when choosing a site. If your goal is to play razz, it doesn’t make sense to sign up at a site that only offers variations of Texas holdem and Omaha.
You should also have some idea of what kinds of stakes you want to play for. If you want to bet heavily on sporting events, you should do some research into the minimum and maximum bets for each candidate you’re considering.
The more clarity you have about your goals, the likelier you will be to find the best possible Canada gambling site.
Since many of the gambling websites you’ll encounter operate in foreign countries, it behooves you to do some research before signing up and making your first deposit. One of the tools you can use for this purpose is our site.
We offer the most detailed, comprehensive reviews of online gambling sites on the web. Each of our reviews covers both the pros AND the cons of a specific property.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Compare our reviews with some of the other reviews you’ll find online and decide where to get your information based on that comparison.
We’re confident you won’t find more authoritative reviews for online Canadian casinos or sportsbooks anywhere on the web.
While you’re doing this research, consider both the quality of the properties and how well they fit into your goals. It does you little good to sign up at an online casino that also offers sports betting and poker if that casino operates in an underhanded manner.
You’d be surprised how often you’ll find gambling websites that delay your payouts or refuse to payout at all.
One of the benefits of using our recommendations is that we’ve thoroughly vetted the sites we’ve listed here for integrity and trustworthiness. Not every gambler will have a positive experience at every site we list. It would be naïve to think so, as people vary.
But we’re confident that the gambling sites we recommend for people in Canada are better than you’ll find listed anywhere else.
When we rank Canadian gambling sites, or any other type of site, we do so with an eye toward which properties are best for the largest number of readers.
This doesn’t mean that these are the best options for you, necessarily. You should pay careful attention to your goals and what each site offers when examining a rankings list. Don’t sign up at an all-slots casino just because it’s #1 on our list (or someone else’s) if you want to play poker or bet on horses.
You should eventually be able to do your own rankings and make your own recommendations, but for now, examine our rankings and recommendations in light of how well a specific site can help you achieve your gambling goals.
Many online gambling information portals just want to get a commission or sell an advertisement to a gambling site. That’s our business model, too, but here’s the difference:
We want to maintain an ongoing relationship with our readers.
Please let us hear from you in the comments, or send us an email with your feedback about our recommendations.
We’re experts, but even experts are fallible. And situations at gambling websites can change at any time. We rely on readers like you to re-evaluate your rankings and revise our reviews to make sure they’re current.
Help us help you.
Keep in touch with us.
The best Canadian sports betting sites will, of course, offer wagers on the sports most popular in Canada. This means that an ideal sports betting site for someone from Canada will offer betting on all of these sports:
Of course, those aren’t the only sports a site should offer, but any sports betting website catering to someone from Canada can and should offer action on at least those favorites of the country.
You should also look for Canadian sports betting sites that offer a wide range of minimum and maximum bets. It’s common to find betting sites that have a minimum bet of $5 (CAD) and a maximum bet of $500 (CAD), but if you want to place wagers lower or higher than that, you can find sites that cater to your needs, too.
Finally, reputation is everything when it comes to any sportsbook which wants to serve Canadian bettors. We’ve carefully reviewed bettor feedback from multiple sources when ranking the sports betting sites listed here.
Best Canadian Esports Betting Sites
Esports betting is becoming a global phenomenon, too, and more Canadians are getting involved in it every day. It’s hard to imagine a niche within sports betting that’s growing faster than esports betting.
What’s esports betting?
It’s where you get to bet on esports games like League of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Besides recommendations for the best sites for Canadians to place bets on esports, we offer multiple advice articles and blog posts about how to get better results when betting on esports contests. Be sure to return to the site regularly, as we provide updated tips and tricks specifically for Canadian esports betting on a regular basis.
Finally, we just want to make it clear that you don’t have to be good at League of Legends or any other esports to place a bet on such contests.
You’re not betting on your own performance. You’re betting on your picks for who’s going to win in a match you’re probably not even participating. You don’t have to be good at football to bet on a football game, and esports betting works the same way.
The Best Canadian Casino Game Sites
The best Canadian online casinos must offer the casino games you want to play. If you want to play video poker, be sure to find a casino which caters to Canadian gamblers and also offers the video poker games you want to play.
The online casino sites we’ve listed offer huge varieties of games from multiple software providers. All the games are fair, and each of these properties are independently audited on a regular basis by an outside firm. You want to play at an online casino where you have a reasonable chance of winning.
It’s also important that a Canadian casino site offer fast, responsive customer service and reliable, fast payouts via multiple deposit and withdrawal methods.
All the online casinos we recommend for Canadian casino gamblers meet these criteria at a minimum.
All online casinos offer slot machines. In fact, at most casinos, online or off, 80% or more of their revenue is derived from the slot machine games. We pay special attention to the variety and quality of the slot machine games available at the Canadian gaming sites we’ve recommended here.
We’re especially fond of online progressives, like Mega Moolah. In January of 2019, the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot paid out $20 million to its most recent winner. We like to play games where winning provides us with the opportunity to change our lives dramatically.
You’ll find dozens of slot machine game reviews on our site. Each of those reviews includes the pertinent details for the game in question as well as advice about where the best places to play it are.
Most online poker sites gladly accept poker players from Canada, but most of them offer a different variety of games. If you want to play Texas hold ’em, you’ll have no problem, because all Canadian poker sites offer the game.
If you’re interested in more obscure games, like stud or razz, you might have a harder time finding an appropriate Canadian poker site at which to play. Check our detailed reviews for complete listings of which poker games are available for Canadian rounders.
Canadian poker sites, more than almost any other kind of gambling site, vary in terms of the sizes of bets they take. Some poker sites offer microstakes games where the blinds are just $0.01/$0.02, but others only have games in the $1/$2 range.read more…
Our reviews cover which stakes are available at each site, too. Many Canadian poker sites specialize in poker and offer no other games or betting activities, but you’ll also find plenty of options for multi-faceted gamblers. Many sportsbooks catering to Canadian bettors offer both casino games and multiplayer poker games in addition to their sports bets.
Such sites are well worth considering, especially if you’ re interested in different kinds of action.
Play Money Gambling versus Real Money Gambling in Canada
At most Canadian online casinos and poker sites, you can choose to gamble for play money or for real money. When you gamble for play money, you’re just given a certain number of credits that have no real monetary value to play with. You can experience the sights and sounds of the casino or poker games without risking any money.
The downside to the play money games for Canadian gamblers is that even though you’re not risking any money, you’re also not able to win any money.
The reason that Canadian gambling sites offer these play money games is simple, though:
They’re hoping that you’ll enjoy the games well enough to try them for real money.
In this respect, Canadian gamblers are no different from gamblers anywhere else in the world. Risk is part of the game, and winning real money is how you keep score and evaluate your performance as a gambler
We encourage you to switch to real money gambling as soon as you can afford to. Gambling without risking money and without the potential of winning money is just a waste of time in our eyes. You can play for stakes as low as you’re comfortable with at most of the better Canadian gambling sites, too. You can easily find blackjack for $5 per hand, for example, and some online casinos even offer $1 blackjack.
We offer advice for Canadian gamblers interested in all aspects of real money gambling:
Since the legal situation for online gambling in Canada is relatively lax compared to other countries (ahem, the USA-we’re looking at you), making deposits and withdrawals is relatively easy.
In the United States, you have specific laws which interfere with your ability to withdraw or deposit money at online gambling sites.
This isn’t the case in Canada.
The easiest way to conduct these transactions from Canada is to just use any major credit card. Visa and Mastercard are the 2 most commonly used options, and they’re both readily available at any of the online casinos for Canadians that we recommend.
You’re not out of luck if you don’t use credit cards, though. Ewallets have been popular since PayPal and eBay were new, and now a number of ewallets specifically cater to Canadian gamblers. In the reviews of casinos on this site, you’ll find detailed listings for which ewallets work at which sites.
You’re not betting on your own performance. You’re betting on your picks for who’s going to win in a match you’re probably not even participating. You don’t have to be good at football to bet on a football game, and esports betting works the same way.
Finally, anyone with a bank account can also just use direct banking transactions. This works like writing a check, but without the physical paper check. If you’re gambling for enough money, a wire transfer is often the easiest route to go down when making your deposits and withdrawals.
We probably should have mentioned this as a subsection of the deposits and withdrawals section above, but cryptocurrency gambling is so different in some cases that it’s more than just an option for getting money to and from a casino website.
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That’s because most gambling sites are able to handle cryptocurrency transactions with almost no banking fees at all.
And some gambling websites even operate exclusively in cryptocurrency.
We have several detailed explanations of how cryptocurrency gambling works in general. All that advice applies to Canadian gamblers just as pertinently as it applies to any of our other readers.
The most popular cryptocurrency in use, both for gambling and other purposes, is Bitcoin. You’ll find a complete guide to Bitcoin gambling on our site here. We also offer listings for:
Bitcoin Sportsbooks
Earlier we suggested that you consider our rankings of the top Canadian gambling websites as being somewhat arbitrary, but we might have given you the wrong idea. We actually spend considerable time and effort in putting together a list of sites in order of quality. Just because we suggest you evaluate that list with your specific needs in mind doesn’t mean that these sites are just listed in random order.
On a lot of other sites, you’ll find listings for casinos, poker sites, and sportsbooks that have raving reviews for each of them. You’ll find that most of those “reviews” are nothing more than thinly-disguised advertisements.
We don’t do it that way.
Our reviews are based on more objective criteria than who’s going to pay us the most advertising money. We have too much respect for our Canadian readers to do that. Our Canadian gambling site reviews are the lifeblood of our site. We treat them as such.
Here’s what we look for when evaluating and ranking Canadian gambling sites:
If, like we suggest, you’re going to bet with real money, you need to know that your financial information is kept secure by the site you’re transacting with. You’re not just sharing a credit card number. You’re also sharing personal information like your address.
We only recommend the best online gambling sites which maintain appropriate security protocols. Your money and your privacy are safe at the sites we recommend.
Any Canadian betting website that’s been in business for any length of time has a history and a reputation. When we rank sites, we consider their track record related to customer complaints in forums and user reviews. Many properties have had so many issues in the past that we just decline to list them.
That’s one of the reasons why using our site for recommendations just makes sense. We have the expertise to recognize the properties with a good reputation and history.
To make real money wagers, you need a way to get money to and from a gambling site. We like to list gambling sites which offer multiple appropriate withdrawal and deposit methods. We’ve touched on that at some length earlier on this page.
It’s important that you have multiple easy options to use when making both deposits AND withdrawals. Otherwise, there’s no point in betting real money at all. After all, at least some of the time, you should be withdrawing some of your winnings.
We only recommend top gambling sites with easily-understood, easily-used interfaces. You want to get right to the betting. You don’t want to spend a long time learning how to navigate around the site.
It’s hard to consider a gambling site usable in this day and age if they’re not mobile compatible, so we evaluate that before ranking a site, too.
All the Canadian gaming sites we recommend feature perks like signup bonuses and ongoing promotional bonuses. They also offer rebates and frequent bettor programs.
Not all these offers are made equal. Some sites have exorbitant wagering requirements. Others make it next to impossible to earn your bonus money.
Questions come up regardless of what kind of business you’re in. Getting those questions answered in a timely and friendly fashion is what separates a great company from a mediocre or lame company. We want you to be completely comfortable with the level of customer service you get from the online gambling companies we recommend.
Luckily, customer service is easy to test. Most of these sites offer live chat and toll-free numbers, so we can call them and ask questions or text them with our questions and see what kind of experience they have. We can draw conclusions from those interactions about what kind of experience you’re likely to have, too.
GamblingSites.org Blog for Canadian Readers
If you are looking for blog posts that pertain to only Canadian topics, then you are in luck! We have categorized all of our blog posts and you can find all the most recent blog posts we have here on GamblingSites.org below!
Our mission is simple:
We want to provide you with the most trustworthy and comprehensive gambling site information on the web. Our goal is for you to be able to make informed decisions about betting online from Canada.
Online gambling shouldn’t be a hassle, and if you’re armed with the right information, it doesn’t have to be.
You can learn more about the team behind this site here.
What Else Can You Expect From Our Site?
Our site also offers a gambling blog that’s updated daily. Most of the advice there, including the sports picks, is applicable to our Canadian audience.
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You can also find detailed casino reviews on our site, as well as industry news and information.