Online play away from Gateway Casinos

Ontario runs a regulated online casino market, and a private site has two conditions to meet before it can take bets. One is registration with the AGCO, the province's regulator. The second calls for an operating agreement, this one with iGaming Ontario (iGO).

iGO publishes a directory of the sites that have been approved. That directory is where a private site's approval can be looked up. OLG.ca stands apart from the private sites, as the government's own online casino.

iGaming Ontario's directory of approved sites

Two conditions apply to anyone playing on a regulated Ontario site. The first is age: 19 or older. The second is place, and it turns on where the player is, not where they live. The player must be physically in Ontario at the moment the bet is made.

A site that takes bets from people in Ontario without AGCO registration is an illegal operator in the province. Checking a name takes one step. iGaming Ontario publishes a directory of approved sites, and a name can be looked up there before any money changes hands.

BetGuard, at betguard.ca, is run by iGaming Ontario. In a single step it shuts off all regulated gambling sites in Ontario, with OLG.ca among them. How long the block holds is up to the person: a 6 month stretch, 1 full year, 5 years, or a span of their own.

The block stops at the screen. Walk-in casinos, the one on Bonin Road among them, sit outside its reach. Those fall under OLG's My PlayBreak programme, whose casino break lasts 3 months or 6, or from 1 to 5 years, at every casino in Ontario. Once started, that break cannot be ended early.

Across Nickel Route, paid links turn up on one page only, the home page, and each wears an Ad tag. Readers meet them in three places: in the menu as a button, under the opening screen as a strip, and near the bottom as a box. Each one sends readers to the same private online casino business. That company pays Nickel Route a commission, and another firm could take its place.

Neither Gateway Casinos nor OLG stands behind it, and the casino on Bonin Road has no link to it. Anyone can look up a site's name in the iGO directory.