Methodology
How Picasso Gaming Index sources, labels, and presents the numbers you see across the site.
Primary sources first
Wherever a figure is available directly from the body that produces it — iGaming Ontario for Ontario's regulated online market, the AGCO for regulation, OLG for provincial lottery and land-based gaming, Statistics Canada for household data — we use that source and link to it. We prefer official market-performance reports and audited annual reports over secondary summaries.
Reporting periods & currency
Gaming data in Canada is usually reported on a fiscal year running April 1 to March 31. We label every figure with its reporting period (for example "FY2023–24" or a specific quarter) so numbers are never compared across mismatched windows. All dollar amounts are Canadian dollars (C$) unless stated otherwise.
Wagering vs revenue
Two very different numbers are often confused. Total wagers (also called "handle" or "amount bet") is the gross value of all bets placed, including stakes that are immediately paid back out as winnings and re-wagered. Gaming revenue (gross gaming revenue, GGR) is what operators keep after paying winnings — a far smaller figure, and the one that actually represents player losses. We always label which is which, because a headline "billions wagered" number is not money lost by players.
What we do not do
- We do not estimate or model figures and present them as reported data. If a number is an estimate, we say so and attribute it.
- We do not blend incompatible sources into a single figure without noting the join.
- We do not extrapolate a quarter into a full year and label it as an annual result.
Updates
Market-performance data is published on regulators' and corporations' own schedules — typically quarterly and annually. We review our figures when new official reports are released and record the "last reviewed" date on each data page. See Data Sources for the full list of what we track.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-29.