FURIA 1:3 FAZE 
DZ 2:1 GKAY 
Canada will have a Rainbow Six team at the 2026 Esports Nations Cup, and Toronto has already hosted high-level competitive Siege events. Esports clearly has a visible Canadian audience. The harder question is how much of that audience also bets on matches.
Canada does not publish a national total for esports-only wagers, revenue or active accounts. The clearest picture comes from bettor surveys, provincial reporting and the way regulated betting products now handle individual games.
Esports betting is no longer hard to find
A Canadian bettor looking through an online sportsbook can find Counter-Strike, Valorant, League of Legends and other esports alongside conventional sporting events, with markets covering match winners, maps and other outcomes familiar to competitive gaming audiences. For esports followers, those menus extend beyond match winners, with separate map and handicap markets.
Esports also appears within the same betting products and promotions as traditional sport. Covers, a sports-betting information publisher that documents operators, offers and wagering terms, provides a breakdown of the Stake Canada betting bonus for new players, including the conditions attached to the offer and information about the sportsbook’s available markets. It is relevant here because it shows how esports is presented within a broader Canadian betting product, rather than how many people actually wager on it.
A sportsbook can carry dozens of esports competitions without revealing how frequently customers use them. Availability tells us esports has secured space on betting menus. Participation tells us more about its reach.
Canada’s esports bettors are still a specialist crowd
Leger’s 2025 Canadian sports-betting research found that 15% of Canadian sports bettors surveyed had wagered on esports during the previous 12 months.
Hockey remains much further ahead. In the same research, 41% of Canadian sports bettors had wagered on the NHL, while 22% had used live or in-play betting. Esports therefore reaches a clear minority of existing bettors, but not anything close to hockey’s share.
Leger also found that 19% of Canadian adults had bet on sport during the previous year. The 15% esports figure applies only within that smaller group of sports bettors, not to Canadians generally. That makes esports neither a fringe curiosity nor a mass-market betting habit. It occupies a narrower part of the market that is large enough to measure directly.
Rainbow Six gives Canada a particularly visible example
SiegeGG’s coverage of the Rainbow Six Esports Nations Cup 2026 lists Canada among the confirmed participating nations, giving domestic fans a national roster to follow. The Canadian connection extends beyond international representation. The Spoit Contender Series 2025 was scheduled to bring its USD$50,000 LAN finals to Toronto, putting competitive Siege in front of a local audience rather than keeping it entirely online.
Ontario’s betting rules also name Rainbow Six directly. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s PROLINE+ conditions include it within first-person shooter esports alongside Counter-Strike, Valorant, Overwatch and other titles. The rules get specific. They explain how bets are settled when a map is incomplete, when overtime changes the score or when an additional map is required. In Siege, map order and series format can change how a matchup actually unfolds. Those are ordinary competitive-game situations, but their inclusion in a provincial betting rulebook shows how far esports has moved into standard sportsbook operations.
Canadian fans therefore have national players, local events and familiar competitions to follow, while betting products have built rules around the same games. That does not make fandom and wagering interchangeable, but it does make the connection between competitive esports and betting much more concrete.
What Ontario’s numbers can and cannot tell us
Ontario recorded C$11.4 billion in betting wagers during the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to iGaming Ontario, an increase of 17% from the previous year. Betting gaming revenue reached C$724 million, up 23%. Those figures include esports, but they also combine conventional sports, proposition wagers, novelty markets and betting exchanges. There is no public breakdown showing how much of the C$11.4 billion came from competitive gaming. Public reporting also cannot show whether wagering clusters around particular titles or major tournaments.
That makes the provincial total useful context, but not a popularity figure for esports itself. The bettor survey still tells us more about how widely esports wagering is actually used.
Esports has made the sportsbook, but not the statistics
Esports now appears on mainstream betting menus and in detailed provincial rulebooks, yet it still disappears inside broader betting totals when the financial numbers are published. Leger’s 15% figure gives the clearest recent indication of its place in Canada: visible, established among a minority of sports bettors and still well behind the country’s biggest traditional betting interests.
For now, esports betting in Canada is easier to spot on a sportsbook screen, or in the small print governing an abandoned Rainbow Six map, than it is in the country’s headline betting statistics.