Kristen Foxen’s record sixth bracelet headlines a strong Canadian run in Las Vegas, and back home the regulated online rooms that feed players to the felt are booming, even as a wall still separates Canada from the global game.
- Toronto’s Kristen Foxen won the $25,000 High Roller on June 7 for about $1.77 million and a sixth WSOP bracelet, the most ever won by a woman and the biggest live score of her career.
- She has company: Quebec’s Frederic Normand and Christopher Alcindor have also taken bracelets, and seven-time bracelet winner Daniel Negreanu has gone deep in the summer’s richest events.
- Back home, online gambling in Ontario has hit record months for poker, with GGPoker and its rivals running satellites that send players to Las Vegas.
- The catch is that Ontario’s market is ring-fenced, walled off from the global player pool, with Alberta’s July launch and a Supreme Court case set to decide whether that changes.
LAS VEGAS – The biggest live score of Kristen Foxen’s career came down to two hands and a cooler. Heads-up against American Galen Hall in the $25,000 High Roller at the World Series of Poker, the player from St. Catharines, Ontario, was dealt pocket aces, called Hall’s all-in, and watched his ace-four fail to improve. With that, on June 7, Foxen banked $1,773,083 and her sixth WSOP bracelet, the most ever won by a woman. All WSOP prizes here are in U.S. dollars.
It was the headline act in a strong Canadian summer on the Las Vegas Strip, and it connects to a quieter story back home, where the regulated online rooms that send Canadians to the felt are posting their best numbers yet.
Foxen’s Historic Sixth
For years, Foxen, who plays out of Toronto and was born Kristen Bicknell, had said she wanted a bracelet from a tougher field, an event she could feel prouder of, since her earlier wins had come in smaller or online tournaments. The $25,000 High Roller delivered exactly that, a 345-entry field packed with elite professionals and a prize pool above $8 million. Her husband, Alex Foxen, a four-time bracelet winner who took gold of his own this summer, presented the trophy. The win pushed Foxen’s live tournament earnings past $18.9 million, the most of any woman in the game’s history, and made her one of fewer than 30 players ever to reach six bracelets. Her first came back in 2013, in the Ladies Event, and the climb since has taken her from an unknown Canadian to the most decorated woman the WSOP has seen.
A Deep Canadian Field
Foxen was not the only Canadian collecting hardware. Quebec’s Frederic Normand broke the country’s 2026 bracelet drought a day before her win, taking a $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo event for $235,377, and Christopher Alcindor followed with a $1,500 Big O title worth $387,110. The country’s most famous export, Toronto-born Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu, has been a fixture in the summer’s richest tournaments, finishing fourth in the $250,000 Super High Roller, and this month the seven-time bracelet winner became the first player ever to pass $25 million in WSOP earnings, extending his record as the series’ all-time money leader. He also shared off the felt that he and his wife are expecting their first child in November. The 57th WSOP, which opened May 26 across the Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas, runs 100 bracelet events through the summer, and its centerpiece, the $10,000 Main Event, is still to come in July.
The Pipeline Runs Through Ontario
The Canadian presence in Vegas is not an accident, and more and more it runs through Ontario’s regulated market. Online poker in the province just had its strongest stretch on record, with March setting all-time highs for both poker wagering and revenue and ending a nearly two-year plateau, according to iGaming Ontario. Much of that traffic flows through GGPoker, the market leader with an estimated half of Ontario’s poker play and a WSOP partnership that runs online bracelet events and satellites feeding the live series in Las Vegas. The province now has six licensed poker rooms across four networks, and the lineup just shifted again, with PokerStars going dark in May and relaunching June 4 as PokerStars Exclusively on FanDuel on new software. For players weighing where to play, the regulated Canada poker sites now rival anything offshore, and the province has quietly become the country’s deepest poker ecosystem.
Walled Off From the World
There is a catch that shapes the whole Canadian game, and it is the wall around it. Since Ontario’s market launched in April 2022, every licensed room has run a segregated, Ontario-only client, cut off from the global player pools that make for bigger fields and richer tournaments. Whether that changes is now a legal question. A 2025 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling found, by a 4-1 margin, that the province could permit cross-border player pooling as long as it keeps operational control, but a coalition of provincial lottery corporations is appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada, with Alberta intervening on Ontario’s side. Alberta opens its own regulated market July 13, most likely ring-fenced at first, with a shared Ontario-Alberta pool a real possibility down the road. If those walls come down, Canadian online fields could swell overnight, and the pipeline to Las Vegas would only get stronger.
For now, the Canadian story at the 2026 World Series is a familiar and happy one, a country that punches well above its weight at the table, with a home game finally big enough to match the talent. For the rooms, reviews and news behind it, the Canada gambling sites hub keeps tabs on the market all year.
