Cue sports, equipment and the betting line
The betting and casino desk of the paper, including the markets that actually exist on pool and snooker.
Cue sports carry a betting market, and it is unusually legible: a snooker match is a sequence of discrete frames, which means the board can be read frame by frame rather than guessed at. The Betting Desk explains what the common markets actually settle on and how a handicap line resolves, for readers who want to understand a board before they form a view about it.
Single-event sports betting became legal in Canada on June 29, 2021, when Bill C-218 received Royal Assent and amended the Criminal Code. The change did not create a national market. Instead, it handed provinces the power to license and conduct betting within their borders.
Listed in the order the section reads: journal first, then features, answers, equipment notes and catalogue indexes.
The two pieces here cover the two things that confuse people first. Market definitions come before anything else, because the same bet name settles differently between books and most disputes are about wording rather than about the match. Frame handicaps come second: the number in front of a player is applied at a specific point in the settlement and knowing where turns an opaque line into arithmetic.
This is not a tipping section and it carries no recommendations. Betting and casino coverage on this site is written for readers of legal age in their own jurisdiction; gambling involves risk, and in Canada each provincial regulator publishes its own help line. The older betting and casino features kept in this section were published at these addresses before the Journal existed and are retained unchanged, because the links pointing at them still work.