PokerStars' Ontario's recent launch includes a significant series beginning Saturday, October 1, 2022 -- the Ontario Championship of Online Poker, or ONCOOP. The 17-day series will spread across 17 days, include 132 separate tournaments, and offer more than $2 million in guaranteed prize money.
PokerStars' recent migration of Ontario-based players from its global dot-com platform to the ring-fenced, Ontario-only site might result in a smaller player pool, but Stars has ensured that the province's online players have a full shot at "COOP" excitement.
The 132 events being offered are split into "Low" and "High" tiers, catering to players with smaller or larger bankrolls. ONCOOP includes a two-week buildup to its no-limit hold’em main events, which will get underway on September 16, the final Sunday of the series. The "High" main event features a $500 buy-in and a $200,000 guarantee, while the "Low" main runs with a $50 buy-in and a $40,000 prize-pool guarantee. Both main events begin at 5:05 p.m. ET on October 16.
Players continue migrating to new PokerStars Ontario platform
Pre-existing PokerStars players in Ontario, which includes Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and other large cities, must complete the mandatory migration of their accounts from PokerStars.com to the new Ontario-only site at on.pokerstars.ca. PokerStars previously published a migration page and a related FAQ page to aid the province's players in making the switch to the new platform.
Among the items that PokerStars' pre-existing players may have had concerns about were their balances on the global site. As part of the migration, those balances are converted into Canadian dollars (rather than the U.S. dollars on the global site), and they are automatically loaded into a player's PokerStars Ontario account. Other player assets such as T-Money and T-Tickets will be consolidated, converted, and transferred as well, while previously earned StarsCoin will be converted into cash and transferred in the same way. Rewards Chests that haven't been opened yet by their owners will be "force-opened" and the prizes converted and transferred as well.
New customers, of course, can simply open an account and fund it with Canadian dollars through the various deposit options PokerStars Ontario offers. With ONCOOP being the largest series the site has offered to date, there'll be plenty of action in the next few weeks.
Featured image source: PokerStars Ontario
