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Between January 29 - February 10, the Montreal card room will be the home of the TonyBet Winter Festival, which includes an All-Stars for Starlight tournament with ice hockey legend Larry Robinson (and friends) that gives all the tournament fees to charity, as well as the $500,000 guaranteed TonyBet Winter Festival Main Event!
TonyBet is a rapidly growing poker room with a focus on Openface Chinese Poker (OFC). Recently, they have introduced NL Hold'em and Pot Limit Omaha games aswell and they decided to celebrate this by collaborating with Playground Poker Club in Montreal for a huge event.
The series will kick off with a $135 + $25 buy-in All-Stars for Starlight tournament where all the tournament fees go towards the Starlight Children's Foundation Canada. This tournament is not the first charity event that the room runs, last August they organized the Strike Out Cancer charity event which raised almost $30,000 for the Jodi Taiger Lazarus Fund for Hereditary Breast Cancer Research.
The Playground Poker Club is located in the Kahnawake reservation [3], meaning they are not bound by Canadian law, which allows them to collaborate with offshore sites.
The legal status of online gambling in Canada might be a bit confusing to new players, but this source [4] explains the current situation very well (comparison with US laws, predictions regarding future law changes and other useful information.)
After the charity event, players can participate in plenty of side events, there will be a No Limit Hold'em Shootout tournament as well as Bounty, 8-max, Deepstack, Survivor, Deepstack Turbo, Win the Button, Freezeout, 50/50 bounty events and a Pot Limit Omaha (single rebuy) tournament.
The main attraction of the series is the $1,100 buy-in, $500,000 guaranteed TonyBet Winter Festival Main Event which runs with four Day 1 flights and a deep structure.
Players can qualify for the event through live and online satellites, check out the TonyBet/Playground Poker website for more details.
TonyBet Winter Festival schedule [5]