2008 WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars Tournament
March 14th, 2008
At San Jose’s Bay 101 Casino, 376 players including twenty four poker professional ’shooting stars’ with $5,000 bounties on their heads are fighting it out for top prize and a share of the $3.6 million prize pool.
Day 1a saw some early eliminations as Jerry Yang, Gus Hansen, Gavin Griffin and David Pham all handed over their $5,000 bounty to their conquerors. WSOP bracelet winner Brandon Cantu had the most success taking out two ’shooting stars’ and collecting $10,000 in bounty.
Day 1b saw another seven ’shooting stars’ eliminated including Jennifer Tilly, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey and Gavin Smith. Eleven stars survived the day however, joining five from Day 1a to go into the player mix for Day 2 which saw the remaining 138 players hit the tables. By the end of the day only thirty six were left, of which five were ’shooting stars’. Those eliminated included Men Nguyen, Mike Matusow and Allen Cunningham.
Day 3 began with some early knock outs for Anna Wroblewski, Paul Wasicka and Jimmy Tran, but it was Brandon Cantu who stole the headlines, taking the chip lead into the final table with five bounties to his name in total.
Final table chip stacks:
- Brandon Cantu - 3,323,000
- Michael Baker - 1,964,000
- Noah Jefferson - 842,000
- Jennifer Harman - 541,000
- Steve Sung - 474,000
- John Phan - 374,000
