Day 3 at the 2009 Bay 101 Shooting Star $10,000 no-limit hold'em championship event began with 36 players. The tables were seated six-handed to start the day, which made for a lot of action. A man was left with non life-threatening injuries Tuesday following a shooting near the Bay 101 Casino parking lot in San Jose. The California Highway Patrol and San Jose Police Department.
Los Angeles, CA (March 3, 2017) — Season XV of the World Poker Tour® rolls on with the WPT® Bay 101 Shooting Star at Bay 101 Casino in San Jose, CA. The $7,500 Main Event is one of the most fun-filled events of the season, awarding bounty prizes on a select group of players and drawing one of the most elite fields on the tournament circuit.
The Season XV WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star $7,500 Main Event takes place starting Monday, March 6, 2017, and runs through Saturday, March 11. More than 50 players have been selected as Shooting Stars in the event. Knocking out one of these players will earn a player $2,500 in cash. In addition to the more than $125,000 to be won in tournament bounties, each chip leader from Day 1a and Day 1b of the tournament will be awarded with a $10,000 cash prize.
Last season’s WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star $7,500 Main Event proved a record field size for the event with 753 entries. A prize pool of more than $5.3 million was generated with $1.298 million going to the winner. Stefan Schillhabel, a German player, won the event for the largest live score of his poker career. Joining Schillhabel at the final table were Adam Geyer and Maria Ho.
Ho is one of more than 50 players selected as a Shooting Star for Season XV, and she’ll be joined by fellow bounties Erik Seidel, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, and Richard Seymour. WPT Co-Commentators Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten will also be Shooting Stars, as will WPT Raw Deal Analyst Tony Dunst.
Ema Zajmovic, the first female winner of an open event on the WPT Main Tour, became a late addition to the list of Shooting Star players.
Following the WPT L.A. Poker Classic that recently completed, WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star is the second leg of the World Poker Tour’s California Swing. Last season, it was Ankush Mandavia who emerged as the California Swing winner thanks to a a 23rd-place finish in Bay 101 Shooting Star to earn $30,310 and an eighth-place finish from a field of 409 in WPT Rolling Thunder for $36,646.
For becoming the California Swing champion, Mandavia earned perks and comps that he can use on this year’s California Swing, including transportation and accommodations.
For complete information on the Season XV WPT California Swing contest, click here.
Click here for more information regarding the Season XV WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star event.
Today the World Poker Tourreleased the remaining 2018 portion of its Season 16 Main Tour schedule, highlighting stops at Seminole Hard Rock, Borgata, Fallsview, Commerce and Thunder Valley.
'These five venues generated nearly 5,500 total entries and more than $23 million in total prize money during Season XV of the World Poker Tour, and we look forward to continued WPT success at these world-class properties during the second half of Season XVI,' said WPT CEO Adam Pliska.
Conspicuously absent from the schedule, however, is Bay 101 Shooting Star, the fan favorite bounty event that has graced the tour for over a decade. Almost since the WPT initially came on the scene, Bay 101 Shooting Star has been one of its flagship events.
First appearing on the schedule in Season 2, Bay 101 started out as a $5,200 event with $5,000 bounties placed upon a select group of star players. It drew a field of 243 and Phil Gordon took it down for $360,000. The event remained thereafter as a mainstay on the tour, becoming popular among poker fans and recreational players alike, many of whom have long enjoyed bounty tournaments in their home casinos as one of the most popular tournament formats.
It soon morphed into a $10K event and then moved to the $7,500 price point in 2013, where it has remained the past few years. Past champions aside from Gordon include Nam Le, Ted Forrest, Brandon Cantu, Taylor Paur, Stefan Schillhabel and Sam Panzica, who won nearly $1.4 million last season en route to challenging for WPT Player of the Year.
The absence of Bay 101 from the schedule also likely means the end of the California Swing promotion for the time being. The WPT release outlining the 2018 schedule makes no mention of the Swing.
For years, the WPT held the L.A. Poker Classic and Bay 101 Shooting Star one after the other. When WPT Rolling Thunder, an event in Northern California, was added to the schedule in 2014, it made for three straight events in the Golden State.
The WPT introduced the California Swing promotion, offering players some added value to encourage them to attend all three events. Players competing in each event accumulated points for in-the-money finishes and the winner banked a bevy of prizes. Last year's champ, Rainer Kempe, won a package that included travel expenses and hotel accommodations to what was supposed to have been this coming California Swing.
As noted here last week, the Bay 101 Casino located in San Jose just reopened in a new location described by The Mercury News as 'the first phase of a bigger expansion project.'
That same Mercury News report had suggested 'the casino will also continue its world-famous Shooting Star poker tournament,' although it remains to be seen whether it will once again when the next season rolls around.
Here's a look at the 2018 portion of the WPT schedule, with the WPT also having promised to release details on the season-ending Tournament of Champions at a later date:
| Dates | Event | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| Jan. 10-15 | €3,300 WPT European Championship | SpielBank Berlin (Berlin, Germany) |
| Jan. 19-24 | $3,500 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open | Seminole Hard Rock (Hollywood, FL) |
| Jan. 28-Feb. 2 | $3,500 WPT Borgata Winter Poker Open | Borgata (Atlantic City, NJ) |
| Feb. 10-12 | CA$5,000 WPT Fallsview Poker Classic | Fallsview (Ontario, Canada) |
| Feb. 24-March 1 | $10,000 WPT L.A. Poker Classic | Commerce (Commerce, CA) |
| March 2-6 | $3,500 WPT Rolling Thunder | Thunder Valley (Lincoln, CA) |
| April 13-18 | $3,500 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown | Seminole Hard Rock (Hollywood, FL) |
Shooting Star Casino And Hotel
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