All 584 entrants dreamed of being the real “Shooting Star” in the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship. But only six players still have a shot to stake that claim.
Day 3 at Bay 101 in Northern California played down to a final table, which won’t be played until Dec. 15. That final table will take place in Las Vegas at Wynn during the World Poker Tour’s season-ending WPT World Championship festival, a three-week series that includes a $3 million guaranteed Super Gold Million tournament and a WPT Prime Championship.
And Then There Were Six
Day 2 concluded with 55 players remaining, including 12 “Shooting Stars,” players designated as special $2,500 bounties. When play wrapped on Day 3, Shawn Daniels was the lone remaining Shooting Star. He is also the only WPT Champions Club member still in the field.
Daniels, who has over $3.5 million in live tournament cashes, will start with 3,000,000 chips in Las Vegas, good for the fourth-largest stack. He’s well behind the chip leader, and that is Quoc Mai and his stack of 10,165,000. Chahn Jung is the nearest competitor with 9,075,000 chips.
Final Table Chip Counts
| Place | Player | Chip Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quoc Mai | 10,165,000 |
| 2 | Chahn Jung | 9,075,000 |
| 3 | Ziao Guo | 4,095,000 |
| 4 | Shawn Daniels | 3,000,000 |
| 5 | Eric Zheng | 2,065,000 |
| 6 | William Davis | 700,000 |
Ziao “Zeo” Guo then sits in third place with 4,095,000. Guo is one of the most active players in Hustler Casino Live history, having appeared on the show nearly 100 times since HCL first launched in 2021.
Daniels is in fourth place, followed by Eric Zheng, who will return to action in December with 2,065,000 chips. William Davis is the short stack with 700,000 chips, and he will likely be the player Mai and Jung pick on early at the final table.
All six players have a guaranteed minimum payout of $94,000 after Jeremy Menard busted on the final table bubble in seventh place. But the winner of this legendary World Poker Tour event will take home $470,500.
The final table will be livestreamed from Wynn, and it should be quite a marathon affair. Although Davis has only a fraction of what the chip leaders are sitting on, he still has 18 big blinds. Mai and Jung have over 220 big blinds each, while Guo is in great position with over 100 big blinds. There are four big stacks in play, and even Zheng has no reason to press with 52 big blinds.