Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship Kicks Off

The $10,000 World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship kicks off today at the Bay 101 Casino in San Jose, California.  Fifty of the world's best poker players are going to be attending as well as hundreds of other players from across the globe that going to try to knockout the poker pros to get their $5,000 bounty and to try and get their seat at the final table.

Players that knockout on the tournaments "stars" will get a bounty of $5,000 and a t-shirt that will have the picture of the player that they just took out.  Also the chip leader at the end of each of the first two days will get a cash bonus of $10,000 dollars.  Play has already been underway for about an hour as I write this as the tournament started at 10:30am PST.

One of the first few rounds of play saw Allen Kessler take a small hit as he was holding pocket Queens while his opponent got a Pair of Aces and Kings but the hand got checked all the way down so Kessler didn't end up losing a lot of his chips.

At last years event Ted Forrest who was one of the stars ended up with everyone's chip and got the top prize of $1.1 million dollars.  He got the big win after beating out 450 other players. 

The players that have a bounty on their head are; are: Ted Forrest, Joe Hachem, Doyle Brunson, Todd Brunson, Freddy Deeb, Gus Hansen, Allen Cunningham, Scotty Nguyen, J.C. Tran, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Barry Greenstein, Mike Matusow, Erik Seidel, T.J. Cloutier, John Juanda, Chad Brown, Jennifer Tilly, Patrik Antonius, Cyndy Violette, Mimi Tran, Sully Erna, John Cernuto, Kenna James, Roy Winston, Barbara Enright, Eli Elezra, Phil Ivey, Antonio Esfandiari, J.J. Liu, Layne Flack, Chau Giang, Mike Gracz, Isabelle Mercier, Hoyt Corkins, Dan Harrington, Joe Sebok, Phil Laak, Kristy Gazes, Erick Lindgren, Tom McEvoy, Mike Mizrachi, Jerry Yang, Men Nguyen, Kathy Liebert, David Pham, Gavin Smith, Jennifer Harman, Amir Vahedi, David Williams, and Robert Williamson III.