WPT® Bay 101 Shooting Star: Hunt the Stars for $5,300

One of WPT®'s most anticipated U.S. stops is back.

The $5,300 WPT® Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship runs October 23–27 at Bay 101 Casino in San Jose. The format? Think a regular tournament with a manhunt included. That's to say, invited pros and poker personalities are wearing bounties. So, knock one of them out and you collect cash on the spot.

Here's how it works and what to watch.

The Championship is a $5,300 buy-in event running October 23–27, inside a 17-day festival. It's running October 16 – November 1, with many side events at a range of buy-ins. The winner joins the game's honour roll on the Mike Sexton WPT® Champions Cup and plays a televised final table. Bay 101 has been a WPT® fixture since 2004, and the Shooting Star is one of the tour's most iconic stops. It's a recent return of a long-running favourite.

The format is half poker tournament, half bounty hunting.

Each starting table is seeded with at least one Shooting Star. A Shooting Star is an invited pro or personality carrying a bounty. Bust a Shooting Star and you win a cash bounty immediately,. The bounty this year is set at $2,500 per star, on top of your tournament equity. If a Shooting Star survives their table, they keep their own bounty.

There's an extra bonus for Day 1 too: chip leaders each pick up a $5,000 bonus.

As you can imagine, it affects how the whole room plays. A recreational player plays against a big name. It's a story to tell their family. The broadcast tracks which stars are still alive and who's getting bounties.

A standard high-roller field wrapped around a scavenger hunt.

The 2026 Shooting Star roster is still filling out, but the early names alone make the hunt worthwhile.

Phil Hellmuth, one never short of a target on his back, is playing. He's joined by the formidable husband-and-wife pair Alex and Kristen Foxen. More bounty players are to come. The full "who to hunt" list is worth checking on WPT®'s channels as the event approaches.

For a sense of the draw, last year's edition seeded 23 bounties. Names like Shannon Shorr, Chance Kornuth, Matt Salsberg and Nikki Limo. Expect a similar mix of high-stakes regulars and recognisable faces this year.

The 2025 Championship shows exactly why the format works for television. Kharlin Sued of Florida won it for a career-best $480,700. He beat California's Danny Wong heads-up, out of a 672-entry field that built a prize pool north of $3 million.

One note was a Shooting Star going deep.

Chance Kornuth, one of the 23 bounty players, outlasted all the other stars. He ran all the way to the six-handed televised final table. It was deepest bounty run of the event, before Sued eliminated him in sixth.

The champion also earns the Mike Sexton WPT® Champions Cup and WPT® Player of the Year points. There's some things to take note of this year. One, how the full 2026 Shooting Star list shapes up. Two, if the field tops last year's 672 entries and $3 million. And finally whether a bounty player can go one better than Kornuth and actually win it.

It all lands in the thick of a packed WPT® autumn.

Bay 101 follows the Cyprus, bestbet Scramble, Australia and Prime Lodge stops. WPT® Seoul and the WPT® Venetian Fall Championship both arriving in early November. And all these go toward the WPT® World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas in December.

If you want a seat, satellites into the Championship run for a fraction of the $5,300 buy-in. Check WPT®'s event page and the Bay 101 schedule for the current qualifier times and the full festival slate.

And if you're here to watch, keep an eye out for the televised final table. The last Shooting Stars and the eventual champion play it out there.