Quoc Mai Leads Six-Player WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Final Table
The San Francisco player carries 254 big blinds into the Dec. 15 Las Vegas finale, with $470,500 awaiting the champion.
- The WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship drew 584 entries and is down to a six-player televised final table.
- Quoc Mai leads with 10.2 million chips after winning the final three-way all-in of the San Jose portion.
- Chahn Jung, Ziao Guo, Shawn Daniels, Eric Zheng and William Davis round out the final table.
- The Dec. 15 Las Vegas finale will award $470,500 and a WPT World Championship entry to the winner.
Quoc Mai will take the chip lead into the six-handed televised final table of the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship after the $5,300 no-limit hold’em event drew 584 entries in San Jose. The final table resumes Dec. 15 in Las Vegas, where the winner earns $470,500 and a place on the Mike Sexton WPT Champions Cup.
The event began at Bay 101 on Oct. 23, as we reported when the Championship opened with three starting flights and its signature Shooting Star bounty format. Play stopped on the night of Oct. 26 after the field was cut from 10 to six through consecutive double eliminations.
Mai, a San Francisco resident, bagged 10.2 million chips, worth 254 big blinds. He locked up a career-best tournament score by reaching the final table, surpassing his previous top payout of $4,660 for a 51st-place RunGood Poker Series finish at Thunder Valley Casino Resort.
The decisive late hand saw Mai’s pocket kings beat Jeremy Menard’s ace-queen and Joe Nguyen’s pocket threes in a three-way all-in. Menard collected $72,000 in seventh place and Nguyen received $56,500 in eighth, while Mai also claimed Nguyen’s $2,500 Shooting Star bounty.
Chahn Jung begins second with 9.1 million, or 227 big blinds, after pocket kings held against Adam Hendrix’s ace-jack and Aaron Massey’s pocket threes in the preceding three-way confrontation. That hand eliminated Massey in 10th for $41,500 and Hendrix for $48,500. Jung was runner-up in this year’s WSOP $3,000 no-limit hold’em event and has nearly $2 million in recorded scores.
Ziao Guo is the only other finalist above 100 big blinds, carrying 4.1 million. Guo has guaranteed at least $94,000, a personal-best payday on the circuit. Shawn Daniels, the 2025 WPT Rolling Thunder main-event champion and a bracelet winner with more than $3.9 million in career cashes, sits fourth with 3 million.
Eric Zheng returns with 2.1 million, while William Davis is the short stack on 700,000. The official seating order places Zheng in seat one, followed by Guo, Jung, Daniels, Davis and Mai. Play will restart in Level 23 with 4 minutes, 5 seconds remaining at 20,000-40,000 blinds and a 40,000 big-blind ante; the button will be drawn when action resumes.
The tournament created a $2.6 million prize pool and paid 73 places. Nearly $1.4 million remains, with payouts ranging from $94,000 for sixth through $305,000 for second before the $470,500 top prize. The first-place figure includes the winner’s $10,400 entry to the season-ending WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas.
Among the players who cashed but did not reach the delayed final table were Phil Hellmuth, Tyler Patterson, Soheb Porbandarwala, Faraz Jaka, Michael Wang, Matthew Salsberg and Joe McKeehen. The finalists play down to a champion in Las Vegas during the WPT World Championship series on Dec. 15.
