Quoc Mai Leads a Stacked WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Final Table as the Hellmuths Bow Out Together

A Delayed Final Table, A Loaded Leaderboard

The 2026 WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship wrapped its live action on October 26 with one of the format's signature cliffhangers: a six-handed final table that won't actually play out until December. The final table is set in the 2026 World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Star main event, with just six players remaining from a field of 584 entries in the $5,300 buy-in no-limit hold'em affair, which began on Oct. 23 with the first of three starting flights at Bay 101 in San Jose, California.

The finish was about as chaotic as these things get. Play was halted when the WPT televised final table of six was set on the night of Oct. 26, with a dramatic finish ahead of a six-week break in play, as the session concluded with back-to-back double eliminations that quickly thinned the field from ten to six. That's the WPT's TV-final-table model in action — bag it up, fly home, and come back for the real money.

The Chip Leader's Story

Sitting on top with a commanding stack is Quoc Mai. The big stack belongs to Quoc Mai, who rode a late-day heater to finish with 10,165,000 (254 big blinds). It's a career-defining run: the San Francisco resident has already guaranteed himself a career-best score by making it this far, with his previous top payday being $4,660. That jump — from a four-figure best cash to a guaranteed $94,000 and a shot at nearly half a million — is the exact kind of variance story that makes deep-stacked live tournaments so compelling to follow.

The full table and payout structure:

• Seat 1 · Eric Zheng · 2,065,000
• Seat 2 · Ziao Guo · 4,095,000
• Seat 3 · Chahn Jung · 9,075,000
• Seat 4 · Shawn Daniels · 3,000,000
• Seat 5 · William Davis · 700,000
• Seat 6 · Quoc Mai · 10,165,000

The remaining half dozen contenders will have to wait until Dec. 15 for their shot at the title and the top prize of $470,500, as the delayed final table will pick back up then in Las Vegas.

The Hellmuths, Together Again

No Bay 101 Shooting Star recap is complete without checking in on the tournament's most famous bounty. Phil Hellmuth entered as a marked man, and he made a real run of it alongside his son. Both father and son fell just short of the unofficial final table bubble, with plenty of notables running deep, including all-time WSOP bracelet leader Phil Hellmuth (48th) — and Nicholas Hellmuth busting one spot later in 51st, with both min-cashing for $11,400 apiece. It's a reminder that even with a target on your back and a $2,500 bounty attached to your name, deep tournament runs still come down to the same swingy spots that eliminate everyone else in the field.

What It Means for Players

For the vast majority of us, the realistic entry point to a series like this isn't a $5,300 live buy-in — it's a cheap online satellite or simply following the structure for ideas on how to play deep-stacked, bounty-driven fields. A few practical takeaways:

• Delayed final tables reward patience over hot streaks. Mai's stack will sit for six weeks before a single hand plays out. If you're building a staking or backing arrangement around a similar structure, build in time for variance to settle before you judge the result.
• Bounty formats change ranges. Shooting Star events pay out for busting specific players, which subtly widens calling ranges against marked opponents all day. Worth remembering any time you see a bounty tag at your table, live or online.
• Career-best scores happen in the mid-field, not just the final table. Mai's run started well before the TV cameras showed up — Day 2 and Day 3 survival is where most of the equity actually gets built.

If you're grinding MTTs online while chasing your own version of this story — whether it's on ClubGG or anywhere else — the only way to know if you're actually improving is to look at the numbers across hundreds of tournaments, not just the one that ran good. A ClubGG tracker that imports your hands straight into DriveHUD lets you build a real sample of your win rate, ROI, and leak spots instead of relying on memory of your best (or worst) sessions. Pair that with a quick pass through our setup guide and you'll have your database running before the next big guarantee fires.

The Bay 101 final table resumes December 15 in Las Vegas during the WPT World Championship series, with $470,500 and a WPT title on the line.