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Shooting Stars Event Begins
The five day World Poker Tour’s Shooting Stars event kicked off on Monday,
with more than 500 competitors shelling out $10,000 apiece for a shot at
$4.5 million in prizes. It’s not just players at the event, where fans are
flocking to see some of poker’s biggest names play and maybe even get taken
out for a bounty.
Twenty-one year old Joseph Batista skipped his college classes Monday and
drove more than two hours from Sacremento to San Jose, in order to watch his
favorite players belly up to the table and play some hands in live action.
“I’m a really big poker fan- especially Phil Ivey. This is like a once in a
lifetime chance, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said the student.
Bautista and other big time poker fans were waiting outside for more than
half an hour before the tournament began, hoping to get some autographs and
chat up the players. Last year’s champion and World Series of Poker 1998
champion, Vietnamese immigrant Scotty Nguyen, continued to show off his
effusive personality in rock star like style, chatting and posing for
pictures with fans while signing autographs.
Televised events like Shooting Stars- to be shown on June 7 on The Travel
Channel- have made poker players famous. World Poker Tour telecasts are
drawing over 1 million viewers a week, and stations like ESPN estimate they
pull in more than 10 million unique viewers a month, most watching poker’s
most popular game, texas hold’em. It is this kind of attention that has
rocketed players like Nguyen and Ivey into the fame stratosphere.
Matt Savage, Bay 101’s director of the Shooting Stars event and several
other tournaments around the country, says that television and the internet
have helped push poker’s surge in popularity. Besides the phenomenon of
online poker, several sites offer live updates from tournaments such as
Shooting Stars.
The unique format of the event, with one player at each of the 50 ten person
starting tables labeled a “Star” and with a bounty on their head, is one
reason for the event’s popularity, which has grown so much that it had to be
split in half this year, with 250 players starting on Monday and the other
half starting on Tuesday. Those remaining from the two days will amalgamate
Wednesday and eliminations will take place to the six person finale at 5 pm
on Friday.
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