At a Shooting Star event, named professional players have a bounty of $5,000. If you can knock one out, you get a bonus of $5,000. That’s enough incentive for players to go all out during play. The huge Bay 101 in San Jose, California was the venue for the 5 day tournament which lasted from March 10, 2008 to March 14, 2008. 376 players put up $10,000 each and there were 45 payouts from a total pool prize of $3,336,000.

When the final table began at 4pm PDT, it was at Level 20 with blinds of 4,000 – 8,000 with 1,000 antes. There was only one lady poker professional at the table and at the start of game play, the seating arrangements and chip count were:

• Seat 1 – Noah Jefferson with 842,000 chips
• Seat 2 – John “The Razor” Phan with 374,000 chips
• Seat 3 – Brandon “The Bounty Hunter” Cantu with 3,323,000 chips
• Seat 4 –Steve Sung with 474,000 chips
• Seat 5 – Jennifer Harman with 541,000 chips
• Seat 6 – Michael Baker with 1,964,000 chips

At the start of heads up play, the Shooting Star champion, Brandon Cantu, had a massive 4:1 chip lead over Sung. Cantu had 6,133,000 chips and Sung played with 1,385,000. His winning hand was 4 diamonds and 4 spades to Sung’s pocket 3s. Cantu bagged $1,000,000 in prize winnings whilst Sung made do with $585,000 as the runner-up.

Cashes for the rest of the players were:

Jennifer Harman - $330,000
Noah Jefferson - $265,000
Michael Baker - $200,000
John “The Razor” Phan - $135,000

Harman was the only professional player at the table that Cantu took out to win his sixth bounty for the tournament totalling $30,000 in all. He earned the nickname “The Bounty Hunter” for this record bust of six notable poker pros in the tournament.

Cantu is one of only 27 players to win the World Series of Poker Bracelet, which he won in 2006, and a World Poker Tour championship. Born on May 10, 1981 in Vancouver, Washington, Cantu is aged 27. He found it somewhat difficult to find a niche in life as he was growing up and was largely influenced by televised poker.

Chris Moneymaker made him set his eyes on poker and he started his foray into the field by playing online with small limits. When he won his first bracelet in 2006, he moved permanently to Las Vegas, Nevada to become a professional poker player. His total live tournament winning as at end 2008 exceeds $2.3 million

-- Reinu C.