After a one-year hiatus, the Bay 101 Shooting Star event is back. (WPT photo)

“I have always said San Jose has the greatest poker fans in the world.”

Matt Savage has called San Jose’s Bay 101 Casino home since he took a job dealing there back in 1994. This week, after its much-discussed one-year absence from the poker tournament calendar, Savage announced that the casino’s premier event, the Shooting Star, will return in 2019.

Savage is one of Bay 101’s key Tournament Directors in addition to his position as the Executive Tour Director for the World Poker Tour.

“We have been working on the Shooting Stars and it has been championed by new Casino Manager Samuel Quinto to bring it back,” Savage said. “To be honest, we are not happy that it skipped a year but we are truly thrilled that the Shooting Star will return in 2019.”

So while the Shooting Star is back, it’s not the same tournament as the one that left. Some slight tweaks to the structure, a single starting day and, perhaps most notably, it will not be a World Poker Tour event in 2019.

“I have always said this is the most unique tournament in poker and many of the things that make this a one-of-a-kind event will return,” Savage said when talking about the resurrection of the Shooting Star.

“It will have a $5,200 buy-in, 30 Shooting Stars that are worth $2,000 if you claim their last chips. The tournament will have a one day start and feature an excellent structure that will have 40,60 and 90-minute levels and play six-handed at 36 players. The 30 Stars will not only be poker greats but also some non-poker personalities and social media influencers.”

The absence of the tournament in 2018 coincided with a venue shift for Bay 101. The old card room, which had its opening back in 1993, was a fixture of the Northern California poker landscape. It was a broad open space with high ceilings and an old-school card room vibe.

The new location, located directly across the 101 freeway from the now-defunct card room, has adopted a more modern approach for their environment. When the new Bay 101 opened in September of 2017, the casino was slow to re-introduce daily tournaments. It quickly became apparent that the Shooting Star tournament would not be able to be incorporated into the casino’s plans in 2018.

For many in the industry, the Shooting Star has always felt like a unique tournament on the schedule. Its ability to attract big names, award bounties and t-shirts for knockouts and drop to six-handed in the late stages of the tournament made it a favorite for pros and recs alike. The legendary rabid San Jose poker fanbase had made the event a can’t-miss tour stop. So, when it was dropped from the WPT schedule in 2018, its absence was felt by locals and pros alike.

But for many of the players, including the locals that make up that legendary fan base, the lack of WPT affiliation won’t stop them from registering.

“I can tell by the messages I have already received that the event was sorely missed,” Savage said.

Bay 101’s day-to-day Tournament Director Quoc Pham echoed Savage’s sentiment. The local players are ready to have their Shooting Star back in the fold.

“[The locals] were ecstatic, they couldn’t be happier,” Pham said. “A lot of people dream of playing the Shooting Star, the prestige of playing in a big buy-in tournament. They have a chance of playing for life-changing money.”

One of the questions that will be answered soon will be who the Shooting Stars will be. In the past they’ve been some of the biggest names in the game, Savage promises that the bounties of 2019 will be just as impressive but give the tournament a brand new look.

“Invites are just being sent out now and contracts need to be signed before we can release names but I can tell you that this year’s list of Stars will look entirely different than years past,” Savage said.

Even without the WPT branding behind it, the Shooting Star is likely to be an appetizing event for big-name pros, if only for the number of qualifiers it is expected to bring in. The venue has 26 satellites on the schedule.

“The satellite schedule is really aggressive and the Shooting Star is always strongly supported by our Bay Area locals making our field one of the best in poker,” Savage said.

“We are hoping that we will give away about 200 seats into the event,” Pham added. ”Roughly half of the field will be from satellites.”

Even though the Shooting Star is not an official WPT event, the 2019 scheduling of it makes it obvious that Savage kept the WPT Main Tour, and his own duties, in mind, placing the tournament in its traditional March timeslot. The World Poker Tour has both the Los Angeles Poker Classic and WPT Rolling Thunder taking place earlier in March, allowing the Shooting Star to, perhaps, capture some of the pros that make their way to California for those events.

“It is important in the current tournament poker climate that dates, especially in the same region in the world, work in tandem. Fortunately, our relationship with the WPT made that easy and it will fit right between two of their events on the West Coast making it easy and convenient for traveling players.”

When asked if the Shooting Star would return to the World Poker Tour, both Savage and Pham couldn’t say. There is a sentiment that they would be trying again to make that happen in 2020.

The Bay 101 Shooting Star takes place from March 19-22 at the Bay 101 Casino in San Jose.