The first day of combined play at the World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Star, that saw the survivors from both Day 1 starting heats finally together in the same room, was full of action and destruction; enough destruction that of the 126 players that started the day, only 27 would remain to see the end of it. 

Among the list of 99 players unlucky enough to end their tournament runs yesterday were many of the remaining shooting star bountied players including Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu, Mike Sexton, J.C. Tran, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Jerry Yang, Phil Laak, Freddy Deeb, Greg “FBT” Mueller and PokerRoad’s Barry Greenstein, leaving only four bountied players for the 27 Day 3 survivors to shoot for.

Those four players, Phil Hellmuth, Chau Giang, Scotty Nguyen and Miami John Cernuto, are each still worth $5,000 to whoever knocks them out, but at this late stage are not expected to go down easy, and one of them, UB’s Phil Hellmuth, will require at the least two really bad hands to do so, since as the end of Day 2 chip leader, it’s mathematically impossible to knock him out with just one.

Some of the other non-bountied survivors to join Hellmuth for Day 3 include Jonathan Little, Faraz Jaka, Nick Schulman, Hasan Habib, and PokerRoad's Dan O’Brien.

Phil Hellmuth, despite his legendary 11 World Series of Poker bracelets, has never won a World Poker Tour main event, however with more than a half million in tournament chips at the moment and only 27 left in the field, this may just be his best chance to do so since 2008’s LA Poker Classic final table.  To watch him try, check out www.worldpokertour.com for live updates, chip counts and videos, as today’s Day 3 unfolds.