A solid contingent of Canadians is making deep runs in the 2026 WSOP Main Event, headlined by DJ Sharma, who entered Day 6 second in chips with 9.8M after a memorable evening on the ESPN stream, where he started today as well.
But just a bit further down the counts, entering the day with 6.3M is a friend and competitor of Sharma’s from Playground in Montreal, Ricardo Cermeno-Sandoval.
We profiled Cermeno-Sandoval last summer after he went on a tear with the benefit of baby rungood, after he and his wife Mathilde had their son, Taro.
He had his first six-figure score, pulled a $25K mystery bounty, and had some of the best results of his career after quitting his job as a dealer at Playground to focus on his family while playing poker on the side.
Taro is now over a year old, so it may not be baby rungood anymore, but who knows. Cermeno-Sandoval has seen continued success on the felt and is now doing some incredible things in the Main Event as he entered Day 6 with just 173 players between himself, $10M, and the title of World Champion.
To get here, though, Cermeno-Sandoval has had to exercise remarkable patience and belief, with multiple days of grinding a short stack or worse before finally getting a chance to be at the point he is today.
“To be honest, the first three days had been really bad, really a big roller coaster. I would go up to 150, go down to 30, and back. I was always bagging a short stack, but always surviving. I'm just happy that after the bubble, I could just spin it up, and now that I have a stack, I can comfortably play my real game. I'm comfortable in this spot.”
Un jeton et une chaise
Cermeno-Sandoval’s lowest point came during Day 3, when in Level 13 with blinds of 2,000 / 4,000 (4,000), he took a beat that would signal the end of almost anyone’s Main Event, but as Jack Strauss taught us many years ago, you’re never done so long as you have a chip and a chair.
“I had jacks against eights. The chip leader opened. There was a guy with 15 bigs that jammed, and I woke up with jacks on the button, and I jammed for 16 bigs. So, the chip leader folds, and I went against eights. Eight in the window. I lost all my chips, I thought I was just done, and then they told me I had one chip, one big blind, and it was just first, all in blind. Then all in blind versus blind, and then it was a big spin. Big, big, big spin up.”
He survived that turmoil to finish Day 3 with 32 big blinds, then continued to run his stack up into the contender that it is here on Day 6.
“I never lost hope, but I'm just happy. I feel like everything was meant to be, that I lost that hand with the jacks. It was meant to be for me to be here with that stack, and I'm just happy that everything happened the way it did.”
If you’d like to leave anything for the dealers…
Back in Montreal, Cermeno-Sandoval has a team of former colleagues at Playground who are also very happy with his ascent. Anyone who has seen him in his home poker room knows how popular a figure he is there, and this will certainly add to his legend.
Before he came to the WSOP, he wanted to share the experience with as many of his friends there as possible, offering pieces of his Main Event with no markup. Needless to say, this sweat was in high demand.
“I sold around 15% of my action to the dealers at Playground. And I had so many people buying it. I had 25 people, so I had to sell like 0.5% to everyone at zero markup because I wanted them to have a sweat. I'm just happy that if I freaking run deep in this thing, everybody's gonna be eating from it. So I'm just happy about that too.”
A Canadian love-in at the Main Event
With support from back home and from his wife and son vacationing in Jamaica (Cermeno-Sandoval says they’ll be here if he makes the final table), he’s feeling plenty of encouragement from outside of the Paris ballroom, but inside it, he’s feeling it from his fellow Canadians in the field.
He started Day 6 with a handshake and a hug from tablemate Callum Roque, another Playground regular, and as the players bagged up last night, he was one of the first to congratulate Sharma on his near chip-leading stack.
But as we spoke to Sharma, he wanted to highlight his admiration for Cermeno-Sandoval and what he’s done in the Main Event.
“I’m so proud of him, I’m so happy for him, and I’m his biggest fan. Of course, this is a zero-sum game, and you have to be greedy, but if there’s one person I lose to, I wouldn’t mind losing to this guy.”
