It’s the most talked-about hand of the 2026 WSOP so far, and it saw Ricky Landais eliminated from the $10K GGMillion$ in 22nd place for $41,942.
Patrick Leonard called it one of the sickest spots he'd ever seen on X, adding, “20 left with $1M for first. Brutal for the guy.”
You can watch it play out below.
Landais was all-in with 
and was up against Bobby James with 
, when the dealer mistakenly put four cards down on the flop.
Under WSOP rules, the 
flop was scrambled and one card was randomly selected as the next burn card.
The – which would have given Landais top pair – was selected, and the board ran out 
, giving James a nine-high straight and the pot.
Landais took the beat with class and left without an argument.
We caught up with him a couple of days later to see how he was processing the bizarre elimination.
'What if?'
“I felt it internally,” he tells us. “But at the start of the hand, I remember just saying to myself, ‘No matter what happens, I have to stay calm because of the cameras’. I didn’t want a reaction on camera, so I just kept telling myself: ‘Be cool, be cool, be cool’.”
Landais knows the ruling was correct. It actually happened again on Saturday to Faraz Jaka in a $25K WSOP event. Jaka recorded the hand and the ruling was applied correctly again.
But it’s still easy to feel for Landais in the biggest tournament of his life. $10K buy-ins aren’t the norm for him.
“It’s life-changing money, you know?” he says. Landais had just doubled from four to eight big blinds. The next double would give him a playable stack again. “To go from four bigs to 16 bigs is massive,” he says.
What did he do immediately after the hand?
“Oh, man, I went straight to my room and called my mom,” he says. “She hadn't seen it, and I hadn't seen the video, but I knew it was bad.”
Now that he's had time to process it — and watch the stream several times — he says it's "a lot to take in."
“I keep thinking, ‘What if?’” he says. “Like, what if I would have gotten the 16 big blinds? Now what? 22 players left. That’s the biggest thing on my mind.”
No blame for the dealer
There’s no history of operators compensating players for a dealer mistake. It would be a dangerous precedent to set. But Landais thinks this is an edge case that deserves to be treated differently.
“It'd be different if I was consistently on the high roller scene,” he says. “This was me taking a shot. And you want people taking more shots. I think it could have been avoided.”
Landais decided to take his shot after a hot run at the WSOP Circuit in Panama, where he won an incredible three rings. He’d been living in the Dominican Republic and Panama was only an 80-minute flight away.
He won the first in PLO, which he says isn’t his strongest game, and he wanted to get a no-limit one to go with it. He ended up with two.
Despite everything, Landais says he'll be back.
“It’s all unfortunate,” he says. “I’ve dumped a lot of money at WSOP events. I’m not a high-roller but I’m a dedicated poker player and I believe I belong in the high rollers. Regardless of that incident and how it ended, I'm coming.”
Landais had one more message he wanted to get across.
“I want to make it very clear that I have no issue with the dealer. She’s human. We make mistakes. And I think she's a fine dealer. I actually rated her 5 stars prior to that hand.”
Additional image courtesy of the WSOP.
