Ricky Landais is deep in the $10K High Roller at the WSOP and gets all-in for his tournament life with a dominating AK against A9. When the flop comes out, there are four cards, and one of them is a king.
The flop is reshuffled, one of the four cards is picked as the burn card, and unfortunately for Landais, it was that king. The board runs out and he ends up getting knocked out of the tournament.
Is it super discouraging to see a card that would have helped you win the pot and have it taken away? Of course it is. And I feel for Ricky in that situation.
Whenever something like this happens, I get 20 messages from people saying, ‘Can you believe this?’ And I've been thinking about it a lot for the past week.
Let’s break it down.
We cannot be results oriented
Is this the worst bad beat in WSOP history?
In a word, no, it's not.
Here's the thing. As operators, we cannot be results-oriented when it comes to making rulings and procedures.
When a poker player gets it all-in with aces against seven-deuce and two deuces come on the board, a solid poker player will say to themselves, 'I did everything I could to make sure I got the right result. And in this case, unfortunately, I didn't.'
As operators, we do the exact same thing.
What we're looking for above all is fairness, randomness, and consistency when it comes to operations and procedures. And in this particular case, that's exactly what happened.
Of course, it feels way worse when you see that there could have been a king on the flop. But we have to work backwards. If you are going to do a final table production, you have a procedure: shuffle, shuffle, box, shuffle, burn, flop, burn, turn, burn, river.
But, since we are confined by the necessity to hire human beings, mistakes will occasionally happen throughout that process.
Usually, it's not a dealer who burns and goes one, two, three, four. Almost every time it is the result of two cards sticking together. In this case, that seems likely what happened.
The TDA has a rule for when this happens
So, what do you do?
You come up with a way to fix the mistake when it happens. And what are you trying to do? Ensure randomness, fairness, and consistency.
We came up with a rule as the Tournament Directors Association 14 years ago for what happens when there's a four-card flop.
Why did we do that? Because it happens a lot.
The exact rule is this: If there are four cards on the flop, exposed or not, regardless of whether the door card is presumed known, the floor will be called. The dealer scrambles the four cards, the floor randomly selects one as the burn card, and the remaining three are the flop.
That is the rule. If you don't like the rule, that's something you could propose to the TDA to change.
If you don't like the result, it's the same thing that happens when a player loses a hand. It's not always about the results. It's about the procedure, the consistency, and the randomness of the cards. And in that regard, everything went exactly according to procedure in this hand.
I feel really bad for Ricky. I really do.
But in my opinion, everything went exactly the way it was supposed to under the circumstances.
Justin Hammer is the Live Events Director for PokerAtlas, an online tournament director for the Texas-based poker app Hijack, and a tournament director at Thunder Valley Casino Resort. He also works as a consultant and is a minority owner of Desert Bluffs Casino in Kennewick, Washington.
For more info visit PokerAtlas.com, HijackPoker.com, and bluffs.poker. Follow Justin on X.
