By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · July 14, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
Editor's note: this article was scheduled for publication early Tuesday morning but was delayed until Tuesday evening owing to a sandbox infrastructure outage on the publishing platform. All chip counts, payouts and player-of-the-year figures reflect the confirmed close of Day 8 in the early hours of Tuesday, July 14.
Two Canadians are alive at the WSOP Main Event final table for the first time in seven years. Rami Hammoud, a Playground Poker Club regular from the Kahnawake circuit outside Montreal, closed Day 8 at Horseshoe Las Vegas in the early hours of Tuesday morning with 79,000,000 chips, second among the final nine and comfortably within striking distance of an American, Lucas Jumalon, who runs away with the outright chip lead on 194,000,000. Greg Mueller, the Vancouver-based three-time bracelet winner, is also alive at 48,500,000 chips, in fourth. The remaining nine will return live on ESPN from Monday, August 3 through Wednesday, August 5, playing for the fixed US$10 million top prize and each already guaranteed a payout of at least US$1 million.
It is the first WSOP Main Event final table with two Canadian passport holders since 2019, when Alex Lynskey and Kevin Maahs both made the final nine (finishing seventh and eighth respectively). The prior instance was in 2014, when Christoph Kulmann and Daniel Sindelar's runs closely bracketed a Canadian presence that included Jean Trudel. Two-Canadian final tables are, in the Main Event's fifty-seven-year history, a once-a-decade occurrence.
The Final Nine
| Seat | Player | Country | Chips | Big Blinds* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lucas Jumalon | United States | 194,000,000 | 129 |
| 2 | Rami Hammoud | Canada | 79,000,000 | 53 |
| 3 | Jamie Shaevel | United States | 56,000,000 | 37 |
| 4 | Greg Mueller | Canada | 48,500,000 | 32 |
| 5 | Michael Gagliano | United States | 46,500,000 | 31 |
| 6 | Mario Boos | France | 44,000,000 | 29 |
| 7 | Lauri Saaskilahti | Finland | 37,500,000 | 25 |
| 8 | Han Feng | United States | 25,000,000 | 17 |
| 9 | Evagoras Evagorou | Cyprus | 22,500,000 | 15 |
*Chip totals as at close of Day 8. Big-blind counts assume the final table resumes at 1,000,000/1,500,000/1,500,000 ante, with 56 minutes and 40 seconds remaining in Level 39. Seat assignments will be drawn before the August 3 return.
Jumalon's Runaway Day
Lucas Jumalon is a 22-year-old recent college graduate whose live-tournament resume before this month, per Hendon Mob records, sat around US$60,000. His Day 8 was, in poker terms, structurally decisive: he eliminated multiple opponents including Australian Malcolm Trayner on the final table bubble, and by the end of the night held 35 per cent of all the chips in play. His stack of 194,000,000 represents more than double any of his opponents and more than triple any player other than Mr. Hammoud in second. It is the largest chip-lead margin heading into a Main Event final table since Adam Kaplan's 2018 lead of 197 million (approximately 40 per cent of the field's total chips at the time), which he could not convert to a win.
Mr. Jumalon's Day 8 highlight was the final-table bubble hand. Malcolm Trayner, the Aussie Millions Main Event champion who came into the day as the outright chip leader on 63,200,000, opened for a three-bet on a hand featuring pocket nines. Mr. Jumalon called with ace-jack suited. The board delivered a jack on the flop; Trayner check-called; the turn was another jack. Mr. Trayner check-called an all-in shove of 12,000,000; a nine-blank river gave Mr. Trayner two pair to Mr. Jumalon's trip jacks. Trayner exited in tenth place for US$750,000, the tournament's official final table bubble finisher. His Aussie Millions/WSOP Main Event double bid, one no player has ever completed in the modern era, ended one seat outside the featured broadcast.
Hammoud's Path
Rami Hammoud's route to the second-place chip position over Day 8 is likely to be studied for years by the Canadian poker community. He entered Day 8 as the second-largest stack on 41,500,000 and, in a room littered with well-documented pros, delivered arguably the most technically sound day-long performance of any surviving player. His table draw put him in position of both Shaun Deeb and Hossein Ensan for large stretches. He won a critical set-over-set hand against Blake Barousse to eliminate the 31st-place finisher before Day 8 opened, and closed with roughly 90 big blinds after receiving one of the day's few "run good" hands, an ace-king that held against pocket queens on a seven-high board.
Mr. Hammoud is one of two players at the final table with almost no live-tournament pedigree at this level. His WSOP.com player profile shows lifetime cashes of roughly US$292,000 across 77 tournaments and five previous live final tables, none of which paid more than US$29,150 (a March 2026 Playground WSOP Circuit US$1,000 Mystery Bounty runner-up finish). His run at this year's Main Event has already delivered a guaranteed US$1 million cash. A win would be worth US$10 million, or approximately C$13.6 million at the prevailing exchange rate. A runner-up finish would collect US$6 million, or approximately C$8.16 million. That figure would surpass Jonathan Duhamel's 2010 Main Event victory (US$8.9 million) as the largest single-tournament cash ever collected by a Canadian passport holder if the champion's slot were his. Second place would leave him just short.
Mueller's Legacy Chase
Greg Mueller returns to a Main Event final table for the first time in his career. Mr. Mueller, who lives in Vancouver, holds three previous WSOP bracelets: the 2009 US$2,500 Deuce to Seven Draw Lowball (US$460,841), the 2009 US$10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship (US$625,882) and the 2018 US$10,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship (US$425,347). His live-tournament earnings before this summer stood at approximately US$4.8 million. A fourth WSOP bracelet in the Main Event, on top of his three mixed-game golds, would establish him as one of the most versatile Canadian pros of the past two decades and place him among the sport's rarest career profiles: only Chris Ferguson, Erik Seidel, Nick Schulman and Phil Ivey have won Main Event and multiple mixed-game bracelets in a career.
His 48,500,000 chip position represents 32 big blinds at Level 39's opening, a competitive but not dominant stack. He will need to win one or two crucial hands early in the taped final table to convert to a top-three finish. A tenth-place finish would have collected US$750,000; his current lock is US$1,000,000; and each successive pay jump from ninth upward doubles at approximately the twelfth step.
The Big Names Who Fell Short
Day 8 produced a series of high-profile eliminations. Malcolm Trayner's tenth-place finish, discussed above, was the day's headline exit. Shaun Deeb, the reigning WSOP Player of the Year sixth in chips returning to the day, was eliminated in fifteenth for US$410,475, ending his second-consecutive-POY campaign. Hossein Ensan, the 2019 Main Event champion whose 29,700,000 chip position had marked him as a live modern-era-back-to-back candidate, exited in eighteenth for US$325,000; his shove into a three-bet from a mid-stack player caught pocket queens. Todd Brunson, whose 7,800,000 chips coming into the day had made his run the tournament's most emotionally weighted narrative fifty years after his late father Doyle's 1976 title, exited in twentieth for US$325,000, unable to double up through a re-shove that ran into ace-king.
Tyler Gaston, the Clark County public defender whose 63,200,000 chip position had made him the Day 6 chip leader before slipping to twelfth for US$510,000 on Day 8, is worth mentioning as the day's most complete collapse in chip terms.
Payouts and the August Timetable
| Place | Prize (USD) | Prize (CAD, at 1.36) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $10,000,000 | $13,600,000 |
| 2 | $6,000,000 | $8,160,000 |
| 3 | $3,750,000 | $5,100,000 |
| 4 | $2,750,000 | $3,740,000 |
| 5 | $2,250,000 | $3,060,000 |
| 6 | $1,750,000 | $2,380,000 |
| 7 | $1,500,000 | $2,040,000 |
| 8 | $1,250,000 | $1,700,000 |
| 9 | $1,000,000 | $1,360,000 |
Play resumes on Monday, August 3 at 3 p.m. Pacific / 6 p.m. Eastern in the ESPN broadcast pavilion at Horseshoe Las Vegas. The broadcast is scheduled to run in three sessions across August 3, 4 and 5 (Monday to Wednesday), with a rest day between the day that eliminates the field from nine to three and the day the heads-up crown is decided. ESPN's Prime Time programming has the tournament in its 6-to-10 p.m. Eastern block on all three nights. PokerGO Plus will carry the hole-card feed live with a 30-minute delay. WSOP.com's live app is authoritative for chip counts and elimination confirmations.
The three-week cliffhanger break, first introduced in 2008 as part of a broadcast experiment to allow ESPN time to edit and air narrative-focused pre-final-table content, has been part of the Main Event calendar for eighteen of the past nineteen years. It gives the network time to produce and air the WSOP "November Nine" or, in the current calendar, "August Nine" documentary features that build audience interest ahead of the taped final table.
The Ontario Storyline
For Ontario audiences, the next three weeks will centre on two questions. First, will the province's provincial-market poker rooms and their audiences rally around Mr. Hammoud in particular? Rami Hammoud's Playground circuit background is a Quebec story that translates well to Ontario audiences, given the two provinces' shared French-English tournament culture and Playground's role as the primary Canadian tournament series for tournament players who cannot cross the US border. Second, whether either GGPoker Ontario, PokerStars Ontario or BetMGM Poker respond with a targeted Canadian-focused promotion tied to Mr. Hammoud or Mr. Mueller's run. Both are legitimate marketing angles for the provincial-market operators.
iGaming Ontario, the province's stand-alone Crown agency, permits live-event qualifier promotions and celebrity-endorsement style marketing under the Registrar's Standards for Internet Gaming provided eligibility terms and disclaimers are clearly presented. Provincial-market operators must be careful with any personal endorsement or run-linked marketing to comply with the regulator's requirements. Ontario audiences interested in the qualifier calendar for future WSOP series should watch our Ontario WSOP satellites hub and tournament schedule for the fall calendar.
The Canadian 2026 Summary So Far
By the time the 2026 WSOP series closes in August with the final table result, Canadian passport holders will have collected somewhere in the region of US$16 million in gross earnings across the summer, depending on the Main Event outcome. The 2026 Canadian bracelet tally already stands at four: Kristen Foxen (US$25,000 High Roller, US$1,773,083, June 8); Kristen Foxen (US$1,000 Super Turbo Bounty, June 15); Marc-Andre Alcindor (Big O); Marc-Etienne Normand (PLO Hi-Lo); and Daniel Negreanu (US$100,000 PLO High Roller, US$2,257,718, July 2). Alex Foxen also won a bracelet in the US$10,000 Super Turbo Bounty, but Mr. Foxen holds an American passport; his bracelet, while family-linked to the Canadian narrative through Ms. Foxen, does not enter the Canadian bracelet ledger.
A Hammoud win in August would add US$10 million to the summer's Canadian tally. A Mueller win would add the same US$10 million and secure Mr. Mueller's status as a four-time bracelet winner in a way that would define the Canadian mixed-game legacy for the next decade.
Full coverage of the 20-day pre-final-table cycle continues on this site through July and into early August. Ontario audiences wanting to follow through provincial-market operators can also follow via our top-ranked Ontario rooms; both Canadian finalists have not publicly announced sponsorship or endorsement arrangements at press time.