Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan
Tom Dwan who is best known by his Full Tilt Poker alias ‘durrrr’ is considered one of the best high stakes poker players in the world with millions in online and live cash game winnings. The young internet poker sensation was born in 1986 in New Jersey, United States. He first began playing poker with his family at home for fun but eventually found his way to playing online at just 17-years old. He began at Sun Poker and PokerStars grinding up a $50 deposit playing small stake sit-and-goes before switching to cash-games where he had instant success.
He eventually ground through the stakes up to the $10/$20 NLHE games on PokerStars which at that time were the biggest games available online. His PokerStars alias was ‘Holdem_NL’ and no-one knew how he was. This is when his internet poker fame began, he had all the poker sites talking about him and attracted railbirds who watched him play. These stakes weren’t high enough for him however and he searched the internet to find bigger games. This led him to various European poker sites which had $200/$400 heads-up tables. After a few months the games had dried up and Dwan was a big winner here as well. This forced him to search for another poker site to play at, leading him toFull Tilt Poker where he created an account and played as ‘durrrr’.
He immediately jumped in at the deep end taking on the high stakes legends including Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen and many others. Despite this he had great success thanks to his aggressiveness and his opponents never knew if they had him beat or not. He earned millions playing NLHE but would lose substantial amounts play Pot-Limit Omaha which became the new choice of game for the high stake players. Despite this Dwan continued reading poker strategy articles and online forums and brushed up on his PLO skills, eventually becoming a great all-round poker player feared at any game.
So far in his poker career 2009 has been by far the most exciting. He began the year by announcing his famous challenge – the ‘durrrr challenge’. This would see him give opponents 3:1 odds that they couldn’t beat him over 50,000 hands of their game of choice, either NLHE or PLO at $200/$400 stakes. Dwan was offering $1.5 million if his opponents managed to finish even $1 ahead at the end of the 50,000 hands, if Dwan finished ahead then his opponents would have to pay him the side bet of $500,000. Patrik Antonius was the first player to accept and their challenge is still continuing.
Dwan also found himself shortlisted for the 2009 WSOP Hall of Fame but was later dropped because of his young age. Most recently he became a member of Team Full Tilt which was a major honour and now he will represent Full Tilt Poker wherever he goes, including more live poker tournaments.
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