Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan

Tom Dwan is one of the most popular poker players in the world and is best known by his Full Tilt Poker alias ‘durrrr’, under which he has won and lost millions. In this article we take a look at how the young poker pro shot to fame by blasting his way through the online poker cash games.

He first began playing poker with his family for fun but as he got older he became fascinated with internet poker and wanted to try it. He began with only $50 when he was 17-years old and has managed to build that into a bankroll worth millions, able to play in the biggest cash games available. He began with $6 sit-and-goes and almost blew all of his money when he found himself with only $14 left in his account. He quickly improved however and switched to NLHE cash games because he understood he could win much more money, and that is exactly what he did.

He began grinding in the low stake games and would read poker forums to learn from the more experienced players. Dwan continued to move up in stakes and was crushing the games at every stakes he played, and he eventually built his bankroll large enough to play the $10/$20 NLHE games on PokerStars which were the largest available at that time. His PokerStars alias was (and still is) ‘Holdem_NL’ and it was at this point in his career that he gained lots of exposure in the poker community with everyone wondering who this mystery player was that was playing against, and beating the best players on the site.

These stakes just weren’t high enough for Dwan however and he went in search of larger games, which led him to the European poker sites which had $200/$400 NLHE heads-up tables. Again, he was a big winner in these games and he actually found that no-one would play against him which left him with no action. Luckily for Dwan Full Tilt Poker began hosting the largest games available online and he created an account with the alias ‘durrrr’ in the hope of tilting players at losing to him. Immediately he made an impact and had the poker forums buzzing, and attracted lots of railbirds to watch his games because he was regularly beating the best poker players in the world such as Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen and Phil ‘OMGClayAiken’ Galfond who created poker training site Bluefire Poker.

2009 has been quite a rollercoaster ride for Dwan. First he began the year by making his ‘durrrr challenge’. This was a challenge to anyone to play against him at 4 tables at either $200/$400 NLHE or PLO and he would give them 3:1 odds. If he was $1 ahead of his opponent after 50,000 hands then they would have to pay him $500k, but if he lost he would pay his opponent $1.5 million! Finnish high-stakes pro Patrik Antonius was the first player to accept the challenge which is currently only half-way completed due to conflicting schedules and juicy online cash games. He also made a live version of his durrrr challenge, which saw him play against 3 opponents over three days with the matches being a $500k buy-in and his opponents had the choice of either NLHE or PLO. He began with a $22.5k loss at the hands of Marcello ‘luckexpress’ Marigliano. Then he crushed both Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies and Sammy ‘Any Two’ George for a combined $818k.

Tom Dwan was also shortlisted for the 2009 WSOP Hall of Fame but later dropped because of his young age. There is no doubt the new Team Full Tilt member will be inducted in the future, his achievements in online poker are exceptional and he continues to be a regular face on poker television shows.

No related posts.

Tags: durrrr, Poker Pro, Tom Durrrr dwan, Tom Dwan

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 9:18 am and is filed under Poker Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.