Thomas Dwan Jr. (born July 30, 1986) is an American professional poker player who played online in the highest-stakes No-Limit Texas hold 'em and Pot-Limit Omaha games, primarily on Full Tilt Poker under the screen name "durrrr". Dwan has won prize money in live poker tournaments and has appeared on NBC's National Heads-Up Poker Championship, the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons of Poker After Dark, the third, fourth, and fifth seasons of Full Tilt Poker's Million Dollar Cash Game, and the fifth, sixth, eighth and ninth seasons of GSN's High Stakes Poker.
Early life
Tom Dwan was born on July 30, 1986, in Edison, New Jersey. In season 5, week 7 of NBC’s Poker After Dark, Dwan revealed that he worked for McDonald's prior to playing poker full time. He attended Boston University before dropping out after the first year to pursue playing poker full-time.
Poker career
Online poker
Dwan began playing online poker with a $50 bankroll. He initially focused on sit-and-go tournaments, later switching to multiplayer cash games then to heads-up cash games.
According to HighStakesDB.com, a site that tracks high-stakes online poker, Dwan earned $312,800 in 2007 on Full Tilt Poker and $5.41 million in 2008. Before the 2007 World Series of Poker, Dwan claimed to have lost, at the time, $2 million of his $3 million bankroll, over a four-month period. He recovered from this loss within a year. In January 2009, Dwan lost more than $3.5 million, which he recovered after six months. However, from late October to late December 2009, Dwan suffered his then-largest downswing, losing approximately $2 million to Phil Ivey, Ilari "Ziigmund" Sahamies and $5 million to then-19-years-old Swedish professional Viktor Blom aka Isildur1.
In mid-November 2009, Blom challenged Dwan to a series of heads-up No Limit Hold'em cash games. Blom's foray into online high-stakes cash games began in late October 2009, when he initially lost $1.1 million to Patrik Antonius, Brian Townsend, and other high-stakes players. By the beginning of November, Blom had recovered his losses; he then challenged Dwan to a heads-up marathon that would take place simultaneously on six tables at a time with over a million dollars in play. By the end of the first week of play, Blom had gone on ostensibly the largest run in the history of online poker, winning approximately $5 million from Dwan, prompting Dwan to issue a live challenge to Blom at the Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge.
At the end of 2009, HighStakesDB.com reported that Dwan had lost $4.35 million in 2009, which lowered his cumulative online poker winnings at Full Tilt since January 2007 at approximately $1.4 million. HighStakesDB.com also reported that after stepping down in limits following his loss to Blom/Isildur1, Dwan won $2.7 million in December 2009. According to the same site, Dwan had more than recouped his 2009 losses in the first few months of 2010; he was reported to have won $1.6 million in the first two weeks of April 2010, and after a session in which he won $1.6 million from Sahamies in a little over two hours, was ahead $7.3 million for the year as of April 21. However, Dwan lost about $4 million in the next three weeks, leaving him ahead about $3.3 million for 2010.
Million dollar challenge
In January 2009, Dwan issued a $1,000,000 challenge to play anyone online, "with the exception of Phil Galfond", heads up for 50,000 hands four-tabling at $200/$400 limits or higher No-Limit hold 'em or Pot-Limit Omaha. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, Dwan agreed to give them $1,500,000 more, while if Dwan is ahead, he will get $500,000. Regarding his challengers, Dwan has said, "I think all of them actually are better over-all poker players than me -- by quite a bit; I happen to think in this one area, I might have a little edge -- and we'll see if I do."
Patrik Antonius and Daniel Cates were playing Dwan as part of the challenge, but neither challenge was completed. In October 2013, Cates was ahead about $1.2 million after roughly 20,000 hands. Since then, however, Cates has publicly claimed that Dwan has stopped playing and is not responding to his queries. In August 2017, Cates stated that Dwan had paid him approximately $800,000 in penalties for not playing, that Dwan was committed to finishing the game, and they expected it to be completed by the end of 2018.