Tom Dwan

Tom “durrrr” Dwan is one of the most talented young poker players of today and has gone from high school senior to self-made millionaire in just a few short years. Dwan was born and raised in Edison, New Jersey. He first discovered online poker with his friends and regularly played play money sit-n-go games on Empire Poker. He found that he had an uncanny ability to read his opponents. At 17 years of age, Dwan decided to make his first deposit for real money games hoping that it would help pay for his college tuition.

He began with a $50 deposit at Paradise Poker and set out on a mission to build his bankroll, starting with $6 SNGs and quickly moving up in limits. At that point he started playing no-limit hold’em cash games beginning at $1-$2 NL and sometimes taking on the $2-$5 games. He became victorious with those limits and made the decision to take his game to the next level.

He took his bankroll over to PokerStars and began multi-tabling $2-$4 and $3-$6 no-limit hold’em games turning his $50 deposit into $15,000 by the time he turned 18. He took his money and enrolled at Boston University studying engineering. He continued to move up in stakes and eventually realized he didn’t need college- he could make a living playing poker. After his bankroll had grown into the hundreds of thousands, he dropped school and took on poker as his career.

He bought a house in Texas and moved in with his friend and online poker player, David “Raptor” Benefield. They turned the house into a poker player’s chill pad complete with two big-screen TVs, a huge sectional sofa, and a multi-tabling computer set up for each of them. He quickly settled into his new life and within only two years, was playing against poker’s best players including Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and David Benyamine in $200-$400 no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha games at Full Tilt Poker.

Once he became of age to compete in live tournaments, he took them on as well. In 2005, he cashed in the EPT London in 12^th place. Once he turned 21, he took on the US tournaments head on, winning nearly a million dollars in live tournament winnings before a year had gone by. At the 2007 WPT World Poker Finals at Foxwoods, he made the final table and finished in fourth place taking home almost $325,000 during the televised event. No more than two months went by and Dwan finished in second place at the 2008 Aussie Millions $3,000 pot-limit Omaha event as well as cashing in on the main event.   He earned over $112,000 between the two events. A couple of weeks later he was seen in Atlantic City, where ha almost won his first live tournament at the Borgata Winter Open coming in second place.

When the 2008 World Series of Poker rolled around, Dwan was finally old enough to compete in his first WSOP event. He took home two eighth place finishes for his first WSOP tournament events. In addition to his successful live tournament games, Dwan has been involved in some of the most epic hands recorded in the history of television. In March of 2009, Dwan took down a pot of mass proportion from Barry Greenstein totaling $919,600. This was the largest pot ever played on High Stakes Poker television at the time. He went on to rake the biggest pot in TV history in September of 2009, taking down a massive pot of almost 1.2 million dollars. The hand was played in Full Tilt Poker’s Million Dollar Cash Game in London against poker pro Phil Ivey.

In 2009 Dwan issued a $1 million heads-up challenge which was accepted by Patrik Antonius. The “durrrr” Challenge as it is called, challenges anyone who is willing to 50,000 hands of heads-up poker play. If the challenger wins, they will receive $1.5 million and if Dwan wins, he will get $500,000. As of October 2009, Dwan and Antonius have played about half of the 50,000 hands with durrrr leading by about a quarter of a million dollars.

Wiki- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dwan

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