Tom "durrrr" Dwan puts out a heads-up challenge

Hello fellow poker fans, Jason Lindgren here with the first of hopefully many news articles for Poker Shuffle! I’ve decided to start with news regarding  Tom Dwan aka “durrrr” online, a young and unpredictable professional poker player who has won and lost several fortunes in his career. So lets begin with Tom Dwan’s “durrrr” heads-up challenge.

So whats the “durrrr” challenge all about? Well Tom Dwan  issued a challenge to the international poker world in January 2009 (anyone with the cash can accept the challenge). He will put up $1.5 million dollars to any opponent’s $500,000, guaranteeing challengers 3 to 1 odds.

The way it works is, the opponent plays “durrrr” in heads-up at 4 tables all at once, 50,000 hands. After the last hand has been played, the player who is up, even by one dollar, wins the challenge. So if  “durrrr” wins, he keeps any money he won during the challenge and the opponents $500,000. However if the opponent wins they keep their winnings and the $1.5 million that “durrrr” put up.

There are a few rules that “durrrr” has laid out:

• The game type must be No-Limit Hold ‘em or Pot-Limit Omaha
• The stakes must be a minimum of $200/$400
• Once the stakes have been decided upon, they must stay the same for the entire challenge
• Players must reload if their stack falls below 75 big blinds at any time be it No-Limit Hold ‘em or Pot-Limit Omaha

Patrik Antonius steps up to the challenge

Professional poker star Patrick Antonius has been the first in line to try win the $1.5 million dollars in the “durrrr Challenge”. Other big name players including Phil Ivey and David Benyamine have expressed interest in accepting the challenge.

After a year, have these two high-stakes experts played through all 50,000 hands?  They are yet to reach their  goal, so far 32,874 hands have been played of the 50,000

The problem here is that there is no set time for playing the challenge, only playing when they are both available and willing. For instance Patrik is not online or readily avalible when Tom is, or vice versa. So they struggle to get Challenge time.

However, often you will see Patrik Antonius online as well as Tom Dwan and they are not playing in the “durrrr Challenge”. The reason behind this is, the challenge is set to either “No-Limit Hold ‘em” or “Pot-Limit Omaha”, and as both players are professional Stud H/L, Razz, Stud Hi and other variants of poker they prefer to be playing other games, instead of only the one form.

The stats so far? Well after 52 sessions “durrrr” is up by just over 1.4 million dollars so it is clear Patrik has a lot of catching up to do with less than 20,000 hands left to play.

In the last session they played a total of 79 hands, which is not very much at all. With “durrrr” only going up another $22,000. I will be following the “durrrr Challenge” closely to see what unfolds, but with Tom’s lead it is not looking very good for Patrik, but this is poker, anything can happen in 20,000 hands!

Patrik in the "durrrr challenge"