With the PartyPoker World Open VI in full swing in London, video cameras were not just trained on the tables. As the single-table heat format provides plenty of downtime for those waiting to play and those busting out early, there are ample opportunities to interview the competitors. On Monday, PartyPoker’s cameras caught up with Tom “durrrr” Dwan.
Most of the first half of Tatjana Pasalic‘s six-minute interview focused on Dwan’s Durrrr Challenge. Truthfully, nothing came out of it that most poker fans did not already know, with much of it simply being a recap of the challenge and the results to date. Dwan was proud to let the camera know that he is currently up $2 million on fellow Team Full Tilt member Patrik Antonius after almost 40,000 of the 50,000 required hands. He does know, however, that one can’t be completely results-oriented when judging the quality of a poker player. About Antonius, Dwan told Pasalic, “He’s still a very good player and Omaha is a high-variance game, so he’s got a chance to come back, but I’m definitely a pretty solid favorite at this point.”
Should Dwan finish with a profit against Antonius after 50,000 hands, he will win an additional $500,000 from the Finland native. If he gets insanely cold-decked and somehow finishes in the red, he will have to fork over $1.5 million to his opponent.
Dwan recently started a second round of the Challenge against young online poker phenom Dan “JungleMan12” Cates. That one is going very poorly so far for Dwan, as he is down almost $700,000 after just 6,820 hands. Of course, there is a long, long way to go, so anything can happen. In the interview, Pasalic asked Dwan if now, after having played Cates a bit in the Challenge, he feels he will be able to think about how Cates has played and adopt the appropriate strategy to beat him. Dwan made the point that he was already familiar with Cates: “I’ve played some number in the tens of thousands of hands – I think around ten or fifteen thousand hands – versus him before we ever played the challenge, so I had a pretty good idea of how he played.”
As for when the Challenge with Cates will crank back up, Dwan was not quite sure. He said that he wants to try to get some hands in before the World Series of Poker Europe starts on September 14th, but there is only a small window before that and after the World Open, so it all depends on whether his schedule can line up with Cates’.
