Depending on who you talk to, the results of the legendary cash games that just took place in Macau are at both ends of the scale. And the main name coming out of Macau is not Phil Ivey or John Juanda, both of whom have been playing in this big game, it is Tom “Durrr” Dwan. Born on July 30^th, 1986 in Edison, New Jersey, the 24 year old Dwan is either up $9 million or down $2 million. That is an $11 million spread of possibilities that are in the range of unbelievable. As the story goes with so many of these young online Poker phenome’s, Dwan dropped out of Boston University, where he was studying engineering to pursue Poker full time. He says that he started, at the innocent age of 17, with $50 that his father had given him as a birthday present. Playing $6 sit and go’s and initially losing over half of his stake, he eventually built it up to where he was playing in the largest cash games on the Internet. One of the companies on the Internet that tracks players online results has reported that even after posting a $4.35 million loss in 2009, Dwan’s cumulative poker winnings at the end of 2009 were about $1.4 million. That is a long way from the $50 birthday present. After Dwan posted a massive loss to online Poker Star “Isildur1”, he is reported to have won $2.7 million online in December 2009. And 2010 has been a big year for Dwan having posted online winnings of almost $3.3 million in the first quarter. And this is after ending the quarter on a bad streak losing about $4 million.

These numbers seem amazing for anyone and when you put it into perspective and realize this is a 24 year old that we are talking about, the story is even more like a fairy tale. Dwan became a member of Full Tilt’s Pro Team and he is not only a regular at their nosebleed tables but he issued the “Durrr” challenge in January 2009 offering $1 million against $500,000 for a fifty thousand hand match with anyone “except Phil Galfond”. Two of these matches are still underway but none of them have been completed yet. He is way ahead against Patrik Antonius and behind, in the early stages, against Daniel Cates. Recently Cates complained that Dwan had not been available recently to continue their match. He intimated that Dwan was absent because he was losing. Now with the reports coming out of Macau it seems like we have found out the reason for Dwan’s absence from the online match recently.

Large cash games notoriously develop around major poker tournaments. Over the years some of the pro’s have skipped the tournaments in lieu of the action in these big side games. In Macau, which is the site of the Asian Poker Tour Macau, a game to top them all has been running that has caught a lot of attention. This past week they have been playing No Limit Hold Em with blinds of $6,500/$13,000. Dwan is reported, by some, to be down as much as $2 million and according to others is up over $9 million.