Like Samuel L. Jackson famously said in the movie “Jurassic Park,” “Hold onto your butts.” The second installment of the Tom Dwan Million Dollar Challenge kicked off on Thursday night featuring the New Jersey youngster battling CardRunners instructor Dan “JungleMan12” Cates. Dwan ended the first 1,651-hand session up about $130,000, but has seemingly taken a nosedive since. In fact, posts of chat logs with JungleMan12 on TwoPlusTwo indicate that Cates is up $518,000 after 5,800 hands. To say that the online poker community was following the action closely would be a severe understatement.
The pair is playing 50,000 hands of $200/$400 No Limit Hold’em. If Cates is up at the end of the challenge by $1 or more, Dwan will fork over $1.5 million. Contrastingly, if Dwan is up $1 or more at the conclusion of 50,000 hands, Cates will owe $500,000, as Dwan gave 3:1 on his money. In either case, the victor keeps any profits made at the tables over the course of the Durrrr Challenge.
In a blog post on Thursday, Dwan detailed several facets of the new Durrrr Challenge: “need to add on if below 75bb can get up anytime effective stacks are >250bb… run it twice whole challenge.” The ability to run it twice somewhat quells the variance associated with poker; however, many in the online poker community have questioned whether that’s necessary over the course of 50,000 hands.
According to PokerTableRatings.com, in a session that began at 4:12am CT on Friday morning and stretched for seven hours, Cates turned in a $756,000 profit at the $200/$400 No Limit Hold’em Heads-Up tables. In a two-and-a-half hour session prior to that, Cates was down $82,000. If all of these scores are accurate and for the Durrrr Challenge only, then that would indicate Cates is up over $650,000 in the early going. Between the two sessions, a total of 5,500 hands were played, or nearly 10% of the challenge.
After 1,651 hands, Dwan posted on Twitter, “On prolly a more interesting note to most of my followers- just finished 1st session w/ jungleman. +$129,888.50 after 1,651 hands.” That post was submitted around 2:00am CT, but Dwan has given no update since. Meanwhile, Full Tilt Poker’s Durrrr Challenge tracking page continues to display the first cycle of the challenge that pitted Dwan against Patrik Antonius. That challenge is about 10,000 hands short of completion.
Over on the TwoPlusTwo forums, poker fans have been drooling over the new incarnation of the Durrrr Challenge. At the time of writing, over 800 posts have been submitted in a thread on TwoPlusTwo’s News, Views, and Gossip forum along with a bevy of hands. In one of the more recent ones, Cates raked in a $192,000 pot holding pocket aces on a board of 8-J-6-9-4. The hand saw Dwan call Cates’ open-shove on the river and then promptly muck.
One poster on the popular online poker forum PocketFives.com put the high-stakes Dwan/Cates encounter into perspective: “Watching these two play four tables at once at these stakes makes me realize how pathetic I am at poker and how I also need to put more effort into the game if I ever want to achieve anything worth mentioning.”
Also according to PokerTableRatings.com, Dwan has dropped $1.4 million lifetime to Cates, about seven times as much as Phil Ivey.
Stay tuned to DurrrrChallenge.com for the latest news from the virtual felts.
