The Durrrr Challenge: The Complete History, 2009 to 2025

In January 2009 Tom “durrrr” Dwan told the poker world he would play anyone except Phil Galfond heads-up for 50,000 hands, four tables at a time, at $200/$400 or higher. He put up $1.5 million against their $500,000. Two players accepted, and neither match reached the finish.

The second leg of the Durrrr Challenge took until June 2025 to settle. The two legs ran to 58,771 hands between them, more than the challenge asked for, split between opponents heading opposite ways.

Dwan was $2,059,719 ahead of Patrik Antonius when that leg went quiet in August 2010. He was $1,251,059 behind Daniel “Jungleman” Cates at Full Tilt Poker's last count in April 2011.

The challenge is the ancestor of every public heads-up match played since, and its record is scattered across a decade of posts, most of them no longer indexed. This page puts the whole thing in one place, session by session, with the working shown.

It starts with the player who made the offer and the reason he gave for making it.

What the Durrrr Challenge Was

The Durrrr Challenge was an open heads-up bet issued by Tom Dwan in January 2009: 50,000 hands of no-limit hold'em or pot-limit Omaha, four tables at once, at $200/$400 or higher on Full Tilt Poker. Dwan risked $1.5 million against $500,000. Whoever was ahead after rake collected.

Dwan's reason, by his own account at the time, was that he could not get action at the top of the game. The offer went up on Two Plus Two and was repeated in a January 2009 interview for the February cover of Bluff.

Why Phil Galfond Was the Exception

Dwan named one player he would not take the bet against. Galfond was a close friend and, at the time, the man most people would have picked to beat Dwan at four tables of pot-limit Omaha.

The exclusion became a running joke, and then something more than that. A decade later the one player Dwan would not face built his own challenge series on the same template.

Who Accepted

Antonius, Phil Ivey and David Benyamine all said yes within weeks of the offer, and Full Tilt built eight dedicated “durrrr Challenge” tables to host the matches. Only Antonius ever played a hand.

Ivey, who accepted but never played a hand, would surface later in a different role, as the proposed escrow holder for the second leg.

Leg One: Dwan vs Patrik Antonius, February to October 2009

The first leg was four-table $200/$400 pot-limit Omaha, Antonius's choice, and over 18 months it produced more than 39,000 hands. The Finn who accepted first was then widely regarded as the best Omaha player online, and for the first 15,000 hands the result backed that up.

The Opening Session

Play began on 18 February 2009 with a 1,541-hand session that Dwan won for $134,911. The second session was postponed the next morning. The regular nosebleed games had started, and both men preferred them to each other.

The shortest session of the whole challenge came three days later: 92 hands in 15 minutes on 21 February. By 1 March, after a 226-hand sitting, they had played 4,178 hands and Dwan led by roughly $140,000. Roughly eight per cent of the challenge was done in its first fortnight.

The First 13,000 Hands

The lead changed hands repeatedly through March and April without either player getting more than $172,000 clear. Dwan was back in front by $67,000 after the tenth session in late March. An eight-hour, 2,043-hand session in early April swung it back, leaving Antonius $80,707 ahead.

Then Antonius pulled away. He led by $159,727 after 12,956 hands in late April, the largest lead either man had held, and by $391,704 after 13,556 hands in May. A 215-hand session in mid-June left him $411,192 up after 15,332 hands.

19 June 2009

The longest session of the challenge was also its wildest: 15 hours and 4,523 hands on 19 June 2009. Dwan was $1.2 million ahead at one point, and he closed the night $726,000 up overall. The swing inside those hands was later put at $1.5 million.

The largest pot of the entire challenge was dealt that night, $477,555, and it went to Antonius: queens full of sixes against Dwan's sixes full of nines. It was not enough. Antonius had gone from $411,000 ahead to $726,000 behind in one sitting.

Antonius's August

Two months passed without a hand. When they sat down again on 24 August 2009 Antonius won $392,000, and across that session and the next he took more than $800,000 back. By September his lead was $34,153 after a $26,431 Dwan win trimmed it.

The Halfway Point

On 1 October 2009 Dwan won $274,740 in 400 hands to retake the lead at $235,453. Six days later, hand 25,000 was dealt: 231 days and 38 sessions after the first one. Dwan took $418,440 that night and led by $697,532 after 25,145 hands.

The halfway statistics said something the headline figures did not. Dwan had won 13,591 of the 25,145 hands, comfortably more than half, but Antonius's average winning pot was larger at $3,009 to $2,590.

Dwan had taken eight of the ten biggest pots. April had seen six sessions and July none.

The table lists every 2009 session for which a contemporaneous report gave hands or a result. Full Tilt never published a hand-by-hand log, and the leg had 38 sessions by its halfway point alone, so sessions without a public breakdown are left blank rather than estimated.

Leg One, Part Two: From Isildur1 to the Final Tally

The second half of the Antonius leg was shaped by something that happened away from the challenge tables. A week in November 2009 changed Dwan's bankroll, his priorities and the pace of the match.

Isildur1 Interrupts

In November 2009 an anonymous Swedish account called Isildur1 sat down against Dwan across six tables and won roughly $5 million inside a week. The anonymous Swede who beat Dwan for millions was later identified as Viktor Blom. The challenge idled while Dwan rebuilt, and resumed in December.

Dwan Takes Control

From December the match became a grind in one direction. Dwan led by $711,556 after 27,773 hands, then $937,271 after 29,764 following a session in which he led by $125,000, trailed by $225,000 and finished $225,715 up.

In January 2010 he passed a million at $1,077,932 after 31,912 hands, having won seven of the last eight sessions.

March 2010 produced the strangest session on record. Nine minutes, 61 hands, and $230,710 to Dwan. His lead stood at $1,986,418 after 33,303 hands with 16,697 still to play.

The Last Sessions

A 92-day gap followed. In August 2010 they played 280 hands, Antonius won $244,599, and Dwan still led by roughly $1.6 million after 39,254 hands. The final recorded tally was Dwan ahead by $2,059,719 after 39,436 hands, with the remaining 10,564 never dealt.

Gaps between rows are unreported play. The jump from 33,303 to 39,254 hands covers sessions between March and August 2010 that no report broke down, during which Antonius clawed back a six-figure sum before the final 182 hands swung the margin back past $2 million.

Antonius's Own Account

Antonius gave his explanation in September 2022 on the Brandon Adams Podcast. He said he had been cocky and arrogant going in, and that his one mistake was not practising four-tabling before the match started. He had never played four heads-up tables at once against anyone, let alone Dwan.

How the leg formally ended has never been set out by either player. Two trade reports and Doug Polk have said Antonius bought out of the remaining hands, and no terms have ever been published. This page carries that as reported, not as fact.

Leg Two: Dwan vs Daniel Cates, August 2010 to April 2011

The second leg was four-table $200/$400 no-limit hold'em, and it started while the first was technically open. The 20-year-old who took the second leg was a University of Maryland economics student who had spent 2010 becoming the biggest winner in online poker.

Who Jungleman Was

By one contemporary account Cates had just taken $800,000 off Dwan in regular cash games when Dwan mentioned he was looking for his next challenger. Dwan announced the start on Twitter around midnight and pointed readers to his blog for the rules, which added four things to the 2009 terms.

Opening Night

The cards went in the air at 12:35am. Nearly 12 hours later Cates logged off with a profit of $518,191 over 5,829 hands. The first two and a half hours had gone to Dwan, who was $129,888 up after 1,651 hands; the final hour swung $370,000 the other way.

More than 11 per cent of the challenge was played in that single night. It had taken Antonius and Dwan six sessions across a month to reach the same count. One outlet logged the night at 5,862 hands rather than 5,829, a difference noted in the methodology below.

25 Big Blinds Per Hundred

Session two came the following Monday: 958 hands, Cates winning $172,954 to extend his lead to $692,400 after 6,820 hands. He was winning at more than 25 big blinds per hundred hands, a rate nobody sustains. The betting line flipped.

Dwan Claws Back

The autumn sessions went Cates's way at a slower pace, and he was $755,000 ahead after 10,129 hands in December 2010 following a 346-hand sitting worth $110,000. Then Dwan started to recover. He won $18,000 across 1,407 hands to cut the lead to $555,000 at roughly 12,500 hands.

The fourteenth session, 1,214 hands, went to Dwan for $63,362 and left Cates $500,783.50 ahead after 14,190 hands. Total time at the tables across those 14 sessions: one day and 17 minutes.

The shape of the match was in the per-hand numbers.

Dwan was winning the pots that mattered and losing the ones that added up, and over 14,190 hands Cates had won around 3,000 more of them.

4 January 2011

The first session of 2011 was the longest in weeks: 2,918 hands, and Cates won $319,103.50 to go $819,213.50 up after 17,108 hands. The biggest pot of the leg to that point, $216,505.50, was played that night.

The December pattern held. Dwan's winning hands were bigger, Cates's were more frequent, and the lead kept moving one way.

The Last Count

A six-week gap followed. Between mid-February and 3 April 2011 another 2,227 hands were played in short sessions. Full Tilt's challenge page, archived on 3 April, showed 19,335 hands with Cates ahead by $1,251,059, the figure every later summary carried forward.

Black Friday, 15 April 2011

On 15 April 2011 the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment against the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. Five domains were seized and more than 75 bank accounts frozen.

The Department of Justice release charged 11 defendants with bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling offences. Full Tilt locked its US players out the same day.

Cates posted that he and Dwan had decided to wait until they knew the fate of Full Tilt before deciding anything. By September the answer was in. The DOJ's amended complaint described Full Tilt as a global Ponzi scheme that owed players roughly $390 million while holding $60 million.

The room holding the escrow and running the only four-table $200/$400 heads-up games with both men's money in them was gone. For the American player base the consequences ran far wider than one match, and what became of the US player base is a story of its own.

One detail most summaries flatten: the second leg was not stopped mid-sprint. After the 4 January 2011 session there was a six-week gap, then 2,227 hands in short sittings through 3 April. Black Friday closed the venue on a match that had already slowed to a crawl.

Full Tilt relaunched under PokerStars ownership in November 2012, outside the US. That is the only reason the next chapter exists at all.

2013: The Restart That Wasn't

In March 2013 Cates asked Dwan on Twitter whether he would like to continue their challenge instead of playing everybody else at every game on Full Tilt. Dwan replied, Cates countered, and within a month they were back at the tables.

The April 2013 session lasted less than an hour. The two could not agree on how many hands they had already played, and the figures stayed vague. Dwan's own estimate in the table chat was that he had won $158.

The New Agreement

In July 2013 Cates posted on Two Plus Two that terms had been agreed: at least 4,000 hands in August, then 8,000 hands every two months until complete, with penalties if the schedule slipped. At that pace the challenge would have finished by March 2014. The schedule was never kept.

The Session That Changed the Deal

One long session did happen, in October 2013: 1,485 hands over more than three hours, and Cates won $197,600 to push the count past 20,000 hands with a reported lead of nearly $1.5 million. At the Battle of Malta that autumn he said the deal had changed.

We've come to a new agreement. With the deal we have now, I'll make money either way.

Daniel Cates, at the Battle of Malta in 2013. The terms of the new agreement were never published. They are the terms that would matter for the next 12 years.

Dwan Leaves Full Tilt

Later in 2013 Full Tilt and Dwan parted ways, ending his sponsorship. Cates told the press that Dwan was not responding to him and that he was out of options. Roughly 2,500 challenge hands were reported played in 2013, and none in 2014 once Full Tilt withdrew its high-stakes games.

The Penalty Clause

The 2013 agreement included an inactivity clause, and it is the clause that turned a stalled match into a 12-year financial relationship. What it said has only ever been reported second-hand. The figures below are carried as reported, with the year and the speaker shown for each.

In August 2017 Cates gave the fullest account of how the clause had worked in practice. He said Dwan had been paying every two months, and that Dwan wanted it known how much had already been handed over.

He's been paying me penalties every two months lately. He wants me to point out he's given me something like $700,000 or $800,000 basically in penalties since 2010.

Daniel Cates, August 2017. On 31 December 2018, after Dwan joked about the rivalry at a Triton cash game, Cates called him out on Twitter and in the same thread confirmed that roughly $700,000 had been paid in 2017.

The arithmetic that follows from Cates's own figures is the point. By 2017 the penalties had reached roughly half the side bet without a single further hand being dealt. The clause had become the match.

Accusations, 2014 to 2018

“Is It Time to Call Tom Dwan a Scammer?”

That was the title of a Two Plus Two thread in October 2014, and the answer most posters gave was yes. Dan Colman posted that Dwan was scamming Jungleman and was therefore a scammer. Others speculated that Dwan was bust, or hiding in the Macau games, or both.

The position they were arguing over was simple. Dwan was roughly $1.25 million down in play, owed the full side bet if the match ever finished behind, and had stopped answering Cates's messages. None of that was disputed by Dwan, who said nothing.

The Macau Years

Dwan spent most of this period in the Macau private games. In July 2015 Cates posted that their disputes had been essentially resolved and the challenge would be played out within nine months.

Cates added that Dwan had been distracted by the arrests of Macau game host Paul Phua and Richard Yong in Las Vegas. A new site would be needed, since Full Tilt no longer spread the stakes.

The nine months passed without a hand.

Polk Weighs In

In mid-2016 Cates told an interviewer he was still trying to get it done. Then, in what he termed a casual reminder on Twitter, Doug Polk called the challenge a scam in 2016, ranking it among the biggest in poker history. Cates replied that a resolution was being worked on.

Polk's case rested on an escrow claim: both sides were supposed to lodge their stakes with Phil Ivey, Cates had, and Dwan had not. Neither Dwan nor Ivey has addressed it in public, and this page carries it as Polk's claim.

The Crossbook and the Quiet Years

The Crossbook

Cates had sold 20 per cent of his side of the challenge to David “Viffer” Peat. By his account, after he paid out Peat's share of a separate live bet, Peat told him Black Friday had voided the crossbook and compared it to a rain delay in baseball.

No rational person acts like this.

Daniel Cates on Peat, in 2013, after the crossbook dispute went public.

That is the detail the short versions miss. Other people had money riding on the Durrrr Challenge, on both sides, and some of them refused to pay. It is a large part of why the match never faded from view the way an ordinary unfinished heads-up session would have.

Table Mates, Still No Match

Dwan and Cates shared tables at Triton Montenegro in May 2018 and at the Triton Series in Manila, and got on well enough on camera. In September 2018 a forum post relayed a chat in which Cates said Dwan had forfeited. Nothing was confirmed.

2019 to 2024

The subject surfaced whenever either man was in the news, but no challenge hand was played. Cates won the $50,000 Poker Players Championship in consecutive years, 2021 and 2022. Dwan returned to televised cash games and to the headlines over other debts, stories that live in their profiles.

June 2025: The Settlement

Cates signed with GTO Wizard in May 2025. The following month he and Dwan, who both represent the solver platform, released a 20-minute joint video on its channel in which they described the challenge as resolved and their business affairs as settled. Neither man gave the terms.

Cates did most of the talking about the past. He said his anger had sometimes gone too far and that he had shared things which should have stayed private. He said the original penalty structure now looked too steep to him.

I can't add on an additional crazy amount.

Daniel Cates, June 2025, on asking for more after Dwan had already lost more than a million dollars in the match. The clip is the primary source for the ending and is the one document in this story that both men put their names to.

The video ended with a teaser for a Part II, read at the time as a hint of a new match. A search on 6 October 2026 found no Part II and no announcement of one. The last challenge hand on record remains the one dealt in October 2013.

The Durrrr Challenge by the Numbers

The two legs were different matches. Against Antonius the challenge was an 18-month grind that drifted to a conclusion. Against Cates it was a sprint that stalled, played at a pace that would have finished inside six months and then abandoned with more than half the hands undealt.

The one number that never moved is the side bet. It sat in the terms for sixteen years, and nobody ever got close enough to the finish to find out who would pay it.

Why It Was Never Going to Finish

Four structural reasons explain the outcome better than any judgement about the men involved.

None of the four needed anybody to behave badly. Put the same terms in front of any two players and the same thing happens, which is why the matches that followed changed every one of them.

The Challenges That Did Finish

Every public heads-up match since has been built with the Durrrr Challenge in mind, usually as the thing to avoid. The three best-known comparisons share its stakes and its side-bet structure and differ on exactly the points that stalled it.

The echo is Galfond. On 19 November 2019 the man Dwan had excluded in 2009 posted his own open challenge, borrowing the format openly: 50,000 hands, $100/$200 or higher, 3 to 1 on a side bet of ten buy-ins. He then ran it on a streamed daily schedule.

He is undefeated in every match that reached its agreed finish, having come back from €900,000 down to beat VeniVidi1993 by €1,671.58 over 25,001 hands. Two of his matches never did finish, and one of those was against Cates. One Galfond opponent who withdrew never played a hand.

Polk's match with Negreanu ran to its 25,000 hands in early 2021 and Polk won roughly $1.2 million, closing with a $255,722 session. The 25,000-hand match Negreanu lost was finished inside three months because sessions were agreed in advance.

The lesson carried into Polk's later bankroll challenge, and why public challenges tend to fail is a question the Durrrr Challenge answered first.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal covered the Galfond finish as a mainstream sports story, which is one measure of how far the format had travelled from a Two Plus Two post in 2009.

What the Challenge Left Behind

All three principals were playing at the top of the game in 2026. Cates holds two Poker Players Championship bracelets, Dwan is back in the biggest televised cash games, and Antonius is a Poker Hall of Famer without a bracelet who has no intention of slowing down.

In October 2026 Antonius told JRB his best poker is ahead of him and, dared to play 70 WSOP events in one summer, did not say no. The man who lost the first Durrrr Challenge at 28 was, at 45, the one with the most left to prove.

A Part II was teased in June 2025 and has not been announced. If it is, it will get its own post.

How This Record Was Compiled

The session tables were built from contemporaneous session reports, the Full Tilt challenge pages preserved in the Internet Archive and the players' own posts. Where no report gave hands or a result, the row says so. Nothing in either table is estimated.

Where sources conflict, the figure used is the one closest to the table. The Antonius final tally comes from two independent reports in February 2011, and a later summary giving $2.5 million after the same hand count is treated as an error.

The 2013 lead is a contemporary report rather than a Full Tilt count, and is marked as such wherever it appears.

Figures with no primary source are left out. That includes every number circulating for the 2025 settlement, every total for what Dwan is said to owe other people, and both men's net worth.

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