Tom "Durrr" Dwan

What a sicko. Honestly.

Lately I've had a lot less time to be playing poker but I've been keeping up to date with the celeb line by watching the latest series of "High Stakes Poker s05" and the "Aussie Million 2009 Cash Game".

What has really been standing out to me is how Durr is playing. He's basically playing a really really loose aggressive style getting involved in so many pots its inspiring. From what I've been watching his plays and reading ability are on a completely different level than some of the other high stakes guys like Phil Laak or Howard Lederer. I'm not saying their bad, but this kid really is the revolution of TV poker in my eyes and it just makes amazing viewing. His aggression must make him so ridiculously hard to play against I would imagine. At the rate he is going, I really do believe in the next couple of years he will undoubtably be viewed in most peoples eyes as the best poker player in the world. I mean let's be honest he's already playing with the best and almost out of his $4million+ online downswing this year. How anyone can loose that kind of money and keep playing without tilt is just mind boggling in itself.

Oh god, I'm becoming one of those gay little Durr fanboys.. Woops lol. Anyway...

I'de like to say a quick word about the "Aussie Millions 2009 Cash Game". This is in my opinion the best TV cash game I think I've seen. Well the first episode anyway. It was really nice to see some TV pot limit omaha, and I hope this starts to bring more players to the omaha tables as it is such a fun alternate to No Limit Hold'em. Anyway I have to say the first episode was such a good watch. The atmosphere on the show was quite gripping and there were some really interesting spots.

One such hand was between Andrew "Good2cu" Robl (prick) and Patrick Antonius. I hate good2cu, such an arrogant douche bag honestly. There are plenty of other examples of how hes such an annoying cunt lol. But I won't go into them now. Here is the hand:



Now all I can really think of here is that Robl is completely unaware of hand values here. As vs. Antonius' range getting it in here is ridiculously bad with absolutely no fold equity. Now Robl is obviously a very experienced NLHE cash player so in his terms he has top pair 2nd kicker (with no immediate redraws). When converting it to omaha its like 4betting the flop with 33 on a 10 j q suited board. Ok maybe thats a slight exaggeration but it's close. At the end of the day they split the pot 4 ways and he won all 4 which was around a 0.27% chance. Must be nice to run that good lol...

I just thought the reactions from the other players was hilarious (click the image to get the full picture, don't know why its cut some off here):

nikki with the puppy dog 'what the fk are you doing?' face...


tom acknowledging the donk play to nikki. robl completely oblivious:


This coupled with Antonius' comment when Robl flipped over the hand made it all out to be quite funny viewing.

The second episode from the Aussie Millions 2009 Cash Game was a heads up session between Durr and Antonius. Both were effectively $1.5 million deep with Antonius starting the session with $2million. The blinds were at $1000/$2000 and as such they were sat with 750BB's deep effective. In my opinion, this does not make good viewing.

I think what a lot of people enjoy about watching the high stakes games online is the amount of money people are shovelling in with huge $300k+ all in pots. However as these two were so incredibly deep this just wasn't the case. In fact through the hour long episode I don't think there was a single all-in. Now, I know being sat ridiculously deep makes the game a lot more interesting for the players as they can have a bigger edge with more room to manoevure. But for the viewing audience it's a lot more fun seeing $500,000 coin flips and such. I'de say this is particularly the case for your average casual poker player.

Regardless I think this years Aussie Million Cash Game was such a good watch and I'de really recommend it to everyone. Go to pokertube or search youtube or a torrent for it if you missed the TV streaming.

Good luck at the tables all!