On Wednesday night, Dan "jungleman12" Cates made a surprising announcement while he was on Doug Polk's podcast regarding his tribulation that started back in 2010 with fellow pro poker player Tom "durrrr" Dwan.
The Durrrr Challenge
The durrr challenge is an open dare to the online poker community offered by high-stakes player Tom Dwan. Basically the structure is 3-1 on this bet: That over 50,000 hands of 200/400 Pot Limit Omaha played online, they would fail to show a profit against him.
Here's the original statement of the challenge Dwan wrote, "I'm making this heads-up challenge to the world. Anyone can accept. Four tables, minimum of $200/$400, and I'll put up $1.5 million to their $500,000. We play 50,000 hands minimum and if they end up a dollar after rake they keep the side money or whatever. So basically, if you and I played and you won a dollar, you would get my $1.5 million and if I won a dollar I would win your $500,000. So I'm giving a million dollars free if anyone thinks they can do it."
Between $700-$800K paid already
Daniel "jungleman12" Cates recently revealed that Tom "durrrr" Dwan has already paid him around $700,000 to $800,000 in penalties ever since refusing to continue on their 2010 poker deal of 50k hand $200/$400 NLHE 50,000 hand challenge.
This disclosure truly creates a whole new perspective about their situation. On the course of the past years, Dwan was perceived to be only carrying out delaying tactics and had no intent at all to finish off their match, for which he has $1,500,000 up against Cates' $500,000 as to who shall be ahead right after 50K hands have passed.
In 2010 on Full Tilt, Cates and Dwan played a few times, however their match ups have become too drastically scarce up until Black Friday occurred, and after that the match has been ceased on an indefinite amount of time (due to the fact that online poker was no longer allowed in the United States). After Full Tilt re-opened its online doors in 2012, they continued to play a few more matches; however, for the past four years Cates' has not heard back from Dwan, and with just 20k hands played, he is currently down $1,200,000 in their challenge.
One of the largest scams in poker history?
Many from the poker community were disappointed with Dwan's demeanor over not putting any much of an effort to finish the challenge. Some believe it had all been a ‘scam', as Doug "WCGRider" Polk also mentioned in his latest podcast episode aired a few days ago.
However, despite all these speculations, what strikes as oddly strange was the fact that up until now Cates had never publicly revealed that Dwan has been regularly paying him penalties in exchange for his non-participation in the challenge, and those penalties have now reached around $700,000 up to $800,000!
So with this realization, many are thinking that there's a high chance that Dwan will just buy out his way out of the bet, even though Cates did mention that all this time he still wishes to continue and complete the challenge.
It looks like Cates is thinking that this challenge (which is the longest-running unfinished heads-up match in the history of poker) could be over before 2018 ends, and he was even willing to take on prop bets on that date.
Whatever the outcome will be, with this eye-opener directly from Dan Cates himself, it is nice to hear that Tom Dwan isn't totally flaking out and he's acting like a true gentleman, that is, paying for a humongous amount in penalties for failure to keep his end of the deal.
Source: https://www.highstakesdb.com/8068-jungleman12-durrrr-has-paid-me-over-700k-in-challenge-penalties-so-far.aspx
