Tom Dwan - the missing man

The fact that a lot of people are coming out about it now is good because maybe he'll actually feel compelled to start doing something about paying his debts off. It's not like Tom doesn't have the skill or connections to start doing good on his word. He's made it this far, there's still time.

But yeah, for every person we've heard about him owing money, there's probably two or three we have no clue about

So afaik the list looks like:

Jungle ~$500k
Jetten $226k
Trueteller $1.5mm
Voulgaris. ~$500k
Is that all we know so far?

Literally only boomers like Dwan or even know who he is at this point.

Lmao

There truly is a sucker born every minute

Sources? And are those numbers current? Wouldn't be surprised if he owes the IRS, too.

For Jetten and Trueteller the source is them on twitter. The others aren't as clear.

Who is really in position to say what he has blown at the table, the poker table, with his insane playing style? I don't think we can just assume "Yeah he's bookoo tens of millions ahead in poker but blew it all elsewhere." We see the highlights, we see the heater, we see the sun run, we see cashes, we see the Gus Hansen on steroids thing. And now we see the disaster in its wake. It all goes together. It's not the least bit of a surprise. He's a talented maniac who got the one percentile run. For a while. He's foolish and that's why he is where he is. The foolish thing is built into his adopted psyche and playing style, which has a big upside at times, and a catastrophic downside.

He looks dead inside.

With regards to money and how he reacts to losing/winning millions he definitely is dead inside.

he actually looks mentally ill... not a cheap dig at him but sometimes you can look in a persons eyes and see there is something wrong
he might be sleep deprived for so long that he has done some serious damage to his mind

2, 1

Too bad you aren't as foolish as him. You could be where he is. Traveling the world, playing for millions daily, and doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants. FOOLISH!! I guess Hellmuth was right.

i mean yeah the entire season of High Stakes Poker probably encompasses what - 400-600 hands max? he was obviously well ahead of his time in terms of poker skill but he needed a lot of rungood as well to look like the poker genius that he did. and having the unlimited FullTilt bankroll did not hurt either. Ivey's results with and without the FullTilt money are night and day. there's no guarantee that he did not get into trouble playing against chinese billionaires who have unlimited bankrolls, even if he was a big favorite in the games it would only take a few weeks or months of runbad to bust him at the stakes they were playing. for all we know he developed a pit addiction to try to get back losses from the poker tables. there's so much mystery surrounding those Macau games that we will probably never know the true story.

i read lots of stuff about his pit addiction...

If memory serves me correctly, Dwan didn't sign with Full Tilt until well after those HSP appearances.

I don't think the "Full Tilt money" was a factor in how he played on those shows because he wasn't a Full Tilt pro at the time.

I don't know anything about the high stakes world, but the sense I got at the time was that Dwan/Galfond/Dang Bros and a few others were the first young guys to win the race to really huge bankrolls, so were able to get into some good games and soak up a lot of the soft money before other crushers invaded that space. Dwan had a year or two there where he seemed invincible until Isildur and Jungle came along. He was already a sensation by the time Full Tilt finally reeled him in.

Just out of curiosity how much of Robls cash game poker have you seen that wasn't from like the last three years?

Actually I think he had a large sample beating the toughest online headsup games at the time, as was indeed regarded as one of the top online crushers by reputable players. This would not realistically be possible if he was just a maniac on a sunrun. There were only a few people willing to play him when he was at his peak.

Like many players, he didn't adapt with the times, and since he didn't do in depth solver work, etc, eventually the game passed him by. The same is true of Isildur1, etc.

He's amazing at PLO!

In fact the whole reason there was a durrr challenge (where he gave 3:1 odds on the sidebet and the offer was open to anyone) is because he was having trouble getting action otherwise.

It's also well known that Durrr and Isildur had to switch to PLO because they weren't getting NL action anymore. They were considered two of the best NL players and thus couldn't make money at NL anymore.

You say things like "We see the highlights, we see the heater, we see the sun run, we see cashes..." but this is disconnected from reality. What we saw was him not getting NL action anymore due to his reputation as one of the top crushers.

Yes I get he's a scammer, that doesn't mean you should rewrite history with him being a fish on a heater all along. That is just childish.

Robl 'needed' JRB to get games up and running so he could sit down and fleece them. That was part of the reason that Robl staked JRB for years. Not sure why they broke up, but IMO it's partially due to JRB having kids now and cutting back on his schedule .. but who knows. JRB has Rick Salomon now.

I'm still of the opinion that Dwan was considering folding to Doug Polk in the Hustler hand because he didn't have anymore chips to play with behind. I could be wrong of course, but just his body language during the tank. He quickly recovered and stated it was a tank about call or raise, but even that took a moment to get out of his mouth. GL

There is literally 0 % chance Dwan considered folding to Polk

He was never folding and definitely considering raising.

Yeah this is 100% accurate

He signed up with Full Tilt like a week before S6 of HSP started filming. Maybe even less than that.