10 Pushups, Millions of Dollars
Durrrr” was already a binary legend before I’d met him. For almost a year before the 2007 World Series of Poker, I’d been hearing the legends… a twenty-year-old kid who could beat the best players in the world in the biggest games offered online. He was twenty feet tall if he was an inch, and he strode the earth with his blue ox, Babe.
Okay, I’m mixing up Durrrr and Paul Bunyan, but you can hardly blame me. As with all characters that exist in our imaginations, Durrrr was larger than life. The internet throngs worshipped the ground he mouse-clicked on. Every time he sat down, threads would open proclaiming that he was playing again. Did I say twenty feet tall? I meant thirty.
Meeting a guy who’s been built up that way is always a surreal experience. Chris Vaughn, who I was working with at the Series for BLUFF, mentioned he was grabbing lunch with Tom Dwan and would I like to join them? “Who?” I asked. “Tom Dwan. Durrrr.” This is where the narrator slaps his palm against his forehead.
Chris and I made our way to the All-American Burger in the
It was as we were being seated that the encounter took an unexpected turn, with half the
The line time passed and Dwan, resigned to his loss, suddenly stood up. He walked three feet from the table and promptly dropped to the ground, much to the surprise of our fellow diners. He pumped out ten rapid-fire pushups, satisfying his debt. I finally understood how Billy Ray Valentine felt hiding in a bathroom stall in Trading Places. This kid, a millionaire many times over, with his money further blooming on trees, was making push-up bets. That was enough to get me interested in the person on top of the player. For me, that took him from just being Durrrr to being Tom.
Tom was born twenty-one years ago in
It was in the final year of high school that Tom was introduced to the game that would separate him from the herd. With the poker boom in full motion, he, a close friend, and both pairs of parents decided to play a friendly kitchen table game of Hold’em. The game proved popular, with the next month seeing the activity reconvene each Friday night.
It was at the end of that month that fate struck. Tuesday night was movie night, but his pre-set plans fell through. “We had nothing else to do, so we went online. I deposited 50.” He hasn’t had to make a deposit since.
There was no one moment where the game clicked. More it was just a steady learning process through trial and error. “I learned pretty quickly that you need to think about each hand exclusively. After I fi gured that out, I just needed to work on thinking through the hands.” That came with time and experience.
As he found success, he started rising in stakes. “I had like $5,000 in the bank when I started,” he remembers now. It was a lot of money to him two years ago. He moved up steadily, with his profit margin increasing more the higher up he played. Still, there were other things in his life to consider, school amongst them. With high school done, he made his way to
“In high school, there were subjects that I hated, but if I didn’t do them life would suck. College was different, mostly because of poker. Like, I’d have a test Friday and on Thursday night my friends would be like, ‘Let’s go out!’ and the money made it easy to say screw it. That happened way too often.”
I’d have some dumb five-page paper on something I’d never find useful again as long as I lived. With the same amount of time, I could make $2,000 playing poker, which was probably more than my professors were making in a week. That probably sounds cocky and arrogant, but what I mean is I couldn’t put those realities out of my mind. I did fine in the subjects I liked, though.
I remember hearing my friends putting up with the stuff they hated because they were all excited about getting into this or that entry-level position. With all of the money I had coming in, felt like being in one of those jobs in three years would make me want to shoot myself.”
It was no wonder then that Dwan dropped out after his freshman year. Poker was the place he’d be in three, five, or ten years, and he’d be making a hell of a lot more money than those friends. Living it up, too.
“I like to think I’m similar to the guy I was three years ago. I still have a lot of the same friends. The only real difference is that money isn’t a concern. I try to be conscious of not turning into a spoiled person who forgets how to live a normal life. The big change in my life is that if I really like the idea of doing something, I can do just about anything on a whim… randomly traveling to
Tom’s twenty-first birthday allowed him to expand his poker horizons. “I like live play. I think I make more per hand live because there’s so much more information that you can process.” He believes his ability to process that information is what’s been most responsible for his overall success in the game. Asked why he’s been a winning player, he says bluntly, “I think more or better than my opponents; I analyze things better. Application of logic is crucial.”
He enjoys online play more than live because of the freedom it offers. “I can pick who I’m talking to, choose my chair, choose my other activities… Live, you’re playing against a bunch of people you don’t know, who you don’t always like. Still, I ’m getting a lot more confident in my live game. The hourly rate live can’t compare to online, though.”
There is an exception to the rule, he says, and that can be found in large live tournaments. “The fields are so big and it’s so profitable. Right now, I’m just trying to take the best EV+ spots.” That means live tournaments. He’s already started turning a big profit, as evidenced by his fourth place finish at the World Poker Finals, good for $324,244.
As he enters adulthood, he’s starting to see the big picture a little more clearly. Where once he was playing as high as he could regardless, now he’s looking to reduce the variance. “I’ve had some huge swings in the last year. I’m trying to lower them, but for now I just deal with them the best I can. I’m keeping my risk of ruin as close to zero as is humanly possible, but I can still lose $500k in a day.”
After all, it’s only half a million.
Thing is, he talks about the money like it’s those ten pushups he had to do in the All-American Burger. He and his friends are gambling constantly for micro-sized stakes. There’s a good reason in addition to the fun of it. “I think it keeps you sharp. It constantly tests your reasoning.” Not to say he hasn’t won some big wagers, including $50,000 for three golf shots made. “That was a fluke. I’m really bad at golf.”
Fortunately, he’s pretty good at poker. More and more, people are figuring that out, and that’s a pattern that will continue to play out as his live event exposure grows. This is one of the guys who’s set to dominate the game for the next decade. I’d bet ten pushups on it.
Gary Wise didn’t pay for lunch that day, so he’s probably a little biased. He spends a decent amount of his time away from burgers working on his website, www.wisehandpoker.com.
