Durrrr Challenge: The Snows of Yesteryear Have Gone
February 8, 2017 11:01 amThese days the Durrrr Challenge is just a point of historical interest as far as the poker community is concerned, as you would expect from a contest which started all the way back in 2011, before grinding to a halt on Black Friday that same year.
Of course, the person still most interested in the competition would be Dan “jungleman” Cates, who after taking a commanding lead in their $200/$400 heads-up No Limit Hold’em battle with 40 percent of the hands completed stood to win $1.5 million from Dwan. Outside of Cates’ obvious investiture, one wonders just how much people have any great interest in the six year old Durrrr Challenge.
After all, Tom Dwan may have once been at the center of the high-stakes poker scene in the 2000’s, but after being released from a diminished Full Tilt in 2013, the 30 year-old has all but vanished off the face of the poker world. In fact, Dwan’s last forage online took place in 2013 at Full Tilt, eventually quitting the site with $2,165,475 in winnings, while Dwan’s last three tournament cashes occurred between 2012 and 2014, with Dwan showing $2,661,781 in winnings throughout the whole of his career.
Since his disappearing off the radar, speculation has been rife that Dwan had gone broke, but there has been plenty of evidence to suggest that he has made Asia his new home, and over the past few years he has been seen playing mostly live cash games in Macau and the Philippines. Nevertheless, Dwan has avoided the scrutiny of the poker world for so long now, that even if he was to resume his Durrrr Challenge with Cates, which in itself is highly improbable, there would few takers truly interested in the outcome of this now long-winded soap opera. François Villon once posed the question”Where are the snows of yesteryear?” in his famous poem called “Ballade of the Ladies of Times Past”, and the answer, as far as the Durrrr Challenge is concerned, would be that it is all gone!