Jungleman Wins $60k As Durrrr Challenge Resumes

More than two years ago, Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Dan “Jungleman12” Cates started their Challenge II. The goal was to play 50,000 hands of heads-up NL with Dwan standing to win $500,000 of Cates’ money if he won compared to giving away $1.5 million if he lost. Unfortunately for Tom Dwan, he soon sunk to a $1,251,059 deficit after 19,335 hands played and since Black Friday struck, the Challenge II has been in the deep-freeze ever since.
That was until recently when a series of tweets designed to needle Tom Dwan seems to have had their intended effect and brought the Challenge II back into focus once more. One such tweet read: “Regarding my recent tweets with @TomDwan , I tweeted because he has repeated avoided playing since 2011. Hes down and likely to lose 1.5m+”
Now, after its long hiatus, last Sunday finally saw the first hands played of $200/$400NL across four-table between the top pros. The brief encounter of just a few hundred hands may not have been quite the dramatic battle rail fans had been waiting for, but at least it may help overcome inertia and get the whole protracted affair back on track. After 493 hands in which Cates won roughly $59,300, the two pros left on good terms with their online chat going:
durrrr: kk ill be around some of the next few days i think
durrrr: not tonight tho prolly
durrrr: cya
jungleman12: if you want, we can play sometime in next couple weeks
jungleman12: ok cya
An encouraged Dan Cates then took to his twitter account and wrote: “well that was fast..but I think @TomDwan and I will get a good game soon.”
Hopefully from this point on the Challenge II won’t take a further two years to complete.