What happened to Tom Dwan in Online Poker?

When it comes to online poker, Tom “durrrr” Dwan will always be known as one of the most famous players. After all, he was widely considered a top internet grinder from 2008-2010. However, the past few years have seen Dwan’s profits and online reputation take a major hit. To illustrate this point, let’s follow Dwan’s profits during the most significant rises and drops in his career:

– October, 2007, -$330k (rough start)
– December, 2008, $5.73 million (the legend was born)
– February, 2009, $2 million (a sharp drop)
– June, 2009, $7.23 million (Dwan’s peak)
– November, 2009, -$1 million (playing Viktor Blom takes its toll)
– April, 2010, $6.72 million (thank you Guy Laliberte)
– April, 2011, $2.4 million (a steady drop before Black Friday)
– January, 2013, $883k (the fall continues)

As you can see, Dwan has never been a stranger to wild bankroll swings. However, it looks like these swings have been going down far more often than up since April of 2010. Because of this big bankroll drop, some people question whether or not Dwan could even compete with the top online players of today.

There’s no simple answer to this thought because, as his results indicate, durrrr has not been a successful player over the past two and a half years. However, it’s worth mentioning that Dwan doesn’t dedicate the bulk of his time towards beating high stakes games at Full Tilt Poker anymore. Instead, he’s still grinding in the live Macau cash games and making a healthy profit off the Asian businessmen and whales there.

Assuming the Macau games were ever to dry up, it’s likely that Tom Dwan would fully rededicate himself to beating online poker – if there were no other juicy cash games elsewhere. And while it’s debatable on whether he’d definitely beat Blom, Ben Sulsky, Phil Ivey and other high stakes grinders, he could definitely become a profitable player.

After all, Dwan did revolutionize the way many poker players thought about the game during the late 2000’s. So as smart as he is about poker, it’s merely a matter of wanting to be one of the best again.

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