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Controversey Surrounds First Challenge Durrrr Promotion
Tom Dwan is an American poker player who uses the screen name "durrrr" when he plays online. Born in 1986, at a very young age Dwan made quite the name for himself winning big in the high-stakes pot-limit Omaha games and the no-limit Texas hold 'em games at Full Tilt Poker. He was such a sensation that Full Tilt Poker invited him to join their pro team in 2009, and the online poker room even started his own event: the Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge. The challenge was this: $250,000 to enter, and no player can leave until 500 hands, or they lost their buy-in. The event received a great deal of attention from both the fans and the media.
The 2011 version of the Durrrr Challenge that began in late February was different, but it was once again an opportunity for Fill Tilt Poker players to step up and take on Tom "Durrrr" Dwan in a high-stakes multi-table competition. This time around there was a four-stage qualification process, at which point there would be one Full Tilt Poker player remaining who would then get the opportunity to four-table against Dwan in either pot-limit Omaha or no-limit Texas hold 'em. The challenger would win money for each match won, with the grand total being $1.5 million if he won all four. It all sounds simple enough; what could go wrong? Unfortunately, things did go wrong, very wrong.
After the Matrix tournament, the end of the qualification process, concluded, the winner was a Russian player with the handle "svetamillion." So when the Challenge Durrrr matches began, svetamillion was the player playing against Dwan, just as everyone would expect it to be. But Full Tilt Poker doesn't complete all of the challenges in a single session. Instead, they space them out over a series of sessions. So when the play resumed on Sunday, March 27, 2011, the day that the Durrrr challenge would end, svetamillion wasn't there. In his place was the runner-up, a player with the handle "inorej." The worst part: Full Tilt Poker did not give anyone notice or any indication why this happened.
Controversy occurred immediately, and because Full Tilt Poker chose not to provide a reason, it led to a great deal of speculation. And while we know nothing for sure yet, some of the speculation makes a great deal of sense. After all, we know that Full Tilt Poker wasn't trying to cheat anyone. They still gave the opportunity to one of the players in the tournament. This decision led most people to the obvious suspicion that svetamillion had somehow cheated his way to the top spot. Supporting that notion in a circumstantial way is the fact that svetamillion finished in the bottom third of the first part of the process before going on to with the Matrix event and the freeroll tournaments.
The common perception than is that svetamillion was a person or a group of people operating multiple accounts. We may never know the actual reason. Several poker-oriented media outlets have contacted Full Tilt Poker, and all of them have received a similar limited reply. In it, Full Tilt Poker states that they did disqualify svetamillion. They won't say why they'd disqualified, only that the Matrix Tournament itself was not undermined. This would suggest that he did not use multiple accounts in concert. The player inorej lost all four challenges to Dwan, so walked away with nothing from the final event, but Dwan and Full Tilt Poker did donate $40,000 to relief efforts in Japan.
