So who does Dwan owe so much money to?
The story of Tom's unpaid debts goes back to the days before the closure of online poker rooms. At that time, he was running a high-profile challenge in which he faced Daniel "Jungleman" Cates. The fighters measured their strength in heads-up matches on $200/400 blinds for 50,000 hands. The deal was that if Cates defeated Dwan, Dwan would pay him 1.5 million as an extra reward. However, the heads-up finish never happened, which you can read about here:
So, after all this, it was problematic to find a place to finish this fight. Dwan paid Jungleman an unspecified portion and even invited him to a few interesting high-stakes games in Macau. But all of this was just the tip of the iceberg that started the cycle of accusations.
Later on, players like Peter Jetten and Haralabos Voulgaris started to come forward, but in these cases, the stakes were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course, all of them consider this amount of money to be considerable, but the idea of 30 million is perhaps from a completely different dimension.
According to Doug Polk, Tom Dwan owes $30 Million in gambling debts 🤯 pic.twitter.com/E10cvVLAN4
- Snoopdoug 🃏🧨💸 (@PuntingStacks) March 21, 2024
But there is one big player in the game - the Chinese Triads
Doug Polk commented on Reddit , saying that he doesn't expect Dwan to appear on the scene, given the circumstances of his debts. But are these only debts to individuals? Who can be secure enough to be able to lend such a huge amount? Many people in the world could not afford it.
However, there have long been rumours behind the scenes about Dwan's association with the Chinese Triad mafia, which has his back and is constantly recharging his credit, even in private high-stakes games across Asia. All this is said to be happening despite Dwan's reputation having reached an all-time low. The Mafia connection was defended by Polk by saying that the reason Dwan doesn't pay back tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt is because he has to satisfy creditors first, who he owes orders of magnitude more to and who he certainly doesn't want to piss off.
Doug himself and the PokerNews team continue to monitor the situation closely, and it is highly likely that more shocking information will soon come to light. Durrrr himself hasn't commented on the whole situation, even though he appeared at the Korean stop of the Triton High Roller Series just a few days ago.
We will continue to monitor the situation surrounding Dwan and bring you new information.
Source - Reddit, VIP-Grinders, PokerNews, Twitter
