Tom Dwan Drops Out of High Stakes Duel Vs. Hellmuth

Dwan vs Hellmuth Duel Ends Abruptly

As many poker fans probably know, this isn’t Dwan’s first unfinished heads-up challenge. As it was recently revealed in an interview with “Jungleman” Cates on Doug Polk’s podcast, he officially forfeited the “Durrr challenge” he started against Jungleman back in August 2010. He received much flak for avoiding to play Jungleman for years.

Now, Dawn is dropping out of his high stakes Heads-Up Duel against Phi Hellmuth after two games. According to the rules of the game, players need to win at least two matches in order to be able to cash out. Dawn won the first, $100,000 buy-in heads-up Sit&Go on the show back in September 2021. In the rematch in January 2022, however, Hellmuth came out victorious. That one had a $200,000 buy-in. 

The all-deciding $400,000 game was supposed to be on the way. However, Tom “durrrr” Dawn decided to withdraw from this match-up as well.

Hellmuth Vs. Seiver Coming Up on May 17th

So, the PokerGO production team had to find a new formidable opponent for the legendary “Poker Brat”. Their choice fell on Scott Seiver.

Seiver has been a professional poker player for decades. He has an impressive 3 WSOP gold bracelets, having won the last one in the $10K Razz event in 2019. However, his 3 victories are evidently dwarfed by Hellmuth’s record 16.

Seiver also has a total of $24.385 million in live tournament cashes. That puts him in the top 25 on the famous Hendon all-time money list. For more comparison, Hellmuth’s currently  #19 on that list with $27.173 million.

Seiver has quite a lot of experience in playing in front of cameras as well. He has appeared on a number of episodes on PokerGO’s revived version of the classic show Poker After Dark.

Hellmuth and Seiver are set to face each other in a $400,000 heads-up Sit&Go on May 17, 2022, at the Aria Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event will be broadcast live on PokerGO in its entirety for their subscribers. For non-subscribers, the first hour of the game will be streamed live on the PokerGO YouTube channel as a free “preview”.

About his opponent’s often disputed poker skills, Seiver had this to say:

“It is impossible to not respect Phil Hellmuth’s poker game because the results speak for themselves, however, where his talent lies is probably most misunderstood by the general public as opposed to those with a more nuanced view. His game is speech play, but he is one of the best in the world at it.”

So far, Hellmuth has a very impressive 8-1 record in the High Stakes Duel format. He swept both Antonio Esfandiari and Daniel Negreanu 3 out 3 times, then went on to defeat recreational player Nick Wright. Dwan took Wright’s place and served Phil Hellmuth his first defeat. However, as we wrote above, Hellmuth quickly avenged that in the rematch. Now, it’s up to Scott Seiver to stop him.

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