Tom Dwan, back by popular demand, returned for another session in the Run It Once Training Q&A series.
In his last outing, Dwan fielded questions from the audience, offered insights into his thought processes during various historic poker hands he was involved in, and shared wild stories about old-school characters of the Poker Boom era.
In his follow-up outing, the fare was much of the same. If you're at all interested in hearing Dwan's thoughts on hands he's played against the legends, the current environment surrounding AI, and why his performances on High Stakes Poker went so much better than Phil Galfond's – check out the video above.
'They all thought we were clueless'
It was a question from the field of listeners that led to Dwan's revelation about his time on High Stakes Poker compared to Galfond's.
The question read as follows: "How different do you think your life would be if you had run like Galfond on High Stakes Poker instead of absolutely destroying everyone?"
For those who don't know or can't recall, Dwan crushed the games in his early appearances on the show – racking up nearly $3,000,000 in winnings and making a name for himself during a time when poker had no shortage of star personas. Galfond, on the other hand, struggled mightily with the lineups he played in and lost more than $425,000 over 11 hours.
Phil Galfond's time on High Stakes Poker went rather poorly – a direct contrast with Tom Dwan's experience. Dwan's initial reply came simply as: "I got to play earlier than he did."
"For reference, for a few years, Phil and I were pretty close friends and also two of the better people at both hold'em and PLO," he went on. "For a number of reasons, lots of them being luck, it happened that I got in those High Stakes Poker shows earlier than Phil did. In some respects, I a little bit ruined it for him. Because by the time he played, they were like, 'Oh these online kids aren't completely stupid.'"
As the saying goes, timing is everything.
"I ran ridiculously good on High Stakes Poker, but I think my edge there was a lot more than Phil's. And that's not because I was a lot better than him – we were basically the same relative to those people – it's because I got in while they all thought we were clueless," Dwan explained.
"By the time Phil got in, it was two, three, four years later – a lot of these live pros are not dumb guys, right? They had maybe played a few less hands, they maybe undervalued those tools we had or the things we learned. By the time Phil got in, they were like, 'Oh, these fucking math kids know a little bit of fucking math.' His edge was a bunch smaller."
"It had a ton of impact on both of our lives, probably. Sometimes those kind of little things happen that end up making a big difference way later, but you don't exactly know it at the time," he concluded.
