Tom Dwan, Daniel Cates Kick Off New Durrrr Challenge

Tom Dwan is back in action and he couldn’t be happier about it.

Everyone in the poker world has been waiting for the original Durrrr Challenge to finish for well over a year now – but that’s not stopping Tom Dwan from getting to work on another challenge in the meantime.

Last night Dwan officially kicked off his second Durrrr Challenge against Daniel Cates. The duo fired up six tables of deep-stacked, heads-up $200/$400 no-limit hold’em for their first Durrrr Challenge session in the early morning hours on Friday. They played more than 1,600 hands before deciding to step away for a short break. But then, in a break with the precedent set by Patrik Antonius in the first challenge, the two came back a little while later to keep going instead of waiting another month before sitting back down.

Known as “jungleman12,” Cates, a CardRunners instructor, has run pretty well against Dwan in the past, racking up some $661,000 in wins against the online pro before this challenge began. The beginning of the first session of their 50,000-hand challenge didn’t go quite as well for him, with Dwan jumping out front with about a $130,000 advantage before the first break. But Cates then came roaring back in the second session, grabbing himself a lead of nearly $200,000 and announcing that this won’t be a pushover.

The two are actually still playing at the moment, with nearly 4,000 hands booked at this point, so it’s hard to say when they plan to stop. But regardless of the ending time, it’s clear already that this challenge will be much more interesting than the Patrik Antonius version of The Neverending Story. You can get continuous updates (and lots of Tom Dwan love) from this raging 2+2 Durrrr Challenge thread – it’s already up to 59 pages.