Tom Dwan
The question came with venom: “What would your life have been like if you had run like Galfond on High Stakes Poker instead of destroying everyone?”. And Dwan, far from keeping a low profile, leaned on a thesis that stings the pride of several: “I was able to play before him,” he said. And he immediately added the key fact: “For a few years, Phil and I were close friends and also two of the best in both Hold’em and PLO”.
So far, so good. But the blow is in the “why.” Dwan claimed that his advantage wasn’t “being infinitely better,” but the context: “It’s not that I was much better than him… we were basically equal in relation to those people.” Then, why did he print money on TV and Phil suffered? Dwan explains it mercilessly: “I came in when they still thought we were useless.”
And he finishes with the spiciest, almost mocking part, citing the “evolution” of the live pros: “By the time Phil came in, it was two, three, four years later… and those live pros aren’t stupid.” They had learned, they had adjusted, they had stopped looking at online players like clowns. “By the time Phil came in, they were already like: ‘oh, these nerdy kids know a bit of math’”.
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The implication? Dwan doesn’t just say “I won because I was good,” he says “I won because the others were behind” and suggests that his emergence educated his rivals and, by extension, lowered Galfond’s EV.
All this becomes more controversial due to the recent context: recently Dwan caused alarm with strange posts on X, which many interpreted as signs of a bad mental state. Therefore, every phrase of his today is read under a magnifying glass: is it a cold analysis of “timing and information,” or a Dwan returning to the public sphere with a short fuse and a desire to fight the world?
As he himself summarized it, with a closing that seems to justify entire careers: “Sometimes those little things happen and end up making a big difference much later… but you don’t know it at the time.”
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You can check out the full interview, in English, in the following video:
