ShareTom Dwan is known for his hyper-aggressive play style and willingness to risk it all. In this video you can watch the bluffing clinic he ran on his opponents back in the glory days of High Stakes Poker, including multiple six-figure pots against some of the best poker players in the world at the time.
However, in a recent “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, users had the chance to, well, ask Tom Dwan anything. One user asked him if he remembered any big bluffs, and Dwan proceeded to tell Nick Schulman a crazy story about a multi-million dollar bluff he ran in a short-deck game.
Reddit user u/dashcat9 asked Dwan “What is the most memorable well executed bluff you’ve ever run?” Dwan actually got visibly excited when Schulman read the question, and started talking about a game he was playing in Asia.
“It was one of the biggest pots I’ve ever played,” Dwan said.
According to Dwan, he was bluffing with QJ on a flop of AT9. He bet a 7 on the turn and faced a raise from his opponent. He proceeded to re-raise him for a large portion of his stack, and he called.
“I re-raised like 85% of my stack, because he just had a habit of calling pair and open-ender hands,” Dwan said.
When the river didn’t improve Dwan’s hand, he pulled the trigger and shoved the rest of his stack, albeit for a small percentage of the pot.
“The river was like an ace or nine or something, and I shoved for like 1/6th pot,” Dwan said. “He went in the tank for a seconds and folded like a monster.”
Luckily, Schulman had the same question as us: How much was the pot?
“Was the roughly 15% pot bet seven figures?” Schulman asked, and Dwan sneakily said, “Yeah.”
According to Dwan, the game was on after his opponent looked at Dwan’s cards on the way to the muck.
“There’s some of those, that I just slide it in [to the muck],” Dwan said. “Sometimes I turn it over if I really want to show it. But I’ve had a few hands where I thought to myself, ‘Oh, they’re going to grab this.’ This QJ bluff was one of those.”
After his opponent saw the hand, Dwan said he became a calling station for a week afterwards. That seems like a small price to pay when you’re able to get opponents to fold strong made hands with nothing.
