Poker Moments: Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and the Million-Dollar Pot

Nine years ago, summer was dying out, but in the Full Tilt Poker Million Dollar Cash Game, the action was about to hit melting point. Three players remained at the table as the midnight hour approached. Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius. What happened next would be remembered by poker fans forever.

It was described at the time by legendary poker commentator David Tuchman, who looks back on the experience fondly.

“But it was funny because he didn’t know poker. There was a hand the first year where Ivey beat Antonius in a big hand, trip aces versus a full house, Ivey couldn’t get away from it, and we’d brought in extras to make it look like people were watching the game. Turner had all the extras clap like it was a sporting event. It was like after a great point in a tennis match; you’d keep quiet during the point then once it was over, you’d cheer. That was what he was going for, but it was so cringeworthy. I love him, though; he’s a brilliant director who taught me so much about TV and broadcasting.”“We covered the Million Dollar Cash Game for three and a half years, and it taught me a lot about poker and broadcasting. I got to work with a great director called Martin Turner, who didn’t know poker at all; he was doing rugby for Sky Sports. He was a super guy, helped me come over to London and eventually took over Formula 1.

Million Dollar Cash Game Set-Up

One factor in the hand that would eventually become famous above all the others during that series’ long run on television was the sheer amount of time that the players had been at the table.

“This particular year they said: ‘We’re going to shoot for 24 hours straight.’ I was like: ‘Wow, OK.’ I commentated for 20 of the 24 hours - it was ridiculous.

“Full Tilt used to bring out their pros to play in it, but they weren’t all cash game players. You could very quickly tell who was a cash game player and comfortable having that much money in front of them and who wasn’t. The game got shorter and shorter. It became the Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey show. It was kind of insane; three-handed live poker with those players. How lucky am I to have done that?"

“It was Full Tilt’s decision to put Robert Williamson III in the booth, and it was a mistake. You put in a guy who’s a PLO guy; he’s not No Limit at all. He didn’t have any broadcasting experience. It was an odd choice, but as we know from the years since then, Full Tilt made many odd choices - that was one of the smaller ones! It wasn’t a live stream, but we filmed it as live, which was one of the reasons they brought me in. I didn’t have a ton of TV experience, but I’d covered many hours of Live at the Bike. That’s the way they wanted to film it, I think to cut costs. Editing it and then voicing it post-production is a lot more expensive.”As Tuchman remarks, 30 years ago, it would have been the equivalent of watching Johnny Moss and Doyle Brunson in a cash game that was only for the elite. Such a line-up has never really come around again.

Three-handed they were and the pot of a lifetime arrived. Both ‘RW3’ as Tuchman calls him and Tuchman himself, realized the potential of the pot.

“Every hand was huge, none of them were hiding. We’re three-handed, and Turner is in my ear, telling me ‘Shut the fuck up’ in his thick British accent. Then this hand came out of nowhere. The flop comes out, and Ivey had ace-high in a heads-up pot and a gut-shot to the wheel draw, he’s going nowhere. Dwan had overs with a gutshot to the nuts, so he’s obviously not going anywhere. I used to do this thing once in a while where you pick the death card, the one that’s going to bring the most carnage. And I’m like ‘If a non-club four comes...’”

It did. That was when a phrase that every poker fan from Las Vegas to the Australian outback probably remembers seeing on TV at the time. Tuchman still has it yelled at him today.

The Gin Card & The Reaction

“Then, bingo, the bloodbath card came. We were live, but we knew it was for TV, so we couldn’t curse. I have a pretty fucking filthy mouth. I grew up in a family where ‘Fuck you’ meant ‘I love you.’ To me, it’s four letters; it doesn’t mean anything, it’s what’s behind it that might mean something. But I knew this was being filmed for TV so I couldn’t curse. My brain knew not to go ‘Holy fuck!’ but ‘Oh my gosh’ came out and Robert did the same. It’s a phrase that I never use, ever. I can’t think of another time I’ve used that phrase in my entire life. Now it lives in poker infamy, whether good or bad. It’s the most famous simultaneous ‘Oh My Gosh’ you’ll ever hear in your life.”

A magical moment captured - and replayed via YouTube - forever. Then, the treasure chest was open. Tuchman’s learnings from Turner helped him make the next few moments as spellbinding for viewers as they were for the commentary team. After such an audible moment of commentary, now Tuchman wanted to stop Williamson from talking over the action.

Ivey, of course, lost the hand, and a cool $1.1 million was moved from the middle of the table to Dwan’s seat.“This is what I learned from Martin Turner. The more boring the stuff we’re watching, the more animated, the more exciting we have to make it. But there are many moments that speak for themselves. ‘Let it breathe’ is a phrase I like to use a lot. I covered his microphone, muted him, and just said ‘Shut the fuck up. We both know what’s going to happen but let’s see it, let’s feel it.’

At the time, it was the biggest pot in cash game TV history, which was pretty exciting. I was very lucky to be a part of that. Ivey was wearing a shirt that had [Full Tilt] branding on it. One of the PAs was told Ivey couldn’t put tape over it. So the PA went up to Ivey after that hand. Ivey was less than pleased. He sort of growled ‘Could you pick a worse time than that?’”

Aftermath

Tuchman has stayed in the game more than Robert Williamson III, of course. He’s followed the careers of Dwan and Ivey and retains a lot of respect for both men.

I’ve seen all the players since, but I never talked about the hand. I’d rather not get punched by Phil Ivey after saying ‘Say, Phil, it was so awesome to commentate on you - how did it feel to lose that huge pot?’ Ivey was already a legend when that hand took place. He was the mysterious guy in poker who spoke so little but carried a big sword. In many ways, he was what everybody wanted to be. We’d all heard the stories of him playing underage in Atlantic City as ‘Jerome.’ When you thought of Ivey, even though he wasn’t an older man, but in many ways, he was considered an old soul. It’s obvious that Phil Ivey thinks about life, the game of poker, the world in a different way that most of us do. He’s intelligent on a level that many of us, maybe even he himself, might not be able to understand or articulate.”

“I was enamored with Tom Dwan; he was Mickey Mantle to me. He’d emerged from online poker and was a relatively new face, still becoming a man but taking the world by storm. Dwan played online poker in a carefree, reckless, unbelievably aggressive manner that hundreds of young poker players did at that time. The amount of variance that anybody playing that style would get probably forces 99% of them to be broke. One went against all the odds and became Tom Dwan. Shaun Deeb said to me once: ‘If I didn’t run well the first six months of me playing, there’s no way I’d be a poker player. I sucked! I ran like a god though. I made a ton of money, then I learned how to play.’ To me, that’s probably Tom Dwan. When he stuck it in with a draw against a set, he won. The confidence built, the bankroll built and a legend grew. It’s hard to play against a guy like that because it feels like he’s playing Hold’em with three cards. It’s scary.”If Tuchman was a confirmed fan of Ivey at that stage of his career, he was also an admirer of Dwan.

Poker fans have so many different perspectives on that classic poker moment, just as they do on Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan. Tuchman himself admits he knows neither man well, but that’s a normal thing, maybe a good thing - and should encourage us never to presume what we know from the little we see.

“You don’t know these people, actors, poker players, athletes. We rush to judgment on something we saw on TV or read or heard from a friend who heard from their friend.”

Everyone talked about the million-dollar pot between Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey with their friends, except the men themselves. They got back to playing, to growing their legends and, most importantly of all, winning other pots.

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