OK, this has sparked a lot of interest among commenters, so I think I will offer a few of my own thoughts on the hand after all. In terms of what durrrr may have been thinking and why he was successful, I don’t have a lot to add to the very good analysis I already linked. Instead, I’ll focus on what I think Greenstein and Eastgate could have done differently.
(If you don’t know the details of the hand, Geoff recently shared a link to a YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SKwhb_nJVQ)
I’ll start with Eastgate, because my advice for him is easiest: fold pre-flop. By my count, the pot is $16,200 when it gets to Eastgate, who must call $2100 more with his 42o in the Small Blind. The 8:1 pot odds are nice, but he will be very deep out of position against 6-7 good to world-class players with a hand that virtually never makes the nuts or anything close to it. Even suited, this should probably be a fold, since with so many in the pot he’s looking at reverse implied odds even when he makes a flush. Post-flop, his play is fine, and this is just a spot where he’s going to lose money against a very good player. Hence why he should not be playing 24o.
For Greenstein to combat a bluff like this, he needs a strategy that will not turn his hand face-up. The deeper you get, the more you need to mix up your UTG range so that savvy opponents like Dwan can’t take you off pots on “bad” flops. Barry needs to be capable of showing up with hands like A2s here. He might also benefit from limping in with AA UTG occasionally, along with a variety of other hands. This will enable him to limp-re-raise in a spot like this (again, sometimes with other hands as well as a bluff) to narrow the field and make stacks more shallow post-flop so that his Aces will be more resilient unimproved.
Post-flop, he needs to either check the Aces or be leading such a wide range here that AA will be at the top of it and he can more comfortably stack off to Dwan with it. The latter, bluffing frequently into seven players, is very hard to do, so I like checking better.
I also think he’s got an easy fold when Eastgate cold calls out of the Small Blind. But the central thing is that, especially when very deep, he needs to play all of his hands in a way that Dwan can’t put him on exactly an overpair or the VERY occasional (given the T in Dwan’s own hand) quads/full house.