Rough In The Jungle

Aug. 3, 2011, Posted by Pokerfarm

A typical nosebleed grinder's life is something that is admired and wished upon by most poker players. Sponsorships, traveling to live tournaments around the globe and massive profits can buy you million dollar flats, infinite partying and ultimately a strong sense of self-fulfillment because you are the true elite of the poker world. Everything written so far is entirely true but you should try telling that story to Daniel "jungleman12" Cates.

Considered by many as the best heads up player in the world, Daniel had some mind blowing results over the last two years. Breaking through the ranks of the high stakes field, this twenty year old poker prodigy has managed to amass more than five million dollars profit and what is even more amazing – against the very best pros in the world. After constantly beating both NLHE and PLO HU tables he decided to go for the next step and applied for the 'Durrrr Challenge'.

Since the two pros started the challenge, jungleman12 was emerging victorious time after time. Building an unbelievable $1.2 million advantage over Dwan barely half way through the challenge, the question the poker community was asking was of how much more Durrr could lose, not how much Cates could win.

But then a sudden strike swept the poker world of its feet. Black Friday happened and Cates, along with every other American poker player was left with their funds frozen on Full Tilt. And it was no small number.

In a recent interview Mike Matusow admitted that Daniel Cates may have had more than $6 million in his FTP account with little hope of getting that back in the foreseeable future. Furthermore he cannot play on his Pokerstars account from his home country. For these two reasons Daniel has decided to follow in the steps of Phil Galfond and other like minded American pro's and move to Canada. But his luck didn't change north of the border.

Cates was deported back to the US as an illegal immigrant. In a recent tweet Daniel made it clear that he was not 'deported' but 'denied entry' instead. To work around this problem he is considering getting a temporary visa after which he should have no legal problems. Although quite time consuming we may see Jungleman abandon this idea and head across the Atlantic to Europe as he recently suggested in an interview he did with The Pokerfarm back in June. Let us hope he does because high stakes poker action this summer is probably richer than ever with the likes of Isildur, MrSweets28, Skjervoy and Sauce123 dominating the games through June and July.

Sure there are many big names missing from the tables, but the biggest loss for the community is the lack of Isildur vs Jungleman matchups. Labeled as the two biggest talents in HU poker, Blom and Cates would be sure to impress us all with gargantuan sized pots and nonstop high stakes action. The question that remains unanswered is how will Jungleman cope with Isildur's latest hot streak and even more important, with his lack of online poker in the last couple of months. One thing is for sure, we're in for a hot, hot high stakes summer.