Out of the Online Jungle - Daniel Cates Bursts Onto the Live Poker Scene

@Daniel Cates won the WPT #Alpha8Johannesburg on Sunday, Feb. 16, against eight other top players, including @Phil Ivey and @Erik Seidel. This is his first major title from a live event and probably heralds many more to come.

Daniel Cates‏@junglemandan Going to south africa soon to test my tournament luck... and also get in touch with my jungle side

This is what Daniel tweeted on February 2nd and Africa certainly drew out the best of his 'jungle side'. His tournament luck stood the test and won him $ 500,000.

Daniel was born in 1989, started playing poker in home games in his teens and by the age of 18 had become hooked on online poker, giving up his earlier addiction to the Command & Conquer video game. He learned fast, worked hard, dropped out of college to pursue poker full-time and did not have to wait long for success. In 2010 #jungleman12 was online poker’s biggest winner.

Photo credit: Christopher Morris for The New York Times, 2011

Also in 2010 he accepted the famous Durrrr Challenge - an online match consisting of 50,000 heads-up poker hands. At the time of #BlackFriday and the Full Tilt Poker shutdown, when the challenge was temporarily postponed, Cates was leading the match against Dwan. It is still unclear how - and if - it will be settled.

Though badly hit by Black Friday and with a lot of money locked up in Full Tilt, jungleman12 continued his successful career and is considered by many the best online heads-up player around.

Cates conducts a Heads-Up Strategy Seminar, 2013

Meanwhile the lure of live poker seems to have taken hold at some point and Daniel Cates ventured into the real world, registering several ITM in 2012-2013.

In an extensive interview for New York Times Magazine, in 2011, Daniel talked about the “balance of life” he wished to achieve and what it might mean:

“I don’t know. Exercise. Girls. Basically, I need to figure out how to be Daniel and not jungleman. If you draw a Venn diagram of Daniel and jungleman, you’ll see that jungleman is completely encapsulated within Daniel, but he isn’t actually Daniel. This hurts me when I meet people, because all they see is jungleman and not me. I become aloof to them. If I can achieve a balance of life and allow a balanced Daniel to shrink jungleman, I should have more success in my human interactions.”

Well, his victory in Johanessburg seems to be a sign that jungleman is indeed ‘shrinking’ and Daniel is about to master another ‘level’ in poker and in the game of life in general - one where social skills and human interaction count as much as the lightning-fast reactions and decisions in online multitabling.