Daniel 'Jungleman' Cates: The Poker Pro's Journey to a $20 Million Net Worth

Daniel 'Jungleman' Cates started his poker career playing 50NL online. He eventually began playing heads-up matches, and it was at this point Jungleman began employing a strategy called “reverse game selection.” With this strategy, Jungleman was able to both sharpen his game as well as find and exploit the weaknesses of opponents at all stakes.

In a 2020 interview, Cates explained the time he put into studying the game. “I had loads of free time...so I just played poker and tried to learn at it. I invested a lot of my time in that during that period. One important element (to success) would be to allocate a lot of time.”

Cates lost a large portion of his bankroll to Viktor “isildur1” Blom around 2009 before restoring it. He eventually went on to face and beat many high-stakes regs including Tom Dwan in the Durrrr Challenge where he won over $1 million in 19,335 hands. In fact, 2010 was a historic year for Jungleman who won over $5.5 million in 145,215 hands and was the biggest online poker winner for the year. He has gone on to have continued success in both tournaments and cash games. In 2014, Jungleman exceeded $10 million in profits on Full Tilt Poker alone. His tournament career is also very impressive, notching multiple seven-figure scores and amassing over $9 million in tournament earnings. His two biggest wins came from the 2014 Super High Roller in Monte Carlo and a Super High Roller event in London. Given his winnings, Jungleman’s net worth is estimated to be around $20 million. Jungleman attributes a big part of his success to money management. “Personally I always just reinvested money back into poker,” Jungleman said in the same 2020 interview. “I didn’t splurge very much at all, and I think reinvesting the money is more long term profitable than cashing out and going crazy.”