Daniel “jungleman12″ Cates has had a very successful year in many respects. The newly-turned 21 year-old spent the latter part of his year traveling across the United States, spending time with both friends and family while enjoying the liberties of his new-found legality. While the month of December is certainly the time of year where grace, giving, and congeniality are heavily apparent, when it has come to the poker felt, Cates has been anything but.
Although many consider him one of the most sincere and forthright individuals in the online poker world, Cates has been absolutely ruthless in his accumulation of earnings in 2010. Cates is well over the $5 million mark for earnings this year, and after a very successful session against Patrik Antonius which awarded him $325K, he’s certainly had some very happy holidays in recent memory.
Last night on Full Tilt Poker, the pair spread across eight tables (four at a time), playing $300/$600 HA, which is a mixture of No-Limit Hold’Em and Pot-Limit Omaha where the game changes every 10 hands. Both Cates and Antonius participated in two different sessions during this time. The pair began just after dinner in their first session, in which they played just 436 hands, over nearly two hours. In this session, Cates jumped out to an early lead for the night of $88,968. While this is certainly a respectable profit for the day for most players, the high five-figure amount was something Cates has accumulated almost daily as of late. The pair decided to continue their play later on in the evening. And once again, the second installment of their matchup went in jungleman12′s favor.
In the second go-round, jungleman12 amassed $237,896 in earnings. Playing for nearly identical statistics, with 456 hands played in over two hours, the result was the same as well, with Cates dominating Antonius for most of the match. Despite the Finnish player winning over $73K on one of the tables, it wasn’t nearly enough to comeback from his deficit.
Overall, Daniel “jungleman12″ Cates is up $5,198,049 over 764 individual sessions for 2010. Outstanding!
Meanwhile, in other news, the German Limit Hold’Em specialist IHateJuice has been having some incredible battles with both Patrik Antonius, and the overall best poker player in the world Phil Ivey. Recently, in a conversation with Ivey, the unknown German pro requested that Ivey ask Full Tilt Poker for higher stakes Limit Hold’Em tables. Well soon after that conversation, IHateJuice quickly received his Christmas wish, when Full Tilt Poker opened a $3K/$6K 6-max table for the unknown limit specialist last night. Sitting with over $120K in his stack at the newly-opened table, unfortunately last night, IHateJuice didn’t receive much action. However, IHateJuice also mentioned in conversation with Ivey that since it was in fact Antonius that wished to play at these nosebleeds stakes, it should only be a matter of time before we see some intense action on Full Tilt Poker.
Despite the tables being full of high stakes professionals recently, a world-class soccer star has been participating in his fair share of the action as well. Despite Patrik Antonius usually being the all-around sport star we’re referring to, this time we’re commenting on the international superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.
Being seen on Full Tilt Poker playing under the alias “CR7sete”, Ronaldo has recently spent his time away from the green pitch and instead, at the green felt. He’s recently logged sessions against Antonius at $25/$50 No-Limit Hold’Em, as well as a short session against Cates at similar stakes. Although Ronaldo has showed some ability at the tables, I’m not quite sure if it’s in his best interest to be consistently playing either of those opponents. While CR7sete did gain a bit from both players in the early sessions, only time will tell if Ronaldo’s game will hold up against the pros in the long run. Hopefully, we will see more from him in the upcoming week.
Despite jungleman12 being the biggest winner last night, there were several other online pros who has successful evenings. Ben “Sauce1234″ Sulsky gained $251K, Jared “harrington25″ Bleznik accumulated $124K, and unknown player Arbianight earned $118K.
The big losers for the night were Patrik Antonius ($330K) Scott “URnotINdanger2″ Palmer ($320K) gamblegambel ($230K) and IReadYrSoul with ($133K).
High Stakes Report will continue to bring you updates of all of the latest high stakes action. .
