Dan Cates’s Cheating Allegations: a Storm in a Glass of Water

Dan Cates @junglemandan, admitted to ghosting during a private high-stakes cash game played on a mobile app, and sincerely apologized for his behavior. Whether this action of his has made it easier for the ones that lost the money to swallow the loss, it is another story.

Mobile App Private Game Lit the Fuse

The presumed scandal happened on Saturday night, when Bill Perkins, a wealthy businessman and poker enthusiast tweeted angrily that he was cheated in a high stakes private cash game played on a mobile app, a story that would ““make the Mike Postle scandal look like a church service.”

In 2019, an unknown player, Mike Postle, was crushing everyone who was daring to sit on the same table with him in the Stones Gambling Hall in Citrus Hill, California, provided that the game was televised, prompting accusations of cheating followed by legal action against him.

A day later it became clear that a top 7 pro was playing under the screen name of an unknown recreational player, yet details regarding the name of the alleged for ghosting player were not provided. Until Monday morning, when Dan Bilzerian revealed that Sina Taleb, the recreational poker player invited to the private game, allowed Dan Cates to play from his account against Perkins, Bilzerian himself and others.

Dan Cates Admitted to Ghosting

The tweet from Bilzerian, despite being deleted, caused a certain response from the jungleman, who on Wednesday tweeted a link to a document in which he explained the circumstances around the accusations lobbed at him.

“I played very few hands against Bill Perkins, who sat in a game I understood was rampant with professionals who were ghosting. I thought since many on the site were using pros to play for them (which was clear by the uniquely high level of play) at the time it felt acceptable for me to be playing. Unfortunately Bill got caught in the crossfire and I’m very sorry for that.”

Dan Cates

Expressing his discontent at being singled out while many others were engaged in similar actions, the jungleman also acknowledged his behavior as a role model for the poker community and accepted what he did was far from ethical. But he is only a human, after all, and humans are susceptible to making mistakes, a mistake Dan Cates promised to do his best not to repeat in the future.

As a matter of fact, this is not the first act of ghosting performed by the jungleman. In 2011 he admitted to multi-accounting on European poker accounts of several players, Jose “Girah” Macedo and Haseeb Qureshi among them.

The comparison of the situation with the ongoing saga of Mike Postle, by all means seems to be a knee-jerk reaction from Bill Perkins, who admitted he used it because of the amount of money involved in the game.