Jungleman's scandal

If you have any interest in online poker, you've surely already read something, somewhere about the "Girah" scandal that seems to be unfolding more every day. If not, you could start with posts by F-Train and Shamus today for links and thoughts about the whole mess.

Dan "Jungleman" Cates is caught up in the scandal. He clearly backed, tutored, and trusted Jose Macedo, and was apparently planning to move to Portugal to live with him. That degree of closeness to what now turns out to be such flagrant cheating naturally causes suspicion that Cates himself was more involved than has so far been admitted or proven.

You will understand that I'm naturally inclined to view Cates in a good light. After all, the list of people in my life who have handed me $10,000, with no expectation of getting anything back from me in return, is pretty short. So I'm definitely biased, and you would be right to keep that in mind when evaluating my opinion.

It is also true that I'm not exactly on Cates's list of close friends. We've met a few times because of his WSOP seat giveaway, and I spent a pleasant, almost surreal hour over brunch with him discussing strategic approaches to my Main Event play. But that level of contact hardly makes me an expert on his character, his thoughts, or his actions. I have his cell phone number and he mine, but there's little reason to think that either of us will have occasion to use them, now that the WSOP thing is over and done with.

With those caveats firmly in place, I want to express my opinion that Cates is genuinely a good guy at heart, and is constitutionally incapable of the degree of scumminess that would be required for him to be complicit in the scandal. The facts that have been revealed so far basically require one to choose between believing that he was a co-conspirator (or, at least, in the know but not taking action on the shadiness he knew was afoot) or that he was incredibly naive. Given those alternatives, I have no hesitation in casting my vote for the latter.

My overwhelming impression of Cates when meeting him in person was that he ranked high on the nerd scale. I don't say that in derision; I wear the label proudly myself. He spent years perfecting video game play before discovering that many of the same skills could translate to poker and reap huge profits. I think Terrence Chan's sympathetic post about the roles of trust and loneliness and desire for social contact and peer acceptance within the online high-stakes-poker world are perceptive and likely to be an apt description of Cates's frame of reference in this thing.

Remember that just about two weeks ago Cates made a little splash in poker news because he decided to move to Canada in order to resume playing online poker. He flew to Vancouver, only to be sent back to the states by immigration officials because, apparently, he told them the truth--that he was moving there permanently to make his living. He seems to have had no clue that this would require first obtaining a work visa. It would not surprise me if he didn't understand what a U.S. "green card" was, or that other countries had equivalent things. My guess is that it never even occurred to him that there were strict laws and rules about taking up permanent residence to generate an income in another western democracy. While I found the episode amusing, I think it sheds some light on the degree of naivete that Cates brings to many real-world situations. His youth and relatively cloistered years of online play (video games and poker both) have left him ill-informed of and ill-prepared for many of life's challenges outside his ken.

Don't get me wrong--he's not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I judge him to be exceptionally bright. His aptitude for poker in particular is off the charts. I don't mind admitting that he thinks through poker situations ten times faster than I do, and I sometimes had a hard time keeping up with what he was trying to explain to me. But a narrow field of even the most phenomenal talent does not necessarily equip one to deal with, say, people whose values are so perverse that they're willing to feign a long friendship in order to run a big-money scam.

Some observers feel that Cates's interview with Bluff magazine yesterday further raises the level of suspicion about him being dirty. Take this exchange, for example:

Many have speculated that Jose is just a face/name attached to the account and maybe Haseeb or others were playing on the account. We know of at least one instance where this Haseeb played on Jose’s account. How can you be 100% certain that Jose is the one playing all of the hands on that account?

I am very certain that all hands played on Jose’s account are from him (unless Jose has allowed others to play on his account) except for the one instance in where Haseeb admitted to playing on his account. Almost certainly, over 95% of the hands are Jose’s.

When Jose was disqualified from the BLUFF Poker Challenge on Lock Poker, did you know it was Haseeb who had played on the account?

Yes, but I did not want to get involved. I know it was not a habit.

Surely nearly everybody reading this wants to ask the obvious follow-up question: How can you be so sure of those things? After all, I think the natural reaction to being shocked to learn that your friend has been cheating you and a bunch of your buddies out of a lot of money would be to say, "I don't know. I didn't think there was anything shady going on, but now that I see how badly I misjudged what he was capable of doing, I have to start doubting everything I thought I knew about him." Cates doesn't do that. He still retains faith, somehow, that the account-sharing was an isolated incident--in fact, says he is "very certain" of this, and that he "know[s]" it was "not a habit."

Some people apparently read this as evidence of his complicity--he's aiding in the cover-up, trying to minimize the problem. My reaction is to want to dope-slap him and make him reevaluate more critically what he actually does and does not know about his friend, carefully segregating what he knows from what he believes, and both of those from what he just wants to be true. To me this passage reeks of naivete further blinded by optimism and a friend's loyalty, not of a clumsy attempt at whitewashing.

Of course, I could be dead wrong. He might be guilty as sin, and when it all comes out I'll be the one with egg on my face for speaking up on his behalf. I don't think so, but I have no way of knowing for sure, no special insight. However, my experience with him, brief and shallow though it was, makes me highly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If expressing my opinion in this regard makes others temper their judgment in the same way, then I'll feel I've done what I set out to do here.