“Sheriff” Polk Defeats Jungleman in $200/$400 Heads-Up Match

Online Heads-Up Legends Face Off Live in Texas

The much-anticipated duel between Doug “WCGRinder” Polk and Daniel “Jungleman” Cates was originally supposed to take place on May 28th. However, due to undisclosed reasons, it was pushed back 6 days to Friday, June 3rd.

The game was heads-up No Limit Hold’em cash game with $200/$400 blinds. The venue was the Lodge Poker Club & Cardhouse in Round Rock, TX, co-owned by Polk.

The two have battled quite a lot one on one online back on Full Tilt. Thus, the stream started with a compilation of the most interesting hands they played against each other in that era. 

For the live match-up, however, they decided to ditch their well-known online monikers. The event had an Old West theme, as an homage to its Texas location. Polk was “Sheriff Doug” for the evening. The sheriff faced off “Deputy Dan”, aka “Jungleman” Cates, at the other end of the table in front of a rowdy Texan crowd.

Jungleman Kicks Off the Match with Pocket Rockets

Only the 7th hand in, Jungleman got something to be excited about. He got dealt pocket Aces against Polk’s K5 suited. He stealthily decided to check back his Aces in position on the 734 flop. That worked out for him, as Polk first put out a bluff with his gutshot, then went for value with his rivered pair of Kings. Jungle raised it up and got paid, winning a nice $20,400 pot.

The chip lead shifted to Polk then back to Cates over the next few dozen hands. The first pre-flop all-in hand came when it was Polk’s turn to get pocket Aces which ran into Jungleman’s Queens. However, since the players decided to run the board twice, Jungleman managed to scoop half of the giant, $122,000 pot with a lucky flopped Queen on the first board. Still, “Deputy Dan” was forced to do a “tactical reload” to replenish his stack.

You can find these two hands at the 43 minute and the 2 hour 6 minute marks in the VOD below.

Sheriff Polk Takes Care of Business

With the reloads, it got hard to keep track of which player was actually ahead. Even they themselves expressed some confusion about the actual tally. 

Polk covered Cates for the latter part of the match-up. “Sheriff Doug” ended the session with a $151K stack against Jungleman’s $87K. This all translated to a profit of a little over a buy-in for Polk. He won $53,000.

The late decisive hand in the match came when Polk flopped a full boat with his K4. Unfortunately for Cates, he “got there” on the river with his nut flush draw. Thus, this $124K pot was claimed by the sheriff in town.

This was the latest addition to the recent string of high-profile heads-up matches between poker greats. Previously, we got to witness the Galfond challenge, the Polk vs. Negreanu challenge, and Phil Hellmuth’s crazy good run on the High Stakes Duel as well.

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