It’s safe to say the WSOP may show a decrease in amount of players due to April 15′s “Black Friday.” Some big names have even declared they will be in fact absent during this year’s series. That’s a huge blow for sure.

However, there is destined to be new blood! This is great news as it keeps things interesting and makes for new house-hold names. One player that has a great shot of this is Daniel Cates. Cates is already well-known in the online poker world but now he is old enough for the live felt. He’s better known by his online alias “jungleman.” He has accumulated millions of dollars, mainly playing heads-up games.

He has more recently been seen man handling poker superstar Tom Dwan in cash games. In fact, Dwan challenged Cates to a 50,000 hand heads-up match to be played periodically. Though only 20,000 hands into it, Cates has a whopping $1,250,000 lead over Dwan.

With some new formats this year in the WSOP, specifically high stake buy-in heads-up tournaments, Cates has a great chance at either going deep in one of these or actually winning a bracelet himself.

Of course there will be a lot of other new faces that are seasoned either online or different events where the age minimum is less that 21. There’s also players older than 21 who just caught the poker bug recently. Not to mention players who were finally able to afford to play in the series by either saving up or winning a satellite. In any event, just because some well-known players opted out of the WSOP this year doesn’t mean others aren’t ready to take their place! Be on the look-out for the next big name.