The Cheesecake Factory was mobbed. We found a spot at the bar, and Cates flagged down the bartender to order the filet mignon. In the five meals Cates and I shared over three days, he ordered filet mignon three times. As we waited for the bartender to bring us our drinks, I noted our luck in finding a seat on Valentine’s Day. Without a trace of irony, Cates, who speaks in the halting cadence most often associated with World of Warcraft group chats, asked, “Why would a restaurant be any more crowded on Valentine’s Day?”

Daniel Lawrence Cates was born on Nov. 14, 1989, on the Virginia side of the Beltway, and he grew up nearby in Bowie, Md. His father works in a managerial position in a technology firm. His mother works as a manager at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He describes his childhood as “weird, a bit aloof and mostly spent alone.” Around age 6, he began to withdraw from the regular play of his classmates. “I was figuring out that my interests were different than the other kids’ at school. I was never into fashion or politics or sports. So I began to spend most of my time by myself.” Most of this alone time was spent in the basement of his childhood home, where he discovered a “natural talent” for playing video games, especially Command and Conquer. Lillian Cates describes her son’s obsession with video games as “uncontrollable”: “When he was a kid, we tried to limit his video-game time and his computer time, but it was impossible.”

At Eleanor Roosevelt High School, part of the Washington area’s network of math-and-science magnet schools, Cates was a gifted, if somewhat unmotivated, student who routinely sneaked off to the school’s computer lab to play Minesweeper, the puzzle game that has come standard with Windows since the first Bush administration. During his junior year, he began playing in local live-action poker games held in the kitchens and living rooms of people whom he describes as “not really friends.” Despite the relatively low stakes involved, Cates managed to lose several thousand dollars over a period of three months. The losses alarmed his parents, who put a freeze on his savings account. Faced with a cash-flow problem and owing $600 to a fellow player, Cates took a job at McDonald’s. But he continued to play poker with a dogged mantra. “I knew that if I just kept working at poker, my game would vastly improve,” he said. “When I started playing Minesweeper, I thought it was inconceivable that someone could clear all the mines in 90 seconds. Then I kept working at it. Before I knew it, I had accomplished what I thought was impossible. The same thing happened with poker. When I started out playing low limits, I’d look up at a guy playing with $2,000 and think, How is he doing that? He must be so good. But I just kept working at it. Eventually, everything changed.”

Within 18 months, Cates went from routinely losing at local $5 games to winning at the highest stakes of online poker for anywhere between $10,000 and $500,000 per night. In 2010, his reported $5.5 million in online earnings was more than $1 million higher than the nearest competitor. Unlike other young poker millionaires who make the bulk of their money by winning televised tournaments — a proposition that, because of the high number of players and the unpredictability of their actions, involves roughly the same amount of luck as winning a small lottery — Cates earned his stake by grinding, the term used to describe the process of pressing a skill advantage over an extended period of time. Because poker is a game of high variance, where a significant difference in ability can be mitigated by a bad run of cards, a player’s Expected Value (E.V.) must be actualized over thousands of hands. Every year, a few dozen kids go on hot streaks and take a shot at the big time. Almost invariably, these kids are eventually ground down by higher caliber players. What made Cates’s run different wasn’t his total winnings or the speed with which he earned his millions. What caught the attention of the poker world was that the 20-year-old top online earner of 2010 won almost all of his money in head-to-head confrontations with poker’s elite.

The gospel of E.V. that keeps the poker hierarchy in order was shaken. Cates had taken on all comers in 2010, including highly publicized matches against top-flight pros like Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Ilari (Ziigmund) Sahamies and his fellow young gun Tom (durrrr) Dwan. Each of these men has helped turn poker into a multimillion-dollar celebrity enterprise. Each ranks among the 20 or so most recognized players in the world. And in each of his matches with poker royalty, Cates came out hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead.