Barny Boatman: Living And Loving The Poker Life

Barny Boatman spent much of his youth traveling the world, living in numerous countries and working a variety of jobs that included factory worker, bartender, journalist, English teacher, computer programmer, board game inventor, and even movie reviewer. But it was in the poker world that he found his true calling.

The London-born player graduated from home games with his brother Ross to bigger games with fellow Brits Joe Beevers and Ram Vaswani, forming what would later be known as ‘The Hendon Mob.’ Now a tournament database site, the Hendon mob would previously travel the tournament circuit together, and was featured prominently on England’s Late Night Poker television series shortly before the poker boom.

Boatman earned the respect of his peers in the states with three (nearly four) consecutive final tables at the World Series of Poker. There were plenty of close calls, but he finally nabbed gold in 2013 in a $1,500 no-limit event for $546,080.

Boatman earned his second bracelet two years later in Germany, taking down a €550 pot-limit Omaha event at the WSOP Europe series. He’s added another five WSOP final tables in the last couple of years, including a runner-up showing at the 2023 WSOP Europe €1,650 no-limit six-max event.

Most recently, he found the winner’s circle at the 2024 EPT Paris series, pocketing a career-best $1.4 million for taking down the €5,300 main event. As a result, the 68-year-old has become the oldest European Poker Tour champion in history, and is now a member of Team PokerStars as a brand ambassador.

Card Player caught up with Boatman for an in-depth interview on the Poker Stories Podcast. Each episode profiles a well-known member of the poker world and dives deep into their favorite tales, both on and off the felt. Highlights from the interview appear below, and you can listen to the full episode on CardPlayer.com, Spotify, YouTube, or any podcast app.

Julio Rodriguez: What were some of the many different jobs you had before you found poker?

Barny Boatman: So many jobs, I don’t even remember them all. I worked in a factory. I worked as a van driver. I was a barman. I even had a job delivering filing cabinets up flights of stairs.

I did a bit of journalism and wrote film reviews. I became a teacher, for a while teaching communications and numeracy. I also taught English while living in Barcelona, and then I worked at a law center, focusing on housing and employment law. I used to invent board games. But the thing I did the longest… in my early 30s I trained to become a computer programmer, and I was quite successful at that. I ended up doing work in Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, India, and Australia.

JR: It sounds like you had quite a full working life even before you got to poker?

BB: Poker was kind of always there, to be fair. When I was in school and should have been paying attention, I was playing three card brag in the back of the classroom, or at least flicking cards against the wall and betting on who could get the closest.

But you’re right, the Archway home game, which started as recreational and friendly, had graduated into the more serious game in Hendon.

JR: Some newer poker players might not realize that the ‘Hendon Mob’ didn’t start out as a tournament results website.

BB: When we started, it was four of us. Two stalwarts in that game, Joe Beevers and Ram Vaswani, and myself and my brother Ross. We started traveling around and people always saw us together. There was a lot of mobs then. There was the Birmingham mob, the Liverpool mob, the Dublin mob, whatever. So when we showed up, we were the Hendon mob.

We all started playing tournament poker around the same time, which was the early to mid ‘90s. And as we found success as individuals, we were invited onto Late Night Poker, which started in 1999 and was the first poker show to have under-the-table [hole card] cameras.

This predated a lot of things in the poker world, even the World Poker Tour, but the four of us thought that there was a cultural moment happening. It was worth it for us to go on the show, put up our money, because we kind of had the idea that sponsorship might follow.

(Late Night Poker ran in the UK for six series between 1999 and 2002. In addition to playing, Boatman would join the commentary team for series 5 and 6. Winners included Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott, Padraig Parkinson, Simon Trumper, and Phil Hellmuth.)

In 2000, we started the website, which started more as a little fanzine to promote the game and promote ourselves. The company [has since changed ownership] but they’ve still got the logo, which is a silhouette of the four of us standing on the beach on the Isle of Man.

JR: You guys were coming out to Vegas for the series at a time when there wasn’t a lot of players crossing the pond. It was almost pioneer-like, heading out west to gamble with these unknowns.

BB: At that time, there wasn’t really anything else like the main event. The biggest casino in the UK, the Vic, would have a main event once a year for something like £500. There was only one $10,000 event, and it was in Vegas.

Before us there were guys like Devilfish and Surinder Sunar who would go and come back with stories, but we also got books like Big Deal and The Biggest Game In Town, which weren’t about how to play, but more the characters and the lifestyle. We were very taken with it.

Ross and I had actually been to Las Vegas before years earlier on a road trip that was supposed to carry on from Mexico. But we got stuck in this Omaha hi-lo game at the Plaza, and played for three days non-stop until we were completely broken.

A couple years later, I won a prize from my local card room having gotten the most points in the monthly tournament. It was a flight and hotel stay at Binion’s. I went with no money, just to watch and play a little bit of cash. The idea of putting $10,000 on the table was unfathomable. It was a different planet.

But then I went back the next year, and I won a satellite into the main event for something like $250. I celebrated like I’d already won the championship. It was very rare that I was ever as excited as I was that day, winning that seat. Since then, the series has become unmissable.

JR: You had so many close calls at the series before finally getting your first bracelet in 2013. That one featured a really long heads-up battle, which I imagine was the most stressful poker of your career.

BB: You’d be wrong, actually. It was intense, but I was lucky to have the best rail. There hadn’t been a UK winner that series, and it was near the end, so everybody wanted something to cheer for. My brother and friend got the word out, and we were buying everybody drinks. It was a huge rail, and they were being really funny and singing between hands. I felt like I was playing at home, and I massively enjoyed the moment.

[Winning] was an incredible feeling. It certainly had felt like I was going to be one of those guys who wasn’t going to win one. I had so many close calls, and felt like my moment had probably passed. I never really expected it.

But then when it happens, it completely changes your view. Now, I know I’m someone this can happen to, which gave me a lot more confidence, I guess, but certainly more of a taste for [winning].

JR: I’m sure that confidence helped with EPT Paris, beating 1,749 players over six days.

BB: Winning one of those seemed even more out of reach than a bracelet. With the World Series, you can play every day, and tournaments last three days so you can see the finish line really quickly. But there aren’t nearly as many EPT main events, so I wasn’t betting on it.

JR: You are now the oldest EPT champion ever at age 68. Do you feel any effects of age as far as endurance? Poker is interesting because we are always getting better strategically, but at some point there is a fatigue factor.

BB: That is huge. I try and do what I can to mitigate that. For example, I will always play the earliest start day in any event where there are multiple, because that rest day in between is invaluable to me. I’ve never slept well, always been an insomniac and I suffer from jet lag. So I guess in a way, I was already used to the challenges of being old when I was young.

I know that being tired will lead to mistakes, and stupidity will bite me from time to time, but it’s true that you gain experience and perspective, and with time, you don’t get overwhelmed by any situation. I know what it is.

JR: You’ve been in the game for many years. Has there ever been a time where you thought the game was evolving in a way that you didn’t like?

BB: When the game was played entirely live, there was a concept of etiquette, things you shouldn’t do, even if you could. That’s still the case, but what happened with the internet was we got a generation of poker players who thought that what you could and couldn’t do had more to do with what the software allowed you to do. It became a proxy for ethics.

The [justification] was, it lets me do it. It lets me timeout here to my advantage. It lets me call my friend and tell him what cards I got. You know, the software allows it. People’s behavior wasn’t placed in the real world, so there was a period of adjustment there before everyone came to understand that just because you could do it, didn’t make it okay.

But otherwise, I think that the game has gotten better in almost every respect. It’s gotten better in terms of the demographics that play, and better about being more welcoming to women. The software for online poker has greatly improved, and particularly with PokerStars, there is a synthesis between live and online which I really like.

I’m very much an optimist about poker. When I first started playing, I had my poker friends, and I had my ‘real’ friends. But the more time that passed that line became blurred. There was a wider choice of people to get to know in the game, and I made closer relationships. Some of my best friends are from poker, which I never would have imagined when I started playing.

My experience might not be typical, and I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways, but you know I still love it. I had a very lucrative career in programming and could have been financially secure doing that, but you only get one life. And I love this. I love this life. ♠

*Photos by PokerStars, Card Player, PokerGO, and WPT