10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'My first £1million win took 25 years - it's not just a young person's game'
Barny Boatman is one of the most recognisable faces from poker's early days and secured the best score of his career after a quarter of a century playing around the world
If you followed poker in the late 90s and early 2000s, you're probably familiar with Barny Boatman from his appearances on the iconic Late Night Poker show. While some of his poker opponents from those days have taken on different endeavours, with Victoria Coren Mitchell carving out a TV presenting career and Tony Bloom now the owner of a successful Premier League football club, Boatman has shown he can still compete with the best on the felt.
Boatman was part of a quartet known as the 'Hendon Mob' alongside his brother - EastEnders actor Ross - and their friends Ram Vaswani and Joe Beevers. All four enjoyed six-figure scores during the 2000s, when poker experienced a period of mainstream growth known as the 'boom' era, with Beevers winning $1m when it was worth a little over £500,000, but they might have all given up on a million pound payday until Barny made a stunning comeback last year.
Over the past decade, the godfather of British poker - now 69 years of age - has been more selective with which tournaments he plays. He spent a few years living in Spain before returning to London to care for his mother, though there were a few poker trips, usually to Las Vegas and Dublin, mixed in.
Things changed when he won a little over £80,000 in a tournament in the Czech Republic at the end of 2023 and decided to head back out on the circuit. Two months later, he entered a PokerStars European Poker Tour event in Paris and finished first out of 1,224 entries to win £1.1million.
A little over a year on from that experience, Mirror Sport sat down with Boatman at another EPT event in Monte Carlo. There, he explained his journey back to the top - and offered up his theory on why he can still more than hold his own against opponents young enough to be his grandchildren.
"I think that one of the things I hope i'm reminding people of is that this is still the game that you love, that you play around the kitchen table, that you got involved in because it was exciting," he says. "And there's still a place for using your personality, using your people skills.
"Of course you have to adapt, there are old-school players who kind of give up because they've got their game, i'd say it's a bit like somebody who's learned a bit of French and can get by and ordeer a drink and ask directions, and they go 'Alright, that's all the French I need'. That's never going to get you into a conversation about philosophy.
"But why [poker] is fun is because there's always stuff to learn, there's always a new situation every day. You can learn a lot from solvers [poker strategy software], but things really stick in your head and you really understand them when they happen to you. And I have got a big database of experience, and that does count."
Boatman points to poker as an equal-opportunities pursuit - as long as you're of legal gambling age and can afford to buy into a tournament, you can play against some of the best and most successful in the world. He is one of more than 1,000 players to do that in the main event in Monte Carlo, where some entrants have put in €5,300 for their shot at the €1m (just under £850,000) first prize and others have come through qualifying tournaments for a lot less.
He doesn't make the money in the main event, but he does cash in several other tournaments during the multi-day festival, including a win in a smaller tournament for a first-place prize of around €20,000. It was far from his first cash in Monaco, though. Indeed, he made the money in the first ever EPT Grand Final in the very same city, back in 2005.
"What I remember is how different it was and how exciting it was [when the EPT started]," he says. "Up until that time, the Americans had had it all their own way.
"If we wanted to play in a really big event, we had to fly over to Las Vegas, probably sleep three in a bed or whatever, be jetlagged and have to deal with different rulings and with people saying 'English only at the table' when we spoke because they couldn't understand what we were saying! It always felt that we were literally playing away.
"So to have something on our own doorstep which was of the scale, which was so inclusive, so exciting, it was like all of a sudden they were shining a big light on everything. Up until then we'd been playing small events, going all around Europe, maybe the same 120 people you'd see every week, and it wasn't necessarily particularly welcoming.
"All of a sudden, because of the involvement of PokerStars they were bringing in a much wider demographic of people. They were offering people the whole experience of being in a beautiful city and all this, which they hadn't done before.
"And also it was run by poker players and conceived of by poker players. [EPT founder] John Duthie was the guy, and he knew what he was doing, he knew what we wanted, so we felt we were in good hands."
There's a case that, without that early growth, poker wouldn't be popular enough to still be paying out seven-figure prizes around the world. Boatman has certainly caught the bug once more, making the money in tournaments in four different countries this year alone, but he hasn't forgotten about what got him excited about this game long before his first recorded tournament score back in 1998.
"We used to play in a game, the Archway game, where [me and Ross] used to live, and that's recently been revived," he says. "[The playwright] Patrick Marber is in that game and we'd play round his place or around my place, so we do play a bit.
"I don't know anybody who started playing poker and then stopped. People love it. It's got everything - it's so social, it's so competitive and you can learn and improve."
