Looking for the poker record of a certain player or maybe want to check out your own statistics? Most players probably head to the Hendon Mob database, which details the winnings of poker players around the world.
PokerStars ambassador and British professional poker player Barny Boatman was an original member of the Mob, a group of players and friends who traveled the world playing poker.
The collection of players, which included his brother Ross Boatman, Joe Beevers, and Ram Vaswani, went on to start the site on a lark and are amazed at what the database has become.
Beyond that, Boatman has been involved with numerous other parts of the game – from making one of the first appearances on a televised poker program to the boom of the online poker game to winning on some of the game’s biggest stages. He now has a unique outlook on his longevity in poker.
“I kind of feel like I’ve stretched a short career over a long period of time,” he says. “In the last few years, particularly, I was mostly only playing at the World Series of Poker. I wasn’t playing much the rest of the year. So people say, ‘What’s the secret of your longevity?’ I say it’s partly that is actually not playing all the time and doing other stuff.”
That other stuff in Boatman’s case is pretty interesting too. Boatman spoke with Caisno.org about his life in the game at the recent PokerStars North American Poker Tour series in Las Vegas. This card-playing renaissance man has seen just about everything on and off the felt.
Getting in the Game
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Born in London, Boatman seems to have always had a sense of wanderlust and has enjoyed numerous jobs throughout his life. After leaving school, his travels took him around the world – Barcelona, Australia, Hong Kong, and numerous other stops.
At various times he worked as a bartender, English teacher, journalist, computer programmer, and other professions. Work as a legal consultant in a poor area of England was one of his favorites.
“I was going in and helping to advocate for people who, for one reason or another, it wasn’t that easy to advocate for themselves … representing people at tribunals when maybe they’d been evicted from their house or sacked from their job or when the authorities had withdrawn the financial support that they were supposed to be entitled to,” he says. “I was pretty good at that, but it was immensely stressful because everything you did mattered so much, and other people’s lives were affected by what you did. So although I was very proud of it, I found it pretty tough.”
Through it all, poker remained a constant and Boatman regularly played in home games with friends, including his brother Ross. He discovered tournament poker in the mid-1990s and became even more immersed in the game, playing regularly at the Vic in London, where the biggest event may have had a buy-in of £500 or £1,000.
“The scale of it was so different,” he says. “If you won a tournament and won £5,000 pounds, it was like, ‘Wow, this is life-changing money.’”
And while many poker fans may look back to the WSOP and World Poker Tour introducing the world to poker on TV, where viewers could see players’ hole cards, the English show Late Night Poker was actually the first to introduce this new form of showing the game.
The series ran from 1999-2002 and Boatman reached the finals in the third and fourth seasons. Considering his more than his years in the game, how does Boatman feel about seeing how far poker has come?
“It’s amazing,” he says. “Obviously the two big factors are the Internet and TV. Although I think I was one of the people who foresaw some of it, certainly in terms of it having its cultural moment and it being something where the interest would spread and televising it in a way where you brought out the characters and managed to bring the game into people’s homes. That was going to be a thing, but obviously I never foresaw the scale of it and what the Internet would do.”
Hendon Mob & Beyond
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The Hendon Mob was originally just a group of friends who traveled to play poker. But the group wanted to raise the bar for the game and a way to track their results at tournaments all over the UK. They played in a regular home game in Hendon, a suburb of London, hence the name Hendon Mob.
In the late ‘90s, Boatman and his brother Ross always believed there was a chance for televised poker and even sponsorships down the line.
They envisioned that a database that detailed player results could help in that regard, along with appearing on shows like Late Night Poker.
“I used to be a programmer before I went full time in poker, and we had this idea that to create this website, which was just like a little fanzine really,” he says. “It was something to promote the game and to promote ourselves and position ourselves, maybe when sponsorship came along, that we might be attractive to sponsors.”
That view proved to be very forward thinking and the site eventually became much more than a fanzine. The site soon attracted some advertising and casinos and tournament operators began sending in results.
The Mob even received a backing from a European betting exchange and the group was charged with creating odds and bios on players for betting. Players began asking why their own tournament scores weren’t listed and the business began to snowball.
“We realized there was a real thirst for this stuff,” he says. “It was part of the idea we had about promoting poker as kind of like a sport and something people could have a bit of national pride about and to compare themselves with other people.”
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That led to site-sponsored team events to garner more publicity for the site and for poker in general. The database continued to grow as poker exploded in the early 2000s. In 2013, the group sold the site as it continued to grow.
“It was, ‘well, we can either be business people and keep this thing going, and look for said advertising, look for new relationships with other (online poker) sites or else we could do what we really set out to do in the first place, which is to be poker players,” Boatman says. “So for one reason or another, when the offer came along, it was a perfect time for us.”
By 2000, trips to the WSOP became a regular part of the poker pro’s routine and Boatman now has $5.6 million in live tournament winnings including two WSOP bracelets. At the annual summer series in Vegas, Boatman targets events that best suit his game, not necessarily all the higher buy-in events that attract top pros.
“I found in recent years, particularly, that you get to know over time how to play particular places and particularly festivals,” he says. “I got better and better at being at the World Series, and knowing what suited me. I would play a lot of the $1Ks, the $1,500s (buy-ins), with the really big fields. And when you get deep, you can win half a million or a million. I found in recent years I have come out in front on those trips and it was keeping me going.”
PokerStars & EPT Success
At a time when younger players are constantly studying GTO and other theories and poker strategies, many in the game were happy to see one of the game’s “old school” players rise to the top earlier this year. In February, Boatman took down the EPT Paris main event title for $1.4 million, the largest score of his career.
“It’s fantastic because I’ve reached a point in my life where, some of my responsibilities and all the rest of it allowed me to go back and start playing more,” he says. “I started playing more around Europe in the last couple of years and made the World Series of Poker Europe main event final a couple of years ago. Because of that, I started playing some of the World Series Europe events, and made a few more finals there and came second in one. I decided, ‘Okay, now I’m going to start playing a couple of EPTs.’
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“I used to play with EPTs a lot back in the early days, and I felt like, maybe my moment had passed when I might win an EPT, because the fields got bigger, they got tougher, people from the States are starting to come over and play. I always felt my game could take me quite a long way in these tournaments.
“I never really genuinely imagined winning one. So many things have to go right over such a period of time. You have to get away with the things you need to get away with. You have to read situations right. So it felt like a vindication that I’m right to still think it’s worth putting myself into these events.”
One particular call from Boatman against three-time WPT champion Eric Afriat from that particular event went viral among poker fans and helped propel him on to the title. Check out the massive hand below.
In Las Vegas, Boatman was pleased to see PokerStars bringing live events back to the U.S., where the company operates online gambling platforms in Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – as well as in the Canadian province of Ontario. Online qualifiers from around the world converged on Sin City.
“I think it’s great, and I think it’s necessary and really nice because it feels like being here there’s a bit of the best of both worlds in terms of the USA has always been the home of poker,” he sa. “You’ve got a typical American event, but they’ve kind of brought all that kind of EPT (European Poker Tour) structure and know-how.”
One thing is certain, Boatman is loving getting in the action – win or lose – after some time away from the game to care for his ill mother. After a few decades in the game, he still gets a thrill out of hitting tables.
“I’m loving the fact that I’m playing a lot more at the moment,” he says. “It feels like it’s really rejuvenated me a bit, at least in poker terms.”
Title Image Credit: PokerStars