Podcast: Barny Boatman – Poker Legend and EPT champion
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The latest episode of the awarding winning Poker In The Ears podcast is out and the special guest is non other than Barny Boatman, poker pioneer, poker legend, and now EPT champion. Fresh off his victory in Paris, where he won €1,287,000 and, aged 68, became the oldest EPT Main Event champion in history, Barny Boatman is back on PITE, six years after his last appearance.
Below you’ll find some excerpts from the 30-minute interview, in which Barny Boatman discusses that huge hand against Eric Afriat, messages of congratulations he’s received and, 25-years on, how Late Night Poker changed his life.
Whilst the majority of the show is, quite rightly, dedicated to Boatman’s performance and EPT Paris in general, the hosts also squeeze in segments on an award-winning night at the GPI awards for the PokerStars family, and, of course, Superfan vs Stapes.
You can checkout the full Poker In The Ears episode and interview on Soundcloud, or download it from various podcast providers.
The ageless Barny Boatman, an EPT Main Event champion aged 68
Q: It didn’t surprise me that your win was so well received by the poker community all around the world, you must’ve received so many messages.
BB: It’s a really nice indication of how many people I owe money to! It’s lovely, it really is, to the point where it’s embarrassing. It’s gone mainstream, it’s gone into the tabloids. They’re all doing this old man does a thing kinda angle on it.
A friend of mine, who lives in Austria, sent me a copy of the headline in Bild (a German Newspaper) which says: ‘oldest poker champion ever’. I wouldn’t mind so much, but they used a photo from 20 years ago.
With friends and people who know me it’s about other stuff, but the thing that seems to make it a such a big story is that it’s so amazing that an old fella can do this. For me, I’m amazed when young people are so great at poker. Seriously, the biggest poker tournament moment for me, up there with Moneymaker, and in some ways more impressive, was Annette Obrestad winning the World Series of Europe Main Event when she was 18.
Q: I do think there’s another reason why the news has gone mainstream in the UK, 20 years ago, at the height of the poker boom, you were one of the biggest names in the game.
BB: It’s lovely. The response feels real, it feels genuine. I’m getting a lot of love from all over the place. I do have a lot of friends from over the years that I’ve made playing poker, and other friends too. It makes it a lot more special.
Vanessa Selbst tweeted something very nice about me, she’s someone I look up to as a poker player and as a person. Things like that, it’s all a bonus. I was listening back to some of the commentary and Maria Ho was saying really nice things about me.
I was watching a bit of Day 5 just now. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, on the back of several not very good nights of sleep, and I went there as chip leader and I said to myself: “you’ve got to stay in your box a little bit, don’t give yourself too many hard decisions, because you’re absolutely knackered.”
It was a struggle at times, how I got through that day. I didn’t have too many tough decisions in big pots.
Q: Speaking of tough decisions, it seems like outwardly you said a few times, you don’t mind embarrassing yourself on a live stream. How much do you consider what it’s going to look like when you’re playing, versus not really caring?
BB: Neither of the above, I don’t play according to what it looks like, but I do care what it looks like. We’re all human, we don’t want people to think we’re stupid. It’s not so much what do other people think, it’s what do I think of myself.
Q: Were there any situations in this tournament where you deviated from what your brain was telling you to do?
BB: The big hand, the major hand at the end of Day 4, where Eric tried to bluff me and I called him down with top pair. That gave me something to think about. I was well over 50% sure that I was right. But it’s still a huge decision. It wasn’t an easy call. I probably couldn’t have made it against quite a few other players, but it was never not a call. I knew I was making the call.
I stopped for 10-15 seconds, just to think what the implications were if I was wrong, which were clear, I would be out. And then I thought what the implications were of folding, where I’d be left with an average stack and the implications of calling and being right, in which I’d have a really good chance of winning the tournament. So it was like an anti-ICM voice in my ear.
He went on about how could I call at the end of the day when your tournament life is on the line, but that’s one of the reasons he could put the pressure on so much, that was exactly why he could make this bet, because he obviously believed I couldn’t call. So the situation, what was at stake actually helped me call, when I thought about it.
Q: Let’s talk about Eric’s reaction to that hand. Were you as unbothered by it as it seemed, or did you just know that was the right way to handle the way he was speaking to you?
BB: When you win a big pot off someone it’s easy to be chilled about how they react. He’s a funny bloke, he does this thing where he tries to create bogus bonds with people, he thinks he’s better at that stuff than he is, but it’s obviously part of his game. It didn’t bother me at all, I said to someone else I enjoy interacting with people. I don’t shy away from barbed interaction. I think that if someone wants to battle in words with me then good luck to them, they’re not going to get the better of me.
It didn’t bother me, except for the extent that maybe I was on the brink of being a bit of a bully myself, which I didn’t want to be. When he was upset I wasn’t going to have a go at him. I understood, he’d made a brave move and it hadn’t come off. You’d think by his age he could handle it better, but you know, sometimes the same moment will hit the same person differently.
Listener Question: With 2024 being the 25th anniversary of Late Night Poker, how much of an impact did the show have on your game and would poker have become so big without it?
BB: Taking the second part first, yes I think it would have done, it might just have taken a bit longer. As for my game, I was actually a Seven Card Stud player when I was invited to play on that show. I was known for that game, a lot of known players were invited and said no as they didn’t want their game to be revealed. But for me, I wasn’t a NLHE player anyway, so I didn’t have much of a game to be revealed. But I also did my homework, I understood they were going to show about 15 hands a show and it was going to be about the characters.
It was a one table with quite a short stack, you weren’t going to give up much about your game. But what you were going to do was to have a chance to get in there. It was something we in The Hendon Mob particularly knew was going to happen, with sponsorship and the game getting bigger. So for me, if I hadn’t done that I don’t’ know where I would’ve been. I don’t know if I would’ve learnt hold’em as early. I don’t know if I would’ve got the sponsorship that I got that helped keep me in the game, so it definitely changed my life.
Looking for more on Boatman’s big win? Try these…
The Four Crucial Hands That Led Barny Boatman To The EPT Paris Title
Ageless Barny Boatman Lands EPT Paris Main Event Title
Barny Boatman Has X-Ray Vision
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