In poker, players can be most dangerous when they hold a weak hand – just ask Britain’s Godfather of poker Barny Boatman. At the age of 69 years old, the charming and calculated cockney has seen and won almost everything over the course of many decades of poker.
Last year, Boatman took home the first prize of £1.1million at the €5,300-to enter PokerStars-hosted European Poker Tour Main Event in Paris. This year, at the 2025 PokerStars-hosted Irish Open, he will be looking to repeat his heroics in the €2.5m (£2.14m) guarantee main event in Dublin.
In the Irish capital the atmosphere at the event is positively Irish: lively, pleasantly chaotic and immersive. The main room of the Royal Dublin Society has been turned green with dozens of green poker tables dominating the floor like a football pitch, while the sounds of poker chips clicking together fills the air like a horde of crickets.
Away from the poker, shuffleboard tables, numerous television screens showing football, pop-up food stalls, live music and dart boards lie in wait for those looking to celebrate their wins or get over big losses.
The competition has come a long way from its early days, as Boatman delights in telling you. Yet, when it comes to calling a player’s bluff, Boatman’s approach has changed little.
In an exclusive interview with Mirror Sport while promoting the Irish Open, Boatman outlined what he looks for and considers before he decides whether an opponent is bluffing or not. “First of all, when you are bluffing, you have to tell a convincing story in terms of the way the cards come out,” he explained.
“If a flush comes back door, you are less likely to have it and it needs to make sense in that regard – that’s the first thing you are looking for. Then you are looking for bet-sizing, people doing things a bit differently to how they normally do things.
“If you have been watching someone all day, you can get a sense of when they are confident. Sometimes people start to talk to you and that is often a sign of nerves.”
When at the table, Boatman’s absorbing, quick-wit and laid back personality is more of a shield rather than a mask. It’s difficult to figure out his intentions when his demeanour at the table is the same as it is at the venue bar.
“One of the advantages that I have got is that I am quite naturally chatty,” Boatman laughed. “I feel that I am hard to study and read, because they have got to get through all that to see what’s behind it and I am the same either way. When people try to sit there very still and do nothing and not move, often they give more away doing that than they would just being themselves.
“There is no one answer to what you look for. It’s intuition which is just processing lots of little pieces of information consciously and subconsciously and that’s all the experience coming into play. There are moments when you have just been there before and you know someone is trying to push you around.”
Boatman will be in the thick of the action over the course of the Irish Open. Given it’s his favourite competition of the year, he will be looking to take the prize, just like he did in Paris.
Speaking about the competition and its humble beginnings, he added: “This is genuinely the best event of the year, including everything, for many reasons. I’ve watched it grow from being a very small event, literally in a house in Merrion Square, a Georgian House with seven floors.
“I don’t know if we used to get 100 runners back in those days. I’ve watched it grow to what it is today, the oldest tournament in Europe. Mainly, it’s because of the people. The people here are great.
“Also, people that know you, they talk to you like a friend so there is no real distinction. I noticed in other places, people come up to you because they know who you are and they want to talk to you, but here, you are just an old friend, whether you have met them or not.”
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