Poker News

The Hendon Mob (left to right), Barny Boatman, Joe Beevers, Ross Boatman and Ram Vaswani.

The way it began for that poker-marketing juggernaut known as “The Hendon Mob.”

They were not doing anything more than looking for agood game, these four young English men who had traveled together enjoying the good life, projecting a group persona that attracted notice.

Barny Boatman, Joe Beevers, Ram Vaswani and Ross Boatman . . . The Hendon Mob.

Who could have imagined anything close to the life they’ve lived. So where did the name come from?

“The four of us used to play in a private game in England,” Beevers says. “I’m actually the only one that comes from Hendon. The other three are from North London, which is nearby. The four of us used to travel a lot to play. This was way before TV, way before online poker and we’d walk into a room and people used to shout across the room,” Here comes the Hendon mob. We were actually given the name by the poker community.”

They were formally christened, so to speak, as the result of a London Evening Standard feature in September 2000.

The full-page story with a group shot of the four of them was headlined simply: “The Hendon Mob.”

As though they were a new slightly bratty rock group brimming with attitude, the story itself discussing the swath they had cut through competition during a poker tournament on the Isle of Man.

But they had attracted attention as individuals the year before when “Late Night Poker” debuted in England. It was the first televised poker anywhere in the world.

Boatman explains, “The four of us were all very successful on that show, not just in terms of winning, but in terms of coming across as characters.” Again, this was several years before the World Poker Tour grabbed the attention of stateside television views as the result of its partnership with a cable network and the novel use of camera technology that enabled home viewers to know more about who was holding what than the players at the table.

“We were suddenly being talked about by people as the Hendon Mob,” Boatman recalls. “I mean, we always were the Hendon mob,” but what had been an effort at tongue in cheek labeling, an inside joke was suddenly transformed into a “phenomenon” as a chance result of its television exposure. “During the finals of the tournament,” Beevers says, “they were getting like a million and a half viewers, this show that was going out at midnight.” Did he say that it was a phenomenon?

“It became a complete cult phenomenon,” Beevers continues. It was sold to Australia and Fox Sports. It has been repeated all over the world.”

And the rest, as they say, is history and the result of some very savvy marketing by people with their senses alert for what’s hot. So what is the Mob doing these days? Mostly spending a lot of time on the road traveling between such diverse locales as Southern California and the hot spots of Europe.

“We’re well into the 2005 tour now,” Boatman explained during a recent day as the “fearless four” were making their way to San Diego for another stop on the trail of poker events between Europe and Las Vegas that will wind through the year. Most of what we’re doing right now is really getting into the tour, but of course we are also cranking up the things we’re doing for Prima.”

PrimaPoker.com continues to be the Mob’s online affiliation. Prima bills the four as “our very own poker pros.”

There’s no shortage of new ideas, Boatman explains, all of them calculated to give the Mob and Prima higher profiles in the rapidly growing world of online poker.

Prima describes itself as “bringing together players fromall over the globe in a multitude of card rooms to play against each other at one of the many tables always open . . . The network brings together the thousands of people playing Prima Poker simultaneously at dozens of card rooms to create one unified body of players.

“Uniting players from dozens of sites in one seamless network has revolutionized online poker. Waiting impatiently for opponents is a thing of the past for Prima players.”

That’s what Prima has to say about itself. Visitors to the Prima website can click on to any of about 30 participating network rooms at any time. And they can play against members of the Mob . . . play with them or simply follow their accomplishments as they enter all the best known tournaments around the world. Who are the members of the Hendon Mob?

Barny Boatman is known as TV’s “Voice of poker. He has twice been the UK’s highest finisher at the World Series of Poker championship. During the inaugural Prima Poker Tour, he won the Helsinki Freezeout no limit hold ‘em event, becoming the Finnish champion.

Ram Vaswani is a former snooker professional who has been recognized as one of Europe’s premier tournament players. His poker titles includethe Amsterdam Masters Classic, Europe’s biggest event. During the inaugural Prima Tour he won seven events including the “Best Over-all Player” award at the Finnish Championships and back-to-back victories at the Luton Christmas Cracker.

Ross Boatman is widely known outside the world of poker as a popular television and movie actor, but also has a “fearsome” reputation as a poker pro. He is the defending British champion and last year was the highest money winner on the European circuit. He began the first Prima Tour by finishing second to brother Barny in the pot limit Omaha event at the Four Queens in Las Vegas. Ross gave the Mob its biggest money finish on the Tour when he finished second in the one-thousandpound no limit hold ‘em tournament at the Midland Masters in Walsall. Joe Beevers has been described as “the consummate poker professional.” He had several final table finishes during the inaugural Prima Tour, including a victory in the pot limit hold ‘em tournament in the Poker Classics at the Victoria Casino in London. “”We’ve got something new going on,” Barny says. “We call it the Hendon Mob Forum Users League. That’s where players who come in through one of the card rooms on the network, if they are registered users on our Forum, which means they all kind of know each other because of the chatting back and forth, they can play in this special tournament.”

Beevers says there are monthly tournaments. Participants score points based on how they finish in each event. Bonus points are also awarded when a player knocks out one of the Mob members.. “At the end of the year,” he continues, “We will have a tournament involving the top 10 players in the league and whoever wins that will come with us to Bellagio in December, all expenses paid, for the WPT tournament.” There’s a bit of what Beevers refers to as “Mob memorabilia” among the many other prizes that will be available during the course of these tournaments. One of the prizes will be the poker table on which the Hendon Mob used to play its earliest Hendon games - it’s a full-sized table,” Beevers adds - back in the days before the four began touring the world as poker pros and Prima spokesmen.

“We’ve had so many emails from people who are taking part,” he says, “and in less than a month we’ve already had more than a hundred people sign up for the league.”

Mob fortunes continue to improve in more ways than one, particularly when their new Prima contract is used as a yardstick for assessing the effectiveness of the four. They have signed a second one-year deal with Prima for $1.25 million, a 25 percent increase over last year’s agreement. “What we had last year,” Barny gushes, “was already the biggest sponsorship in poker, “and I can’t tell you how enthusiastic we are about this.”

The Hendon Mob has been familiar to Europeans for a number of years.

The four young men- brothers Barny and Ross Boatman, Ram Vaswani and Joe Beevers, were playing poker together long before their individual and collective personas produced the partnership with PrimaPoker.com. that saw them tour much of the poker world last year.

And now they’re at it again.

Barny says, “We have re-signed with Prima for this year for $1.25 million which is like a 25 percent increase. What was already the biggest sponsorship in poker is even bigger.” The second year of touring under Prima’s sponsorship is already resulting in new ideas intended to boost the profiles of both the Mob and Prima.

One of the most important was discussed in last issue’s first half of a recent conversation with Mob members during their recent visit to several U.S. poker tournament sites. It’s the “Hendon Mob Forum Users League.”

Monthly on-line tournaments during 2005 will lead to a final event at the end of the year among top finishers with the winner accompanying the the Mob to a WPT event at the Bellagio at the end of the year.

But there’s more.

“For the first time ever,” Barny says, “we are going to be playing in every single World Series of Poker event. If we do not get a bracelet now, there are no excuses,” laughing about that.

Can they stand the strain associated with more than a month of daily competition. Barny chuckles at the thought of what this may involve. “We’ve been in the gym a couple of times. We’re trying to eat well. Only time will tell. This is a young man’s game. Ram is probably the fittest of us. I think he can probably take it.”

All this time on the road, what does it add up to over a year?

That calls for a brief huddle before Joe says, “All together, probably a hundred-sixty or eighty days a year of poker.”

Ram says that last year they were away from their English homes for a total of nine months.

“It’s more than half of the year if you count the traveling,” Barny says, “the going back and forth between England and America. It adds up to a pretty full schedule, but we also, of course, do a lot of other things with Prima.” “We’re helping out with their card room operations and we get to spend a lot of time with the satellite winners.

Do the members of the Mob have families? Ross: “We all do . . . wives or girlfriends. I have two children and we are away from them a lot which is heart-breaking at times, but they get to help spend the money when I come home.”

Barny says, “But they also come with us on some of the trips.” On the occasion of this recent conversation with Poker Player, they were in the middle of what is scheduled as a two-week trip. During the World Series in June and July, they will, of course, be away from home for nearly two months.

“That will be a bit of a strain, physically grueling,” Barny acknowledges. “The concentration and level of fitness required to play effectively in tournament after tournament is really quite high.”

If last year’s World Series is any indication , Mob members have already shown they knowhow to rise above the pressure associated with a big event such as the World Series. Barny says he was in the money four times with one final table at the 2004 WSOP. Ram had three “really good” final table finishes. They included a third, a sixth and a seventh. Barny chuckles, “He should have won two of them.”

The poker table exploits of the four were already well known in Europe, years before the first sponsorship agreement with Prima. “We had done all the televised poker in Europe, had been around for awhile there,” The thing that sort of formalized it,” Barny says, “was when we started the initial Hendon Mob website. Of course the reason we did that of course was to try and attract sponsors, but it became a big thing on its own as we continued to produce strong results and get a lot of press.”

This made the Prima decision an easy choice, according to Beevers, when Prima went looking for a spokesperson, or, in this case, spokespeople. Barnety laughs, “Really, our first agreement with Prima was one of the quickest and easiest deals that’s ever been done in any business, not just poker.”

In the summer of 2003, the “main man at Prima” sent the Mob an e-mail and said he was coming through town. There was something important he wanted to discuss with Barny, Ram, Ross and Joe. “He said he was going to be in Covington Station for about an hour,” Ross remembers, “and he wanted to talk.”

“We didn’t know who this guy was,” Barny says. “We had never heard of the company or anything, and we’re thinking, well, we’ll get a nice cup of coffee out of it. But after 45 minutes of chatting, there we were shaking hands on a million-dollar deal.”

Barny shakes his head, recalling how stunned he was at how easily circumstances had come together to benefit the mob. “When it’s right, it’s right and you just know it. You don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about the various angles.”

How successful was this sponsorship? By the end of the first 12-month agreement, Prima had grown by about 500 percent and is now among the top on-line poker sites.

And all this parallels the soaring popularity of the Mob and its individual members.

“For instance,” Ross says, “Ram was playing in a big tournament yesterday and there were over 200 people who came on just to watch him play.”

They were participating in a recent “beat the Mob” tournament, according to Ross, each member of the Mob playing under his own name and there was a $200 bounty to whoever could knock out one of the four. About 27,000 people will go through the Prima network on any given day, according to Ross, who stresses that this is a worldwide network with about 50 percent signing on from the U.S.

“And it’s still growing,” Barny says, “growing very fast.”

Upcoming ventures that seem likely to suck up all the energy Barny, Ross,Ram and Joe seem to have include possible programming related to a European television channel recently purchased by Prima.

“They’re working on a lot of great content for the channel,” Joe says, “and we are obviously going to be very heavily involved in it.” As a Prima press release says, “Uniting players from dozens of sites in one seamless network has revolutionized on-line poker. Waiting impatiently for opponents is a thing of the past for Prima

players.?

Filed under: Poker News