The Hendon Mob are a group of four professional poker players from

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

: Joe Beevers,

Barny Boatman Barny M. P. Boatman (born 1956 in St Pancras, London) is an English professional poker player and the oldest member of the poker-playing foursome known as The Hendon Mob. He is the older brother of Ross Boatman, and resides in Archway. Dur ...

Ross Boatman Ross Maxim Boatman (born 3 March 1964) is an English actor, professional poker player and a member of the poker-playing group the Hendon Mob. He is known for the role of Firefighter Kevin Medhurst in the ITV drama series '' London's Burning'' ...

, and

Ram Vaswani Ram "Crazy Horse" Vaswani (born 1 September 1970 from Finchley, Greater London) is an former professional poker and snooker player and the youngest member of The Hendon Mob, a group of professional poker players. He resides in Finchley wi ...

. The name of the group was first publicised by the ''

Evening Standard The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format. In October 2009, after be ...

'' newspaper in September 2000. Joe Beevers is the only member of the group who actually comes from Hendon, but the others played in Hendon. The Mob first became recognised for their appearances on the televised poker programme ''

Late Night Poker ''Late Night Poker'' is a British television series that helped popularize poker in the 2000s. It used "under the table" cameras that enabled the viewer to see each player's cards. The show originally ran for six series between 1999 and 2002 ...

'' (1999–2002). The Hendon Mob also regularly attends the annual

World Series of Poker The World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a series of poker tournaments held annually in Paradise, Nevada and, since 2004, sponsored by Caesars Entertainment. It dates its origins to 1970, when Benny Binion invited seven of the best-known poker p ...

and other major tournaments. They have dozens of

in the money In finance, moneyness is the relative position of the current price (or future price) of an underlying asset (e.g., a stock) with respect to the strike price of a derivative, most commonly a call option or a put option. Moneyness is firstly a thr ...

results between them. The Mob were used in series one of the British con-art documentary series '

The Real Hustle ''The Real Hustle'' is a BBC British television series created by Objective Productions, Alexis Conran and R. Paul Wilson for BBC Three. The show demonstrates confidence and magic tricks, distraction scams and proposition bets performed on ...

'. Presenters R. Paul Wilson and

Alexis Conran Alexis Conran is a British actor, writer and presenter on TV and radio, who currently hosts the weekend afternoon show on Times Radio. He is perhaps best known for co-hosting the BBC Three show ''The Real Hustle'' from 2006 until 2012. He was ...

, posing as poker novices filming a documentary, beat the Mob by smuggling in decks stacked to their advantage.

Sponsorship

In 2004 and 2005, the Mob was sponsored by

Prima Poker Microgaming is a privately held gambling software company based in the Isle of Man. The company first developed online casino software in 1994. Overview In May 2009, Microgaming's progressive slot Mega Moolah paid out $6,374,434, the largest ...

to the tune of $2 million worth of worldwide tournament

buy-in Buying in may refer to: *Buying in (poker), a tournament entrance fee *Buying in (securities), a process in which a buyer whose seller fails to deliver the securities contracted for, can "buy in" the securities from a third party *Management buy-i ...

fees. In exchange they played on the online Prima poker-room network. As part of the tour, the Mob challenged four-player teams of various nationalities to heads-up matches, culminating with the UK versus the

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

in the inaugural Prima Transatlantic Cup in 2004. The Mob had won each of these international team matches until falling 3–1 to the US team of

Phil Ivey Phillip Dennis Ivey Jr. (born February 1, 1977) is an American professional poker player who has won ten World Series of Poker bracelets, one World Poker Tour title, and appeared at nine World Poker Tour final tables. Ivey is regarded by numero ...

, Andy Bloch, Chris Ferguson, and Paul Wolfe. The Mob's deal with Prima expired at the end of 2005. The Mob were then sponsored by

Full Tilt Poker Full Tilt Poker is an Irish online poker card room and online casino that opened in June 2004. Formerly privately owned by Tiltware, LLC and later by the Rational Entertainment Group, the site was acquired by The Stars Group (then known as Amaya ...

until September 2011, when the online poker site was accused of fraud. The deal was reinstated when Full Tilt Poker reached an agreement with the U.S Department of Justice.

Other ventures

The Hendon Mob is also a website that includes the biggest poker player database worldwide, that collects the results of every

poker tournament A poker tournament is a tournament where players compete by playing poker. It can feature as few as two players playing on a single table (called a " heads-up" tournament), and as many as tens of thousands of players playing on thousands of ta ...

in the world since 2000, indexed by location, date, and player. The origin of the information contained in the database was queried in a court action brought by rival website Pokerpages.com, and information sourced from Pokerpages.com has since been removed from the database. In July 2013 the Mob's website was acquired by the

Global poker index The Global Poker Index (GPI) is a leaderboard index that ranks over 450,000 live tournament poker players in the world. The GPI poker rankings are updated on a weekly basis. Players’ performances are assessed by their finishing positions in pok ...

Notes

External links

Official siteBluff Magazine interviewGlobal Poker IndexThe Hendon Mob Money Race since 1971
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hendon Mob Nicknamed groups of sportspeople People from Hendon