Barny Boatman Bubbles

One of the more interesting events of the WSOP is the $ 5,000 No Limit Hold’em Shootout. Essentially a series of sit&gos 280 players entered this year and played a single table tournament with 8 or 9 players, only the winner progressing. From there, the remaining 30 players did the same again across six 5 handed tables. The winners of those then progressed to the final table.

It requires a far different skillset from your standard multi-table tournament as there is no reward for coming second so the emphasis is on building up a chip lead and finishing the job off. The Hendon Mob’s Ram Vaswani won a similar event in 2007 and his Mob partner Barny Boatman was close to reaching the final table here.

Boatman won his first table to advance to the ‘semi-finals’ where he found himself sat between Jennifer Harman and Phil Ivey – not the easiest of table draws! The plucky Brit made it to heads up though where after a long battle he eventually succumbed to Nasr El Nasr to narrowly miss out on a great opportunity for a first bracelet.

Eventually, it was Hungarian Peter Traply who won the tournament on a final table absent of any star names. He takes home $ 348,755 while yet another player from the UK dreams of what might have been.