Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy is jumping into the world of high-stakes poker.
Portnoy is set to square off against Eric Nathan, who goes by “Barstool Nate” online, in a $20,000 heads-up match. Like the freezeouts between Dan Cates and Ossi Ketola, the blinds will remain stagnant. They will play until one person has all the chips.
Nathan is the platform’s resident poker player and is the host of Barstool’s poker podcast dubbed “Cracking Aces.”
“Him and I are playing heads-up, $20k each, which is funny because he’s worth like $10 billion and I’m worth like $20k,” Nathan told PokerNews.
Nathan has a modest $63,495 in live tournament winnings, including a 717th in the 2024 World Series of Poker main event. On the other hand, Portnoy doesn’t have any recorded tournament cashes or any significant experience on the felt.
More Poker Content Coming From Barstool
Nathan and Portnoy booked the match as Barstool Sports is creating more poker content. On Tuesday, several Barstool personalities are playing on the platform’s “King of the Felt” live stream.
The event, sponsored by DraftKings, features Dan “Big Cat” Katz, Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger, and others, including the aforementioned Portnoy and Nathan.
Ben Mintz, who is known to many as “Barstool Mintzy,” is also part of the lineup. Mintz was briefly a professional poker player who traveled the mid-stakes circuit, racking up more than $642,000 in live tournament earnings.
“Me and Mintzy are probably the only two experienced players in the field,” Nathan said.
The Barstool brand has been associated with sports betting for quite some time. In fact, Portnoy briefly sold a minority share of the company to Penn Entertainment in 2020 for $163 million. Then, he sold the remaining shares in February 2023 for $388 million.
The deal allowed Penn to use the Barstool brand for their online and retail sports betting operations. Just a few months later, Portnoy bought the company back for $1. Yes, just $1.
Now, Barstool looks to build on the gambling brand with some poker content. They hired PokerGO’s Brent Hanks and Jeff Platt to do commentary for the “King of the Felt” stream.
“If we get a lot of viewers, hopefully this is jsut the beginning of poker content 2.0 at Barstool,” Nathan said.
18 Barstool Sports employees.
1 Poker Tournament.
‘King of the Felt’ will be LIVE this Tuesday 9/2 at 6pm ET on the @stoolgambling channels@DraftKings #DKPartner pic.twitter.com/VcXzc5RqPJ
— Viva La Stool (@VivaLaStool) August 30, 2025
Poker Events Build On DraftKings Deal
Barstool signed a multi-year deal with DraftKings in February 2024. It came after Penn Entertainment signed a deal with ESPN in 2023, which prompted the sale back to Portnoy.
Portnoy promised to never sell the business.
“I don’t know what the future is,” Portnoy told Fox Business. “We’re willing to adapt, try anything. But I think this deal for Barstool, why I’m excited about it, it ensures we’ll be around for another 20 years, 30 years.”
The poker tournament and heads-up match also comes as DraftKings made small forays into online poker. In August 2024, DraftKings launched Electric Poker, which was a three-handed hyper turbo sit n’ go with a prizepool anywhere between 2x and 10,000x the buy-in based on a random draw before the start of the tournament.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
