Is Nuts Poker League Still in Business? (2026 Update)
Still after Nuts Poker League?We have not confirmed a current listing, so this searches Amazon for you.
Look for Nuts Poker League on AmazonFull story →Stephen Bellis pitched the Nuts Poker League, a network of low-stakes social poker tournaments played inside pubs, wanting £50,000 in return for a 40 percent slice of the business, and reached an on-air agreement with Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden.
The league is still going today, now under different ownership.
Pub Poker With A Route To A Final
Bellis, known as 'the Badger' in poker circles, built a network of regular local play with cheap entry and a path through to a national final, and reportedly pushed back on the panel with enough confidence to make the segment memorable long after the broadcast.
Paphitis and Meaden agreed to fund the £50,000 ask for the stake in the studio, and Bellis kept expanding the league's list of participating pubs in the years that followed.
The Merger That Kept It Going
In 2014 the league joined forces with Redtooth Poker, a bigger name already running its own pub tournaments, with Redtooth taking overall control while keeping the Nuts branding alive rather than folding it away.
That kind of gradual, low-capital growth suited a founder who no longer had a Dragon's money behind him.
Where Things Stand
The league's website is still live, listing participating venues and running tournament tables, with listings scheduled out as far as 2026, close to two decades after the original pitch.
That kind of longevity is rare among businesses from this stretch of the archive, and the 2014 merger is the turning point that let the brand keep its name while gaining a bigger operator's backing.