Product Update

Is Nuts Poker League Still in Business? (2026 Update)

Is Nuts Poker League from Dragons’ Den still around in 2026? The deal it made, the dragons who invested, and where to buy Nuts Poker League today.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 2 April 20266 min read

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The Nuts Poker League pitched a pub-based tournament poker business in series 3 of Dragons' Den, asking for 50,000 pounds for 40 percent of the company. Unlike a lot of pitches from this early run of the show, this one has a genuinely happy ending, even if the original Dragons' Den deal itself never actually closed.

The short answer

Yes, the Nuts Poker League is still going. It merged with Redtooth Poker in 2014 and the Nuts brand continues to run live pub poker tournaments across the UK today, with events still on the calendar well into 2026.

The pitch

The Nuts Poker League appeared in series 3, episode 6, in the Sports and Outdoors category. Founder Steve Bellis, known in the poker world by the nickname 'the Badger', pitched a nationwide network of small-stakes social poker tournaments run inside pubs, low buy-ins, regular local play, and a route through to a national final. He asked for 50,000 pounds for 40 percent of the business.

Bellis came across on the show as confident to the point of pushing back on Peter Jones directly, which made for a memorable segment even before the outcome was known. That kind of on-camera friction tends to make a pitch more memorable to viewers than a smooth, uneventful negotiation, and clips of that exchange have continued to circulate online long after the original broadcast, giving the business a small but steady stream of ongoing attention independent of anything the company itself was doing.

The deal that did not quite happen

Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden offered him 65,000 pounds on air, more than his original ask. But once the finer details were worked through after filming, the investment did not go ahead as agreed. This is another example of an on-screen handshake that did not survive contact with due diligence.

Rather than that being the end of the story, Bellis kept building the business independently. Pub poker turned out to have real staying power as a category, and the league grew its footprint of participating venues over the following years without the Dragons' money behind it.

The merger that made it last

In 2014, the Nuts Poker League and Redtooth Poker, another established pub poker operator, joined forces. Redtooth took overall ownership of the combined operation, but the Nuts branding was kept alive rather than being folded away and forgotten, which is exactly what has let it keep running under its original name.

That structure has proven durable. The Nuts Poker League still has an active website today, listing participating venues and running structured tournament tables, with results and fixtures showing activity scheduled well into 2026, nearly two decades after the original Dragons' Den pitch. That kind of longevity is genuinely rare among the businesses that pitched in the show's early series, most of which have either closed entirely or left almost no public trace of what became of them.

Why this one avoided the usual fate

Most Dragons' Den companies that lose their on-air investment struggle afterward, because the whole pitch was often built around needing that specific capital injection to grow. The Nuts Poker League had a structural advantage here: a pub tournament league scales mainly through recruiting more venues and players, which is a slower, more organic growth path than a manufacturing or product business needs, and one that does not necessarily require a large upfront cash injection to keep moving.

The 2014 merger with Redtooth is really the pivotal moment in this story. Rather than two competing pub poker brands slowly grinding each other down over market share, combining forces let the Nuts name keep its identity and community while gaining the operational backing of a larger, more established poker operator. That kind of consolidation, where a smaller brand survives by merging into a bigger operational structure rather than staying fully independent, is a common and often underrated survival path for small consumer brands generally.

Our honest verdict

The Nuts Poker League is a good example of a business that outlasted its own Dragons' Den deal. The investment from Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden fell through after filming, but Steve Bellis kept the league running, and the 2014 merger with Redtooth gave it the backing it needed to keep the brand alive. It is still operating today, with fixtures scheduled well into 2026, and it is one of the clearer survival stories from this early stretch of the show.

Where to buy Nuts Poker League

Still selling as of 2 April 2026. Check today's price and availability.

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See the full Nuts Poker League deal breakdown and term sheet →