What lessons can be learned in the wake of EPT robbery

The poker world was left reeling after a daring heist, in the middle of the afternoon, where the assailants made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of the EPT Berlin’s no limit texas holdem tournament prize-pool.

While poker robberies are nothing new, they are usually perpetrated at home games and small local tournaments where there is little security and the game often falls outside the bounds of local laws to begin with.

The brazen robbery in Berlin is the first of its kind –where a major tournament was robbed—and shocked most people in the poker world. Maybe the only more unlikely crime would be the robbery of an online poker tournament :) But, even though I was a bit shocked, after thinking about the crime, I actually started to wonder how this hasn’t happened before.

Hopefully the robbery will change a few things regarding poker tournaments, and their current Standard Operating Procedure:

1. Why do we need to have the first-place prize-money on hand in cash? This is just silly, and is done completely for the awe-effect. Since nobody in their right mind would try to haul $1 million in cash winnings out of a casino or hotel, why not just use phony money to place on the table. Keep the money where it belongs, locked up in a secure safe or in a bank. 99.9% of poker players want their winnings in something a little more portable, like a check.

2. If you’re going to hold a tournament outside of a casino, and therefore away from the safety offered in big casinos, make sure you have the proper security in place to deal with any situation that may arise. I’m not advocating armed guards patrolling the tournament floor, but there definitely needs to be multiple security checkpoints setup. Besides the prize-pool of the tournament, poker pros are notorious for carrying large sums of cash; in a major tournament with 500 entrants I would be shocked to collectively find anything less than a few million dollars in the room.

3. Even though the robbery happened in a hotel, casinos should take notice of this event, and plan for every eventuality. This time around it was 4 or 6 gunmen, but when you’re talking about millions of dollars it could easily be 20 gunmen next time. The robbery if nothing else has shaken people’s confidence in the safety offered at a major poker tournament. A poker tournament is just a trumped up home game, and one of the first things you need to do when you run a home poker game is make sure the participants feel safe and secure.

Hopefully, the EPT and other poker tours around the world have paid careful attention to what happened in Berlin, and take the appropriate steps to make sure a similar situation never happens again.