Berlin 10-03-2010
The growing awareness of the travesty of our corrupt financial institutions is slowly taking away all incentive to invest in traditional markets. For that reason perhaps poker, specifically Texas Hold ‘Em is quickly becoming the new game of the new century.
At least this way you know what your odds are and have equal chances to win, as opposed to playing the market against Goldman S(ucks)achs where we the public seem to lose every time.
If we follow this to its logical conclusion the events of Saturday’s robbery of the European Poker Tournament at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin are refreshingly old fashioned, hearkening back to kinder gentler times, when we at least knew who the criminals were!
Four suspects are wanted in the brazen daylight robbery and the possibility of two more accomplices is also being looked into.
Considering the security and amount of cameras which are to be found in and around the hotel it was pretty loose playing for this quartet to imagine an all in bet like this would pay off.
The robbery took place at 14:15 as the four entered the tournament armed with a machete and handguns. The target was the safe behind the registration table whose contents, by some accounts, held over 4 million Euro. Though it was over in a matter of minutes there was nothing smooth about it.
As the suspects were fleeing a security guard took down one of the robbers in a choke hold forcing his accomplices to come back to his rescue, threatening the guard with a machete. More embarrassing still a hotel intern managed to wrestle away one of the bags of money limiting the pot that the robbers “won” to 250,000 Euro.
Over 900 players took part in the tournament and the buy ins were between 300 Euro all the way up to 10,000 Euro for the high roller game. Seven people were injured in the incident but no one seriously.
The police believe they have a good chance of apprehending the four considering aforementioned video footage and the number of witnesses.
The caper caused the Tournament to pause for a few hours but the players eventually returned to the game.
contributed by Mr B. Brahms
