Now, I know poker tournaments are stressful.  That’s part of the challenge of playing poker — dealing with the cards and decision making while under stress and facing down an opponent.  But I don’t think it’s necessarily supposed to be as stressful as a recent poker tournament in Berlin.

Players were in the midst of the European Poker Tour’s Berlin event, which was being filmed, when a group of armed bandits held up the game.  Panic broke out and several people were injured as they tried to escape the scene, though fortunately no one was shot by the bandits themselves.  But the thieves made off with a reported 800,000 euros (about $1.1 million).  The good news is that the Berlin police say that the bandits were such amateurs that they left behind plenty of evidence to use in tracking them down.  (First sign of a bad bandit may be holding up a tournament that’s being filmed so there are extra cameras everywhere.)

But the amazing part of the story for some in the poker community is that the poker tournament began again right after the robbery.  This apparently wasn’t because the players were so dedicated to playing poker that they were unfazed by the robbery. Even tournament winner Kevin MacPhee has questioned the tournament’s desire to go forward with the games rather than give players a day off to recover.  Now, I suspect that was probably a matter of logistics. The tournament may not have had the rooms available for an additional day of play and of course camera crews cost money.  But I can’t help but think that going back to play after an armed robbery probably put a number of players off their game.  But then in poker, it always pays to keep a clear head.