The recent poker scandal involving an unattended bag of monies and an alleged five finger discount has sent me into therapy mode.

What trauma have I experienced in my past to be immediately triggered to hot, unsympathetic rage when people leave bags of their money lying around? I don’t mean leaving it with a friend who steals out of it, I mean you leave it lying about someplace and someone whips it.

I cannot understand forgetting your handbag.
Spending time on the London Underground in the late 90s and early 00s may have made me very aware of my handbag’s whereabouts given that leaving it unattended on a bench could result in the bomb-squad robo-blowing it up.

I especially cannot understand forgetting one’s handbag when it’s stuffed full of cash, or anything that has value, financial or sentimental.
Maybe I have extremely early trauma from losing a favoured toy at school and my tiny, Scottish mother saying dryly “well that wes ye oan stupid fault”, but if I leave something somewhere, I don’t expect to get it back.

The couple of times I have left something with any value and got it back, it’s been a similar emotional experience to gambling on slots and getting lucky. This suggests I do expect loss when I leave something with value lying about, because I feel like I win when I get it back. What loss am I expecting if I believe nobody could ever stoop so low as to take my unattended property from the public place where I abandoned it?

I have never been mugged at knife point, nor beaten senseless and robbed. Never been carjacked nor held up at gunpoint. There is no immediate single event that I can point towards in my past that excuses the instant trigger to victim-blaming a guy who may have had his money stolen from him because he left his bag of cash under a chair whilst he wandered off.

Maybe I’m unsympathetic because I spent most my adult life in a low-income job. Maybe it’s because I lived on a housing estate for many years with people who barely earned in a year what was in that bag.
Maybe I’m just a proper cunt.

All of these things are possible, but I can’t help it that when somebody leaves their money lying about and it gets robbed, my first thought is “well… what did you expect?”.

I’d like to be extremely clear that I don’t think it’s okay to take someone’s money just because it’s been left lying around, I simply do not feel any sympathy for somebody who abandons a bag of cash and then cries about it going missing.

I am, overall, positive about the nature of the average wo/man on the street. I think most people would have found that bag, and probably handed it in without looking inside it. I think because most of us would never consider taking the bag to the toilet, let alone taking money, we are instinctively horrified at the wo/man who takes the bag anywhere except immediately to the lost and found.

Because it’s what we would do.
Until we wouldn’t.

What’s your price? There is one. Might not be money, and you might not realise how instinctive it would be.

I was working an early shift at a casino and was coming back from break shortly after morning count and cashier change. The cashiers/count team had made a huge mistake and left around 500k£ in neatly bagged £50 notes in the corridor to the gaming floor, about 40meters from an unalarmed staff smoking exit. I earned £16.5k p/a pretax and I instinctively knew I could snatch those two bags and be out of there and on a plane before anyone even noticed the money was gone (ie next count in a few hours).

My legs, arms, feet, genuinely started moving towards that money and I very nearly did it. I cannot lie, the thought was in my mind for more than a second, and I wasn’t fully in control of the thought, nor fully in control of my body whilst the thought was in my mind.

My instinctive movement towards that money ended up being a knock on the door of the cashdesk, my cashier friend keeping her job and me not stealing from my employer.
Of course it did, or I wouldn’t be telling you that story, but I promise you, it was very nearly different.
It would have been so easy. With every normal security procedure accidentally suspended by the errant cashiers, it was a complete cakewalk of a theft; looking back, it was almost rude not to.

I absolutely know I’m not above it, turns out my price is higher than 500k£, but I know I could do it. You have been forewarned not to leave your money lying around near me; I am just a monkey. Do not suspend normal security procedure around me with more than 500k£ in your handbag, because my muscles will absolutely start to twitch. I am not sure of the exact line, but 500k£ was close.

It seems like a weak comparison between allegedly stealing a huge sum of money off a casino versus a few grand out of some dude’s handbag. The victimless corporate crime versus potentially stealing the bread from the mouths of one man’s children might be far apart in terms of social media optics, but they each expose the same truth about the individual alleged thief; we have a price to cross our own moral line. The line where we deem something to be “wrong” and continue to do it anyway.

Knowing I have a price, I will not judge another man for his. I can say what was allegedly done is wrong, without judging the reason he did it. I can say an act is wrong without the cash value being relevant.

The reason casinos have strict procedures to protect extremely liquid assets is not because they do not trust their employees, it’s so nobody has to have the burden of trust.
Had I stolen that money from my employer it is unlikely their insurance company would have paid out, and I would not have felt sympathy. Maybe they should employ an extra cashier so everyone’s not so tired and making stupid errors as a result.

If your assets aren’t worth basic protection measures to you when you have them, I won’t join you in crying when you lose them. I can say it’s wrong for someone else to pick the low hanging fruit and take that handbag, I can agree it’s unfair that you lost your stuff when so many of us get lucky and get it back. I can still be without sympathy because you’re the soft twat who left your handbag lying about.

In terms of a solution to the problem in the live poker world specifically, I would suggest deploying the London bomb-squad from the 90s any time a bag is left unattended and taking the cost of that requirement out of the prizepools.

Poker players might absent-mindedly leave 20k$ lying around in a handbag, but they will snap pay attention if you appear to randomly take $500 out the current prizepool.
There’s a generation of Londoners who never let go of their handbags, and we need some of that energy in live poker.

Whether you are a large company or one lone dude, get a grip on your handbags. If there is something of value to you, don’t accidentally leave it in the path of the primal temptation we all have to commandeer abandoned resources in excess to our immediate needs, at least make a thief fight you for it like a civilised animal.