socialmedian: How Twitter is Changing the World of Professional Poker

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How Twitter is Changing the World of Professional Poker

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Jun 20, 2009

Summary

Doyle Brunson is seventy six years old and he says he was up late last night in Vegas. He's in a $10k game on the 24th day of the World Series of Poker and he just sent out a Tweet. "Still in 10k split," he said. "Didn't sleep much but feel OK...." Is that an intimate look inside the minute by minute, high-stakes life of a poker veteran - or is that a head-trip of a bluff intended to make his opponents think he could be slow on his game today?

The World Series of Poker is a 39 year old annual event where thousands of professional and amateur poker players fight through 40 tournaments for tens of millions of dollars in prize money. The event is different this year, because Twitter has come to the world of poker and it's changing the way the whole industry relates to the game.

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Poker is a giant industry. Online gaming is subject to all kinds of legal regulations, vagaries and pitfalls but real world competitions like the World Series of Poker have their own media covering play by play, hand by hand and tournament by tournament. Much of that media cove

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Comments (1)

Marcel,

Jun 20, 2009

"Poker is a psychological game - and you can imagine how the pros are strategizing about their use of this new method of communication.

"People are calling it Tweet bluffing," Sebok says. "It's a game within a game situation and it's effected the way the games go. It's enabling the fans at home to climb into the minds of the players but if they are smart they know they can climb into each others' minds too: to see who tilts, who rolls with the bad situations and who flies off the handle. Players spread misinformation like 'I'm going to play tight' when they are really going to play loose. We do that verbally but since Twitter is written, it seems more believable. But it's just the beginning of all this, it's blown up in last 2 or 3 months.""