There was a time, not too very long ago, when if you were not standing along the rail, you would have no idea what was happening on the felt until sometime later as you were regaled with the poker version of some old fish story, a mix of truth and elaboration about what went down. Thanks to a combination of the passage of time, distance from the actual event, and selective memory, you would get an historical account weighted heavily with the bad beats and usually omitting the suck outs. But this always occurred well after the fact, not in real time.
 
But today Twitter is a way of life for most poker players, pros and amateurs alike. From their seats at the World Series of Poker, they pull out their smart phones to deliver every bit of news from chip counts to the results of every hand they played. As I write this, Daniel (RealKidPoker) Negreanu just tweeted “67,300 on break of the NLH. Four-bet with A-Q and beat J-J then bluffed a decent sized pot.” Elsewhere, Barry Greenstein is sharing that in Event 26 there are “235 left. Average is 40k. I have 21k.”
 
The Twitter phenomenon started last year and has blown up this year with seemingly everybody—from Doyle (TexDolly) Brunson to Annette (Annette_15) Obrestad—twittering up-to-the-minute details of seat assignments, who is at their table, and their most recent hand. But while (seemingly) everyone is doing it, as your mother once told you, it does not mean it is the right thing to do.
 
Twitter seems like the antithesis of the poker face. Part of poker’s mind game is not to let opponents into your head. But with Twitter, you give them a 140-character, real-time summary of your thoughts and feelings—and it’s gold. One player at your table tweets that he is at a soft table—you see that, you change your game, start re-raising him, start pushing. Another tweets that she just was outdrawn twice—you take that piece of information and decide she may be a bit more conservative the next few hands. You no longer have to “pay to see” your opponent’s cards, just wait twenty seconds and they will tweet their hand to you and everyone on their “follow” list.
 
Perhaps a truly diabolical player would intentionally post false information to see if they could have an effect on others at their table. I doubt this has happened, primarily because it is unlikely that anyone pulling this off would not go on to tweet to the whole world how cunning they were. But it opens the possibility of Twitter being used not just to share information with friends, family or fans, but to try and manipulate others at the table.
 
In this year’s WSOP, Twitter was the location of a mini-dust-up between the elder statesman Brunson and the youngster Obrestad which started somewhere in the real world, but ended up on Twitter. A poker wunderkind with big expectations for a WSOP bracelet on her 21-year-old shoulders, Obrestad used an interview with an ESPN reporter to take potshots at other female poker players (who she claimed “sucked”) and then to call out the granddaddy of all poker players, Texas Dolly himself. Obrestad said that online players were superior to live players and that, given the choice she would rather play Doyle, implying he had a big ego and would be easy for her to beat.
 
Rather than responding in the mainstream media, Brunson took to his Twitter. “Must be a bad time of the month for Annette what’s-her-name. By the way, I’m at Bobby’s Room almost every day if she really wants to play.” Brunson later apologized in a subsequent tweet to women for his comment, while Obrestad has not yet apologized for her anti-women poker player snipe, keeping all of her tweets on her tournament status.
 
Unless and until the rules—which currently allow tweeting until players are in the money—change, Twitter is here to stay. Tweet me what you think of this trend @sharigeller.
 
Shari Geller is an attorney, journalist, reporter, blogger, poker player, and observer of the poker scene. You can write her at BurnThis2@aol.com, and read her blog at www.burnthistoo.blogspot.com.