Twitter: The WSOP's Biggest Star?

[Nathan]

From the PAP News page:

June 23, 2009 (PAP Newswire) -- Everyone knows that Twitter is transforming the way we do business and interact on the Internet. However, that doesn’t seem to be the limit of its power. A recent article in the New York Times illustrates how Twitter has become a dominant force in the world of land-based professional poker, as well.

Using poker superstar Doyle Brunson as an example, the article starts off by explaining how the seventy-six-year-old poker guru has been sending out regular Tweets to his fans during his current run in the World Series of Poker.

“The event is different this year,” writes Marshall Kirkpatrick, describing this year’s WSOP, “because Twitter has come to the world of poker and it's changing the way the whole industry relates to the game.

“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,” he continues. “Much of that media coverage now goes on online. As a growing number of poker players are beginning to send out short messages to the world via Twitter, existing poker media is being disrupted and the news sites are scrambling to out-compete with each other in responding to the players' direct and immediate communication with their fans. Players are reading each others' Tweets, too, and that has consequences.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this piece is the fact that it uses online poker as the yardstick by which regular poker’s popularity is measured, as we see in the quote above. That represents an acknowledgment that online poker has become the more popular venue for the game, something that mainstream media hadn’t acknowledged until very recently. (It also represents a new interest in Internet poker by a mainstream media, which in turn may help the drive to legalize online poker.)

To read the full story in the New York Times, click here.