Well it has been quite a few weeks. After a frustrating week or two of poker in London I flew from Amsterdam to Aruba on the 3rd. I knew immediately that I was in for a great week. I managed to convince my brother Nick to come out to Aruba for the first time so I had a partner in crime. Plus alot of good friends were going to be there. I really do have more and more fun every year in Aruba.
Day 1 Sun Oct 4: Nick and I rented a Catamaran sailboat (a Hobicat) and managed to capsize it only twice. It’s a bit of a pain to get them right side up in the middle of the ocean but well worth it for the fun and adventure. It was really a blast… we went sailing another 3 times during the week. We hung a few hours on the beach with some friends then headed back to the room to get ready for the opening party. Little did I know what an EPIC night we had in store. Things started off a bit tame (by which I mean a normal fun party), but about an hour or two into it people started getting rather drunk, and well… a massive epidemic of people getting thrown into the pool ensued. I must admit that myself, my brother Nick, and some other team UB pros were the main culprits behind this. We would spot someone in the crowd who we thought should be in the pool, and like savage hunters track them down and throw them in kicking and screaming (FYI they were fake screams… interesting fact: people love being thrown in pools! ). We were good though… we always gave our victim the opportunity to empty the pockets of cell phones and other stuff and give them to a friend before getting thrown in. Before long, it seemed like the entire party was in the pool. The award for toughest fighter goes to the newest UB team pro Joe Sebok… that kid is scrappy and strong… I think it took 4 of us to get him in the pool! But once he was in the pool, he came to see the wisdom of it all!
Day 2 Mon Oct 5: This was day 1A of the main event and we had the day off. A fun mostly lazy day on the beach interrupted only by going tubing. Four of us could go at a time on our own separate tubes and boat driver was on a mission to sling us around and knock us off. Quite exhilarating and fun. Dinner out in town at an awesome restaurant Madame Janette.
Day 3 Tues Oct 6: Time to play poker! We started with 15k in chips and as usual with tournaments run by Matt Savage the blind structure was very good. I finished the day with 41k I think, a bit above average. Off to bed early.
Day 4 Wed Oct 7: Nick and I woke up early to go for a swim in the ocean and then sailing before the noon day 2 restart. The winds were fairly strong and the skies ominous. We got pretty far from shore and decided that a fun way to practice sailing would be for one of us to jump out of the boat and have the other tack back to “rescue”. I was the first overboard and my brother decided to sail past me a few times just for fun before picking me up. Next it was Nick’s turn: he jumps overboard, and almost immediately the winds pick up. I am doing my best to control the small boat, which is going faster than ever. Before I even know what’s going on the front of the boat is plowing into the water and I am at 45 degrees… very close to flipping but I managed to lean back and counterbalance. I turn around and tack back towards Nick just as it starts pouring rain and lightning and thundering. It is getting a bit scary, but as an experienced seaman (this is my 2nd time sailing) I wasn’t fazed . I pick up Nick and we decide to head in… the only problem being that it is raining so hard we cannot see the shore. But a good sailor has an internal compass so we made it back safe and sound, in time to play some poker. Sadly the day didn’t go well for either of us. I built up to over 80k early on and was in strong position, but everything just fell apart and I busted in the evening… so I was stuck on a tropical island with tons of fun leisure/adventure activities and a bunch of cool people. Sigh.
Day 5 Thurs Oct 8: Horseback riding! Went with Nick, UB pro Liv Boeree, and Allie Prescott who sadly had to bail at the last minute do to illness. It was a blast, we got to gallup along the beach and mosey through the Aruban countryside. Great big group dinner.
Hung out in the pool for a while around midnight with a bunch of friends and UB pros. Went out to some clubs late night with Joe Reitman and ran into a bunch of great people. Walked home at 5am.
Day 6 Fri Oct 9: Another day of beach bumming and sailing. Good times. Then in the evening to Phil Hellmuth’s party in the penthouse suite. As usual, a great party. Lots of free flowing Dom Perignon, plus a performance by The Dan Band, who were awesome and funny. Oh yes and there was a rapping competition between Jeff Madsen and the Poker Rapper.
Day 7 Sat Oct 10: Lazy day shopping, getting lunch, then went out on the Waverunners. Had a blast once I figured out how to do 360’s. More beach bummery with the crew. Throwing around the nerf football and such. The closing party was that night, featuring another performance by The Dan Band, and another episode of debaucherous pool throwing and frolicking (see day 1).
Day 8 Sun Oct 11: Time to leave Until next year Aruba!
So now I’m back home in Vegas, playing some poker at the Bellagio and just catching up on life. Played the 10k HORSE event 2 days ago, which got only 19 players. Busted on day 2 yesterday. Probably playing the 10k PLO tomorrow… check me out on twitter for updates!
I headed off on Wednesday of last week to go to Adventures of the Mind, an amazing mentoring summit. The program brings together 150 of the smartest high school students in the country with mentors who have gotten to the top of their respective fields. The summit was held at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. I found myself in a room with 9 Nobel prize winners, the founder of Twitter, the head of Mozilla and John Nash (just to name a few of the mentors). I was honored to be in the same room with such great minds including 9 Nobel Prize Winners. Even cooler for me was that IAS was the place where John von Neumann was a professor. I speak of von Neumann several times a year in my poker seminars as he was the father of Game Theory. Any poker player should revere von Neumann and I got to walk the very paths that von Neumann walked. Oh, and Einstein walked those same paths too. He was appointed to the IAS in 1933 at a salary of $15,000 a year which was a buttload of money back then. Freaking amazing experience for me.
Anyway, getting to Adventures of the Mind was pretty harrowing (as was getting home). I planned to take an 11:30 pm flight on Continental out of LAX. I got there and the flight was delayed an hour which turned into 2 hours because flights before mine were already stacked up late. When we finally got on the plane it was already 1:30 in the morning and I was exhausted so as we starting taxiing to the runway I fell asleep. Pretty quickly I was woken up by an announcement that we were taxiing to the gate. At first I thought that I had gone out hard and clearly slept through the whole flight. To my dismay, though, I realized we hadn’t even taken off yet when the rest of the announcement said we had to go back to remove a woman from the plane. That would be a DRUNK woman from the plane who had gotten up and walked to the bathroom during takeoff to throw up! I am not kidding here.
So I was up front in business class so I got to eavesdrop on everything that was going on. We got back to the gate and the maintenance people had already gone home so we had to sit there for a over 15 minutes while they found a maintenance person to open the door of the plane. The whole time this drunk lady and her friend were complaining about how they didn’t understand why they had to be removed from the plane. Didn’t the flight attendant think they had already been embarrassed enough? The answer to that was, “No!” No one told them that they could get up and walk around the plane during taxi and takeoff! Okay…aside from the fact that the flight attendants made their normal safety announcements as we were leaving the gate and I would have to ask, “What the hell planet do you women live on? Everyone knows you can’t get out of your seat during taxi and take off.” Oh, and the final complaint of these women was, “Don’t you know you are ruining our weekend?” The answer to that was, “It’s Wednesday.” I thought that was pretty funny. My own personal answer was that they were doing a pretty good job of ruining my day.
So they finally remove these women from the plane. As a side note the one who threw up claimed to have only had two glasses of wine. I’ll take the over on that one. Anyway, they find the maintenance people who now have to clean the bathroom this woman has thrown up in. Apparently, she didn’t throw up in the toilet but in the sick. Now I am sure everyone has seen a plane’s bathroom sink and it is tiny so the whole thing was clogged with some nasty, chunky throw up. I felt pretty bad for the maintenance worker with that one. It took her about 15 minutes to clean that gross puke up. Ew!
Okay, so finally around 2 am we head toward the runway again and I arrive in Princeton almost three hours late. Thanks drunk lady! You made my day!
So I spent the next two days at The Institute for Advanced Study. I listened to some amazing spoken word artists, heard the story of how Captchas, those distorted words you have to type on the internet to prove you are a human, are now being used to digitize books. Check out http://www.recaptcha.net to find out about that. And Luis von Ahn who is the brains behind that operation (and an amazing speaker I might add). I got to hear from the president of Rhode Island School of Design, here the founder of Pixar speak and also hear from the inventor of the Ultima series of games. And that was just a sampling of the great minds I had access too. It was incredible to see these high school students enrapt by the speakers. Knowing that I was a part of an experience that will stay with these high school students their whole lives and have such a deep impact on them (it definitely had a deep impact on me).
My talk to the students was about how I found my way into poker which was really just a message about understanding that just because you are really good at something does not mean that it is what you are meant to be doing because no matter how good you are if it doesn’t light you up inside it is not the path you are meant to take, no matter how many mentors have invested time in that path or the obligations you feel towards them. In my case, I was very good at the academic path I had chosen as a young woman. I had gone to an Ivy League college, and Ivy League grad school. I had secured a very prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship to go to grad school. My mentors and advisors had put a tremendous amount of time and effort into me and my education. And, frankly, I was a very good scientist.
But when it came down to it the only thing that was keeping down that path was a fear of failing my mentors and my parents. Had I not had the guts to leave I would never have gone down the poker path, a path that I have true passion for. A path that lights me up inside. And had I not had the guts to leave, I might never have founded Ante Up for Africa, or found my way to the board of Decision Education Foundation. I might never had the platform to accomplish the humanitarian efforts that have already been so important to me. So it all came together in the right way for me because I realized that, in the end, the only way you fail your mentors is by failing to fulfill your potential by finding the thing that makes you happiest.
So that was my message to the students. I mean it wasn’t like I could talk about my Nobel Prize winning research like some of the other speakers! I left on Friday, thinking I was going to play The Bike tournament. And my flight was delayed 4 hours. I have been having horrible luck with travel lately. By the time I finally got home to LA I didn’t get to sleep until almost 6 am so I was too exhausted to even play The Bike. I wish I had known because I certainly would have stayed an extra day at the summit. All around, the return flight being delayed really screwed my. But hey, at least there wasn’t a drunk lady on that flight. Way to go Continental!
As poker players and fans of competition in general, we like to make things fun. In response to the overwhelming and continued support of the Ultimate Bet community and beyond, we’re launching our most exciting Twitter event yet. It’s not just any Freeroll tournament. This one has what you might call, a higher purpose.
Remember the Follow Friday Freeroll? Fun right? Well this next one makes that look like 3 Card Monty.
The next Ultimate Bet Twitter Freeroll is happening right here on Wednesday July 15 2009. To make the payout extra sweet we’re asking for your help. We NEED to reach 3500 Twitter followers by the time this Twitter Freeroll happens. We’re currently at 1500, so we need your help to get 2000 new followers.
For each new Twitter follower we get between now and then, we’ll add $1 to the pot. If we hit the goal of 3500 Twitter followers by July 15, you will have helped us increase the total pot to $2000. To make us all feel extra special, we’re going to donate $1000 of the cash to our good friend Annie Duke’s charity Ante Up For Africa. The other $1000 will be used to create the payout structure for the tournament. If we hit that goal, the Freeroll payout structure will reward EVERYONE who finishes from 1st to 74th. WHAT? 74TH! That’s right, it’s getting crazy.
Potential Twitter Up For Africa Payout Structure (It’s ‘potential’ because we need to hit 3500 followers for this to pay out)
1st Place - Seat at the $200K Guaranteed ($215 Value)
2nd Place – Seat at the $200K Guaranteed ($215 Value)
3rd Place – Seat at the Sniper 30K ($130 Value)
4th Place – Seat at the $15K Guaranteed ($55 Value)
5th to 38th Place – Seat at the Saturday $7K Guaranteed ($5.50 Value)
39th to 74th Place – Seat at the Sunday $7K Guaranteed ($5.50 Value)
But remember, this is a contest that has us all working together to increase our Twitter followers to 3500 by July 15, the date of the Twitter Up For Africa tournament. When we hit that target WE ALL WIN, and so does one of the world’s finest charitable organizations. So help us out and we can ALL win TOGETHER, while literally helping to make the world a better place.
There will be many more updates to follow, but for now, spread the word on your blogs, Twitter pages, Facebooks, Myspaces, text and email your friends, forward this blog post and help us connect with more amazing people like you.
If you don’t yet use Twitter, this is the reason you’ve been waiting for to join the UB Twitter party! It’s so easy to get an account! Just sign up and then ‘follow’ @ultimate_bet
The countdown begins NOW. Oh and look, we’re at 1516 followers at last check. That’s already $16 in the pot!!
But remember, we need to hit that target for all this good stuff to happen.
Hell yeah! its finally here… after bubbling at least a half dozen of the events i’ve played this Series so far (its been pretty sick), I finally get to disappear back to LA for 5 days to go shoot a pilot for the TV show I started pitching last year!
The working title is “Grifting Across America” and in it I travel the country trying to beat every game I can find. Dominoes in the Louisiana bayou, street chess in Washington Square Park, bridge at the Manhattan Bridge Club, Golden Tee in Chicago bar leagues — you name it, I take a crack at it, and have plenty of fun along the way.
I can’t release too much more info while we’re in this phase of development, but suffice it to say things are definitely moving forward at an awesome pace! I spend the next few days in LA shooting tons of footage from different games — everything from Mah Jongg to backgammon to German skat, even some Magic: the Gathering — and then we get to cut together an awesome pilot promo & walk it in to some networks this fall. So my job for the next couple days will just be to kick ass, take names, and try to pwn my way thru a ton of games I’ve barely played before. Hey, after a lifetime of game theory and a mastery of blackjack, poker, and a half dozen other games, I think I’ll be able to apply the basic strategic concepts so universal to game playing and do fairly well in these other games. Either that or have fun trying…
A couple years ago I did a TV show called ‘King of Vegas’ where 12 players each had to fight their way thru daily competitions in blackjack, poker, roulette, craps, pai gow, and other popular casino games. A lot of those events were primarily based on luck, but since it was a competition based on beating the other PLAYERS (rather than the games themselves), I found a way to make better bets and better plays even in the events I had little control over the outcomes, and as a result made it all the way thru to the last episode. Although I bombed out in the 11th hour, i felt like i really accomplished something getting there. This show hopes to prove the same thing, that once you master certain games, you already have a built-in edge going into others.
So next week I hope to have a couple pix to show you and some more fun details of the shoot. Not to mention getting back to some good poker action at the Rio! I think there’s a $2500 Omaha hilo event next Tuesday with my name written all over it. In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter at:
Soooo….finally back on the west coast from last week’s Celebrity Apprentice debacle & gearing up for the WSOP!! Hard to believe its just over a week away and then it is 6 weeks of madness — and, of course, bracelets! The past 2 years I have had less than stellar results, but have always felt like I played well. Maybe this is the year I can trade in playing well for making some sick cashes instead lol…
So this final week is some much needed downtime, which means spending some quality time with my dad & bros, as well as catching up on all the season finales of my fave tivoed shows: 24, Lie to Me, and despite not watching as much as I did last season, American Idol! I am blown away by how much of a total rockstar Adam Lambert is, but after last week’s highway robbery by Joan Rivers, I am not placing any bets on the outcome of Idol…lets just say that my tenuous faith in the moral decency of primetime reality television programming has been shaken to its core & I don’t know how long it will take me to trust in it once again!
I’ve been playing online a lot more lately, but mostly lower stakes this week to force myself to focus on the fundamentals of poker once again. Sometimes the hardest game of all to beat, especially online, is a full 5/10 ring game — all of the elements of the WSOP masses are there: the loose callers, the chasers, the semi-pros, and the tight & bluffable weak spots. I’m trying to experience a wider range of styles so that I am completely prepared for the crush of players starting next week at the Rio, rather than the primarily uber-aggro action freaks you find more prevalently at the higher levels.
Other than that just been kickin it with my girl MB & loving life Its been awhile since I’ve been so completely happy just sharing my life with someone & that is exactly what I’ve been doing for a few wonderful months now. And amazing how much better my poker game has been — not only the WSOP Circuit ring, but a bunch of deep cashes online as well! So the moral of the story this week is that HD is calm, relaxed, and centered… and ready to kick some ass starting next week! Make sure you guys add me on twitter so you can get all the moment-by-moment action at the tables @ www.Twitter.com/Hollywood_Dave
The most obvious difference between live and online poker is that when you play online you ain’t physically sitting at a table with other people. And that can be a good thing–say, when someone you’re playing with is violently ill. Last year at the WSOP I was sitting at a low-limit table a few days before the Main Event when a gent who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week sat down. His salt-and-pepper hair was slick with sweat, his flannel shirt had various stains of indeterminate origin, and his watery eyes were bloodshot.
Now someone looking like that really isn’t THAT unusual for a Vegas cardroom, especially in July when a few minutes under the desert sun would leave Pierce Brosnan looking disheveled. What was unusual was the guy constantly coughing and hacking into a hankercheif he kept pulling out of his front pocket. Polite as it might’ve been to use that disgusting strip of cloth, I don’t think the Center for Disease Control considers a hanky an acceptable way to prevent the spread of germs.
Especially as the guy kept reaching for chips with fingers that had to be swimming with bacteria and virus particles. You never see a sick guy at the poker table playing tight, do you? No, they’re the ones raising every hand, tossing clusters of droplet-spattered chips into the pot to mix with everyone else’s checks. And that’s what this guy was doing, raising and re-raising almost as much as he was gobbing into his hankercheif. It took me about a minute to realize that I wasn’t sitting at a poker table so much as a felt-lined Petri dish. I racked up, bid my tablemates good night, and ran to the bathroom to wash my hands. Up to the elbows.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, last night was UltimateBet’s Follow Friday Freeroll–if you aren’t on Twitter, and don’t know what Follow Friday is, then it’s time to emerge from the cave and get with the times! Twitter has been the big thing in social media for the last month or so and last night was the first freeroll tournament for the folks following UltimateBet on Twitter. And a stunning 564 players took the virtual felt last night, myself included. Even though I’ve been battling the flu for the last two days. To say that I couldn’t have played last night had it been a live tournament is a gross understatement–I’ve been so sick that getting off the couch to get a glass of water seemed a more difficult task that rowing across the Atlantic.
But I was able to roll over on my side and log on last night to play. It’s hard to play inspired, aggressive poker when you want to die, but I did manage to execute one brilliant bluff (making a pot-sized bet on the river with four clubs on the board and nary a club in my hand) before I was sent to the rail in 76th place. I had pocket 7s, DOCGB2000 held A-Q, and the flop came K-J-10. It’s never a good thing when your tournament life hangs in the balance and the other guy flops the nuts, and that was especially so for me last night.
After getting bounced I checked the leaderboard and saw that WHOJEDI was at the top. I knew that nickname, as it belongs to poker journalist Jay Newnum who, as it turns out, wrote an article a month or so ago about how Twitter is changing how poker is covered. He also maintains a list of poker players/personalities/writers on Twitter that would no doubt be of interest to poker fans. I confirmed that this was indeed Jay (through Twitter, natch) and followed along to see if he might be a most-appropriate champion for our initial Follow Friday Freeroll.
Alas, it was not to be, and it was a cruel hand that derailed his chances. After winning a huge pot with pocket Kings against ACTION_JON’s pocket Queens, Jay was all-in with Ah-Kh to DRAWZ1977′S Ad-Kc. A split pot, right? Divvy it up and let’s get back to it. Well, no…
Ugh, the ‘ol runner-runner club flush. That left WHOJEDI will just a few thousand chips and he eventually went out in 15th place–but in the money. Attrition tooks it’s toll and before too long we’d set our final table:
As you can see several of the players were talking about Twittering the fact that they’d made the final table–which is exactly as it should be. The field was thinned down to three players and it looked like KIBLOUCHA would go out in third after he flopped a set of sevens…when DEFEDOG1 flopped a set of Kings. That left KIBLOUCHA with just 50,000 or so but he battled back from the brink and after DEFEDOG1 took out DJFOG86 when the latter’s straight and flush draws didn’t connect after the money went in, we were heads up. And it didn’t take the final two long to discuss making a deal, which seemed an agreeable way to end the evening’s festivities.
So now our beloved readers can follow us on the UB Blog and on Twitter and keep up to date on news and promotions and freerolls. And we’ll be posting even more fantabulous content once the World Series of Poker kicks off in a bit more than a week.
If you’ve been following us on Twitter (twitter.com/ultimate_bet) then you know we’re quite active in that community. If you haven’t been following us on Twitter, then what are you waiting for?
We have a great new Twitter only freeroll coming up next Friday May 15 at 8pm EST.
On twitter, each Friday use the tag #followfriday in your twitter post and recommend @ultimate_bet to your followers! It’s that simple to help spread the word! Help us spread the word!
More ‘Follow Friday Freeroll’ details coming soon!
Congrats to the 59 players who have already qualified to the upcoming WSOP this summer! Leading his legions across Sin City, Emperor Phil Hellmuth will make his way to the Main Event in early July. If you think you’re skilled enough to take down gladiators, join him by securing your seat in the world’s most prestigious poker tournament through STEPS or a variety of great satellites. Check out all the info here!
Check back regularly to the UB blog and also follow us on Twitter. Visit our Twitter microblog and click ‘follow’ to make sure you are always in the loop!
Awwww yeah….. as i write this, I’m somewhere near El Paso in the heart of Texas! A few days ago I flew out to Philly to drive cross-country with my girl MB & we are having a blast… originally the plan was to drive straight across to Vegas but then I decided to detour through Shreveport to see an old friend & then my manager called with a meeting this week in LA for the show I’m pitching, so instead we are just driving straight on thru back to Hollywood, baby!!
Y’all gotta check out some of the sweet video blogs i’ve been doing of the trip so far. Here’s the latest one.
(and while you’re at it, add Ultimate Bet on Twitter to get even more up-to-the-moment updates: www.Twitter.com/ultimate_bet ) — I’ve been getting some pretty fun shit out here in this big ol’ country. Drag races in Alabama, a midnite excursion to the Natural Bridge national monument, even some cool HD fans in a Virginia bar during the Villanova Final Four game!
About 8-9 years ago when I moved from Cleveland to Hollywood (after graduating with my theater degree from Kent State), I drove a U-Haul across the country with my then-girlfriend & got to check out the northern route & all its assorted glory. St. Louis, the Grand Staircase, Hoover Dam, etc. This time around its my girl’s BMW (the exact same model as mine lol) and the route is southern, so the sites are totally different… i think pretty soon we’ll be riding right along the border as we cross into New Mexico!
If you haven’t had a chance to take this drive, its truly one to remember, no matter what the route. All the different local customs, accents, cuisine, and scenery really are pretty cool to witness firsthand, especially all smashed into a whirlwind couple days or week of driving. Some people like to obsess about which sites to stop and see, but I’ve found that just pointing your car west and stopping whenever something interesting pops up is the way to go… keep it spontaneous, yo.
As for poker, well, I haven’t had an internet connection long enough to get much action in on UB this week, but I’ll be back soon to spend tons of time on what’s become my favorite little corner of the site — the limit Omaha 8-or-better and Stud 8 games. After so many years –and constant tournaments — of holdem, its a welcome change & now I hardly ever play a cash game that starts with players holding only 2 cards!
Later this month is the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo and I am definitely trying to win my seat into that — I’ve been there twice before and I freakin’ love it! The French Riviera totally rocks (one of my favorite places on earth is right outside MC: Nice, France). Other than that, just been getting more and more interest in my show ‘Grifting Across America’ that I talked about in a blog here a few months ago. More details when I can release them publicly, but its looking more and more like HD is gonna have his own TV show again very soon!
Once up a time (ten years ago, say) if you wanted to publish an article or column or amusing anecdote you needed…a publisher. Someone who would read your article/column/anecdote and shout, “Out of the tens of thousands of unsolicited submissions I’ve received this month, THIS will be the one to see the light of day!”
Of course the scenario described above is a joke–publishers NEVER printed unsolicited manuscripts! They only took pieces submitted by an agent, so before you could get something published you needed to get an agent first. And how does one get an agent? By being a successful, published author. You see the Catch-22, yes? You see that getting your brilliant prose in front of the masses was a rather daunting task?
But those days are long gone, thanks to the internet. These days you don’t need to find a publisher because with a few keystrokes you can become a publisher yourself. Anyone can start a blog, and from things I’ve read (online, of course) it seems that just about everyone HAS started a blog. There are approximately eleventy jillion blogs out there (statistics may be fabricated) and while 99.9997% are either pure spam or are never updated or are strangely concerned with the coming hegemony of the Mole Men, there are still millions of blogs out there chock-full of interesting and lively writing, about just about every subject under the sun. Even poker (pointing to myself and coughing quietly). Indeed, both Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth prominently feature their blogs on their recently-relaunched websites.
If you’re a poker fan you’ve no doubt read scores of blogs, especially when a big tournament is running and you’re trying to keep up with the action. Go to any major event and you’ll find dozens of writers posting hand histories and writing up interviews and uploading photos of the action. And of course many of the players themselves post to their own blogs. This all gives the poker fan an incredibly rich and diverse media smorgasbord to pick and choose from.
But this is the internet, where changes in the status quo occur every fifteen minutes. Blogs aren’t going away, heaven forbid, but they’re now jostling with different social media platforms for a share of our limited attention span. I’m sure you’re heard of Facebook, I’m sure you’re on Facebook, I’m sure you’ve been friended by former high-school classmates who wouldn’t even look at you back in the day. Facebook is an enjoyable time-sink that no doubt has contributed to the global economic meltdown, what with everyone taking quizzes about “Which Sex in the City Star Are You??” instead of doing their goddam jobs.
But while my rampant paranoia leads me to blame Facebook for crippling my 401(k), I fear that the advent of Twitter may signal the end of Western Civilization. In case you’ve been lucky enough to be living in a cave the last year or so, Twitter is an application that lets you broadcast messages that are up to 140 characters long. They say that brevity is the soul of wit, and it is possible to be witty in just 140 characters. But being an old fuddy-duddy (and a blogger) I hope that people don’t drift away from reading stuff like, y’know, sentences. And paragraphs. I like me a nice juicy paragraph.
On Twitter you read other folks’ messages by “following” them, and they can read your message by following you. It’s kinda like sending text messages, except that instead of having to pick and choose who to send it to it’s broadcast to all of your followers. And you can embed links in your tweets, post photos, etc.
Twitter is diabolically addictive. And EVERYBODY is doing it. Shaquille O’Neal has built up a massive following, going so far as to tweet his location so fans could meet up with him at a Phoenix diner. Demi Moore found herself in a difficult situation when one of her followers threatened suicide. Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villaneuva got in trouble for posting updates at halftime. Perhaps the most famous use of Twitter came when Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, as a ferry passenger twitted “There’s a plane in the Hudson” and posted a picture of passengers evacuating the plane.
So what does all this have to do with poker? Well, poker players have embraced Twitter just like everyone else. Maybe even moreseo–go to a poker tournament and you constantly see players stepping away from the table to text and check email. Now these players will also be sending tweets out to their legions of followers. And as poker journalist Jay Newnum recently wrote, this is going to change how poker is covered, and followed. You won’t have to wait for an update to learn Phil Hellmuth is doing in the Main Event–he’ll be tweeting about his big hands and chip counts and bad beat stories.
Because Phil Hellmuth is on Twitter (of course), and so is Annie Duke and Tiffany Michelle and Liv Boeree and Adam “Roothlus” Levy and, gosh, just about everyone. In fact there’s a blog that continually updates its list of poker pros on Twitter. As the World Series of Poker draws closer I think that list is going to dramatically increase, as players realize there’s a massive audience out there anxious to hear from them directly. And players who aren’t famous can let the folks back home know how they’re doing, since they tend to fly under the poker media radar (especially early on).
I agree with Newnum that Twitter won’t replace tournament reporting, nor will Twitter do away with longer-form writing. It’s a communication tool, a unique and very valuable tool, and I’m very curious to see how Twitter changes the way people follow the 2009 WSOP. And I’ll be there, in the middle of it all, posting here on the UB blog and, I’m sure, on Twitter as well. Follow me, and we’ll see where Twitter takes us.
. I pick up Nick and we decide to head in… the only problem being that it is raining so hard we cannot see the shore. But a good sailor has an internal compass 
Until next year Aruba!
