I have yet to join the Twitter-verse. For those still living in the 20th Century, Twitter is usually sent out over smart phones and is limited to 140 characters. Your ‘tweet’ (i.e., a message sent out on Twitter) goes out to all of your followers. They can then re-tweet and send it out to their followers if they wish. Sometimes tweets go ‘viral,’ meaning that millions of folks see your comments.
Sports figures and Hollywood celebrities tweet all the time, as do a number of live poker players. The www.cardplayer.com website has a section for interesting tweets from the past week. Why not video poker players?
A well-meaning friend suggested that I tweet every time I get a W2G. That would, he suggested, show people that I was successful and help sell my books and products. I’m not going to take up this suggestion for a number of reasons:
1. W2Gs are more a function of the stakes I play, rather than how good I am, or even what my score is for that day. One time earlier this year, I lost about $20,000 on a play — and collected $30,000 in W2Gs along the way. People who just hear about the jackpots have a very distorted picture of my actual score.
2. If most of my tweets were about jackpots, many of my followers would get rather bored and turned off very quickly. Nobody wants to listen to someone else always talking about how much money he has.
3. My real “secret” is not the size of the jackpots, but rather why I decided to play THAT game in THAT casino on THAT day. Was a point multiplier in effect? Is there a big drawing? Was I paid to show up there? Have I negotiated a special deal that isn’t available to others? Did I have to learn a new strategy for this game because of special circumstances? Is bankroll a major consideration for this play? Discussing these nuances is not part of a world defined 140 characters at a time.
4. If I had just hit for $100,000, for example, I want to safely get that money to an appropriate place. I’m not interested in telling a number of strangers that right now I’m at the Palms casino and I have a big wad of cash in my pocket.
5. Some of my plays are rather public. That is, I tell everybody listening to my radio show that I’m going to be playing Quick Quads at South Point on 2x point days. Some of my plays you don’t know about. For example, you didn’t have any idea I played Card Craps at Viejas Casino until I wrote an article about it recently. I probably do share more about my plays than any other active professional video poker player does, but I still have my secrets.
6. I communicate publicly all the time. I have several venues where I can express myself in terms not limited to 140 characters. This column in the Las Vegas Advisor usually contains at least 800 words (i.e. several thousand characters) and sometimes my articles go two or three times that long if I feel the subject warrants it. On my weekly radio show, I have wide latitude to discuss anything I choose. And for my final two classes each semester (“What Video Poker Players Should Know About Slot Clubs” and “Secrets of a Video Poker Winner”), I always update the classes based on new things I have learned or discovered since the last time I taught the class. I also sometimes post on vpFREE or videopoker.com. Most other Twitter users don’t have this number of options available for public communication.
7. Most of the people who would follow me on Twitter already own as many of my products as they are going to buy. Twitter probably wouldn’t create that many more sales for me.
8. Part of the “charm” of Twitter is that people send out tweets spontaneously without a lot of careful forethought. I learned the hard way from posting on vpFREE that when I say something negative about someone else, the flack comes down hardest on me, not them. Perhaps it is an innate impulse many people have to protect the little guy when he is picked on by the big guy. Perhaps it is that some people resent my relative success and look for any reason to criticize me. Whatever. I can easily visualize me feeling cranky one day in the future and sending out a negative 140-character tweet about somebody or something. That is the kind of tweet that has the potential to go viral and end up hurting me quite badly.
So, at the present time, I see no advantage for me to join the Twitter revolution — and plenty of disadvantages. Perhaps someday that will change. For now, if anyone has good arguments as to why I should reconsider, I’m interested in hearing them.