A number of top poker professionals are now using the social networking website Twitter (www.twitter.com) to send out messages about their activities to their followers.

Among the pros involved: Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Annie Duke and Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu

One pro, however, is not aboard the Twitter bandwagon and wants everyone to know it.

Patrik Antonius, who according to official tournament records has won almost $3 million in his career playing offline tournament poker, announced this week that the person sending Twitter messages via www.twitter.com/patrik_antonius is not him, but is an impostor.

According to the real Antonius, who is from Helsinki, Finland, someone impersonating him has been sending out fake Twitter messages about his poker activities, including making snide remarks about other poker players.

One remark by the phony Antonius–that 76-year-old poker legend Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson was getting senile–had Brunson so upset that he verbally confronted the real Antonius, who had to explain it wasn’t him who made the offensive Tweet, or Twitter message.

Realizing his reputation was slowly being tarnished by the impostor’s phony Tweets, Antonius this week did an interview with the website Coin Flip (www.coinflip.com) to let the world know he’s not the one making the offensive Tweets.

“I had never heard of Twitter before this summer,” Antonius told the website. “I don’t even know how it works, but one day Doyle Brunson came to me in Las Vegas and demanded angrily, what the hell are those entries about that I’m posting?

“Someone has registered a Twitter account using my name and now he’s posting stuff like it’s written by me,” Antonius continued. “He’s been following me pretty closely and knows what I’ve been doing, so one might think they are actually written by me. Doyle was offended because he thought I had written something like, ‘I played with Doyle last night and beat him easily.’

“I had actually played with Doyle (on) the previous night at Bobby’s Room, and the guy knew that. Supposedly I had written that Doyle is becoming senile and he’s no match to me any more, so understandably he was not happy about it.

“I don’t have a Twitter account and I have never posted a single word there. I have no interest in posting updates about my comings or goings. I’m a private person and I want to keep my private life to myself. I would never want to post entries telling everybody where I am and what I’m doing right now.

“It’s not good publicity for me if someone is pretending to be me and posts stuff that isn’t even true. The same goes for Facebook, too, there are at least a dozen different accounts under my name, but I have nothing to do with any of them. I do have my own Facebook account, but I use it only to keep in touch with certain persons.

“I have no idea who is posting these things, but it’s someone who’s been following me around at Bellagio this summer. I don’t know if he’s been posting any more after I left Las Vegas. I hope the poker community gets this message. I have nothing to do with these Twitter entries and they are written without my permission.”

Which begs the question: Doesn’t multi-millionaire Brunson have anything better to do with his time than worry about what’s being said about him on a Twitter message?

Especially a Twitter message that few people even see?

Regardless of whether the Tweet is true or false, or whether it was made by someone real or an impostor, why does Brunson have to get so bent out of shape about it?

Why does he care?

For a grizzled veteran poker pro, Brunson has mighty thin skin.

Just a few months ago, he went ballistic at fellow poker pro Layne Flack after Flack said in a magazine interview that Brunson’s two victories in the World Series of Poker Main Event in the 1970s were insignificant because there was much less competition then than there is now.

Brunson needs to worry less about what is being said about him by people who couldn’t carry his jock and worry more about why he hasn’t won a poker tournament since 2005.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)