Friends aren’t friends at the poker table.

First off, I’ve had some decent tournament finishes in the last couple of weeks. I made two final tables last week, cashed (in 8th, the lowest pay-out position) in the first and bubbled (in 9th–no pay-out) in the second. The best part was that M finished one place better of me in each of them! Good Job, M! She’s a great card player and I think these fast tourney structures suit her.

I played in the Monday tourney tonight and made it past the first break, but not long into the 2nd hour. I was pretty card dead and ended up making a stand with pocket 3s and lost a race against AK.

I moseyed on over to the cash game table and sat down with $100. I was running good and had a great tight image at a table full of relatively tight players and showed down a couple of monsters, reinforcing that image. After about an hour, a friend of mine from way back sat down with $80 and built it up in to a decent sized stack pretty quickly. He’s got a pretty loose aggressive game, but it seems to work pretty well for him. He kept getting involved in hands with me, for some reason. When I tried to soft-play him (“why would I want to take money from a friend?,” I thought) he kept firing and I knew he was just pushing me around. It pissed me off to the point where I was kind of on tilt, gave back a good chunk of my stack (to my so-called friend) and decided to get up while I was still on the plus side.

The moral of the story is that I should not have friends at the poker table. Not that I shoudn’t play with friends, but when friends are at my table, they’re no longer friends. Play them as hard as you would anyone else. Harder even.