Friends at the poker table...

It's said that you have no friends at the poker table, and that's certainly true in the beginning. However, once you become a regular on a scene as small as the Irish one, that quickly changes (unless you're a particularly anti-social shite). Once it does, you face a new challenge. It's much easier to destroy someone's dreams and take their stack in a tournament with cold indifference if you don't know them from Adam. Or gleeful spite if you do and heartily dislike them.
The truth is that it shouldn't really matter whether the so called villain is a friend, an enemy or a stranger. Poker's a game the object of which is to win the other person's chips. I know this, but still struggle whenever I end up at the same table as friends. This is a definite leak I need to address, and to be honest it has probably been there from the start. At my first major final table, I was ruthlessly indifferent to all but one of my opponents. The exception was a guy who had made an effort to get behind my facade and talk to me throughout the tournament, successfully, to the point where I found myself rooting for him when I wasn't in the pot, and almost folding a hand that was an obvious call because I didn't want to be the one to bust him out (in the event, I called, and lost the race).
Guys like Donal Norton apparently try harder against their friends, and that's the only really sensible attitude you can take. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if my "leak" has been guessed at by good feel players, all of whom seem to go out of their way to be friendly with me at the table.
I seem to play my best poker when I dislike my opponent to the point where I want to bust him badly, and my worst when I like my opponent and don't. When I started going to the Fitz, there was one player for whom I developed a strong personal distaste. This seemed to spur me to study and dissect his game to the point where I knew it inside out. Once I did, it was almost effortless to bust him out of almost every tournament where we ended up at the same table. The more it happened, the better it felt. It got to the point that I could see the fear on his face whenever he saw me at the table. He developed a series of nicknames for me that were meant to be disparaging but I took as a compliment.
Somehow I need to develop that intensity for everyone I will play against regularly, particularly the better players. I need to stop stopping myself from getting into pots with "mates" and looking for tricky trappy lines liable to stack them rather than more straightforward ones that allow them off light. I need to start thinking of people as "villains" rather than friends, as the swine who stands between me and winning a tournament or the bastard who sucked out on me in a cash game so I want to bust out of this and every other tournament. If poker is a hobby or a social thing, playing with friends is sweeter, but if it's your profession, you need to be able to maintain a professional distance from your rivals.

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