Nice! I still have market trading in my sites as a way to do exactly that. I have been at it for around 10 years now on and off.
Are you saying you reached your goals through collusion? Or just that your group of friends helped you emotionally, etc.
Certainly not collusion at the table, no one would soft play each other. It's just easier to know which games exhibit which behaviors when you have a group of people all playing at different tables, it's sort of like live poker tracker if that makes sense. Then you would look for a specific seat to open should a game exhibit perceived favorable behaviors. This takes awhile, obviously, but I didn't have to be anywhere else so wtf.
I suppose it's akin to someone telling a buddy at another table that there's some drunk guy spewing chips at his table, it was just much more elegant and perceptive in nature I suppose. Sometimes it was unnecessary though, for example, when I was taking shots at 5/10 NL, you did not want to see young Asian kids, that would be a 2/5 NL day instead, etc. All things being equal though, when you play a lot with good players that are constantly evaluating players at their table and calculating tendencies, it's quite helpful long term especially when you played at the same casino every month. In a game of incomplete information, any inputs are helpful and at those limits, you hardly saw many people changing their play.
