As 2025 turns into 2026, we’re talking to some of the biggest names in the poker world and reflecting on the year’s most interesting stories and events.
While 2025 was, on the whole, a good year for poker, there were a few dark days for the community – one of which came in the form of the end of the Only Friends podcast.
In the spring of 2022, PokerOrg Advisory Board Member and high stakes cash game regular Matt Berkey created the daily poker news show alongside a rotating cast of friends which included Landon Tice, Brian Lamanna, Melissa Schubert, and Conrad Simpson. Immediately, the show garnered a wide audience – in thanks, partly, to several notable scandals that rocked the community around the time.
With each new episode, Only Friends continued to pick up steam and grew to become one of the leading news and opinion platforms within the poker community.
All good things come to an end
After a little more than three years and more than 700 daily episodes, the party came to a crashing halt in March of this year as Berkey announced to the show's legion of fans that the end was nigh.
"We're getting kicked out. They're evicting us," Berkey said on the podcast. "We just got our 30-day notice. It's all coming to an end. We will have our last show, tentatively, I think, [April] the 28th."
"To me, the problems all come from within – the structure aspect of it, the motivation and purpose behind it," he continued. "When I launched this, one, it was a marketing tool for Solve for Why which by and large, especially now with us being evicted from this place... with that coming into play, and everything else, Solve for Why is scaling way way way back.
"It was always a passion project, and I've been beating this drum for a while — I just don't think the training space is flourishing for the small business. I think it's absolutely carved out for the GTO Wizards of the world, and I think that's the direction it should go."
While the possibility of the show's return wasn't entirely ruled out, no plans were in place at the time – and none have emerged in the months since.
Berkey breaks it down
In an exclusive interview with PokerOrg's Craig Tapscott, Berkey explained the decision in further depth. When Only Friends first started, it wasn't intended to be a poker news show.
"As the show was winding down, I went back and watched the first few episodes. I realized how much we had morphed away from just being a group of friends within the poker space, talking about our daily events, into more of a news source," Berkey said. "I don’t really want to say ‘news source’ because I don't want to belittle actual news sources.
"But we did lean a lot heavier into the daily news aspect of the poker community. We became more media than I expected us to be. That was a little bit surprising, but I guess you run out of personal details to share at a certain point."
With the show's change in focus and the toll of episode after episode mounting, Berkey lost sight of the reason he started the podcast in the first place.
"Three years into the experiment, where I've enjoyed every second of it, I'm looking forward to the final 20-ish shows," Berkey said at the time. "People stop me and they tell me how much they love it, and I'm so appreciative of it. But I've lost whatever sense of purpose there is."
