Full tilt's Andrew Feldman the poker pro from the UK, has lost his court battle with a Rabbi and old friend Simon Nissim. A quite bizarre headline story this one, as the Rabbi claimed in court of a business deal gone wrong, which he said left him out of pocket to the tune of £140,000.

The deal stems back to an agreement between the one time good friends, which involved a play on the spread betting market. Nissim claimed that Feldman had agreed to the terms of the deal, which, as far as I can gather involved the rabbi betting on the money markets on Feldman's behalf. Feldman counter-claimed that his ex-pal had gone further than he had wanted to, costing the pair substantial loses which Feldman did not agree to.

However, in court this week the judge awarded Nissim £136,000 plus costs stating that: "The undisputed facts provide more than sufficient grounds upon which to conclude that Mr. Feldman agreed to indemnify Mr. Nissim and acknowledged that the amounts claimed by Mr.Nissim fell within the scope of the agreed indemnity." adding "Mr. Feldman suggests that if the net result had been a positive one (on spread betting), Mr. Nissim would have claimed the bets for himself; but that because net losses were made, Mr. Nissim 'had retrospectively sought to allocate to me bets that he, in fact, made on his own behalf'."

The judge said that the pair met in 2007 through a Jewish charitable organisation for which Mr. Nissim was working,"They discovered they had a mutual interest in gambling and became friends." The judge added: "Mr. Feldman's evidence is that in the first week or so of October 2008, he had lost the astonishingly large sum of between £700,000 and £800,000 playing poker online." After hitting some huge losses on the Wall St stock markets, things quickly went sour and the pair ended up it court. The judge said that the pair agreed that Mr. Nissim would make spread bets on the Wall Street index on the basis that he would give Mr. Feldman any profits made and Mr. Feldman would indemnify him against any losses.

Feldman's solicitor admitted that his client had told Nissim, he would honour any losses up to £200,000 and had authorised Nissim to carry out 4 or 5 bets a session on the market. However, Feldman claimed that Nissim had carried 77 transactions in a four hour period. The judge ruled in favour of Nissim, mainly on the grounds that he had not purposely amassed huge losses. Summing the judge said "Risking large amounts of one's own money up front is not an obvious hallmark of a fraudster," and awarded the compensation to Nissim with £20,000 costs.

A strange state of affairs and most certainly the end of a good friendship between the two. 'Never go into business with a pal,' and 'Never mix business and pleasure,' are both sayings that a poker player should have engrained in their pysche and never waiver off course.