15/30 LHE at Artichoke Joes: Collusion or just completely horrid game?

[swope]

15/30 LHE game at Artichoke Joes. 80% of the same faces every day, all of whom know eachother real, real well, and converse largely in Cantonese.

White dude sitting in seat 4 leaves, young Asian cat moves into his seat from seat 8. He ponies up the BB, seat 7 & 9 call.

Flop is 646. BB bets, seat 7 calls, seat 9 folds. At this point seat 7 looks over at the dude in seat 4 and proclaims;

"Ohhhh very sorry, if I had known it was you I would have never called."

Turn is a T, BB checks, seat 7 checks. River is a K, check check.

Seat 4 flips 63o for a set. Seat 7 shows AQo.

FTW?

On two other occasions, seat 5 raises preflop, gets called by the BB, and checks down totally innocuous boards to table AA.

Average pot for the hour I played before they broke up the table, about 3-5BB. Number of hands that went "chop chop" without ever seeing a flop, 12.

Not the first time Ive seen the game go like this, its very frustrating. Is this type of deliberate soft playing considered outright collusion or is it simply a [censored] game featuring people who are "friends" and dont want to lock horns with people they play with 70+ hours a week...