Loose-aggressive poker strategy. Playing with Aggressive Players If a player has position on you every time, it will always be a losing game. It's the same as voluntarily agreeing to a fight with your hands tied behind your back.
In one of the previous lessons, we talked about the rules of poker, the basics of betting, raising and calling. In this lesson, we'll take it a step further and teach you how and why to bet in different situations.
Remember that the aggressive style is more profitable during the long game, so in this tutorial we will look at situations in which you can use this style. Aggression allows you to win more money and reduces the winnings of your opponents.
Preflop betting
There are many reasons to raise preflop in No Limit. We have already talked about this a little. It is important to think about the outcome before placing a bet. Here are the goals you should be pursuing:
ISOLATION OF LIMPERS. As the antes increase as the tournament progresses, the money in the pot becomes more and more valuable. If your stack decreases as the pot grows, then you need to become a more aggressive player. Good tournament players know this, but the main thing about poker is that not every player is a good player. You can see that a lot of poker players don't raise and just limp in the hope of seeing it at no extra cost. Such players usually hold cards like suited connectors, suited *, or.
In late position, it's convenient to play against limpers by pretending you're weak. Of course, it is best to play with passive players or those who will definitely call you. The correct bet size is approximately 3x the big blind + 1 big blind per limper. However, be vigilant and watch your stack. A good rule of thumb is that you should have at least 10M chips (M = your stack divided by the size of the preflop pot) to play normally if the game is passive and around 15M for a loose table. You can play with a small stack size, but in this case it would be better to go "all-in".
What cards do you need to play this game? Our goal is to steal "dead money", this is certainly not the best option, but sometimes you can get into it well. It all depends on your image at the table. But if the goal is to make everyone fold with suited , small pair and +, then you should choose better cards than this range.
No free flops
This principle is very similar to the previous one, but it includes the specialization of the battle of the blinds. Once the blinds and antes get big enough, you should always raise from the big blind if the player in the small blind is limping. Remember to watch your game image and try not to be predictable. Of course, there are times when you need to let the small blind get into the pot cheaply, but more often than not, you should not just let a player from the small blind see the flop, but immediately play aggressively preflop.
Post-flop betting
Now let's discuss post flop betting strategies and tactics when playing no limit in particular. Remember to always have a plan and have good reasons for everything you do.
Continuation bets
A continuation bet is a bet on the flop after you did preflop (were the aggressor). They help show that you have good cards and control of the game. If you play in an aggressive style, then these bets are a must. But you can not ignore the characteristics of opponents and the structure of the flop.
You must clearly understand when it is worth making such bets:
Betting Size - How good are your cards?
Make sure the bets complete the card story. For example, if you raise preflop and the big blind is holding, the flop will come. If you have an ace, what bet should you bet? If you bet only 1/3 of the size of the pot, would you believe an ace if you were in your opponent's shoes? Of course not. Many continuation bets should be around ½ - 2/3 the size of the pot, but there are several factors such as flop structure, game image and your stack size.
Number of players
The number of players who called you preflop is a very important factor in determining whether you should bet or not. A good rule of thumb is to never bluff on the flop against three players. In fact, you have to be careful when you decide to bluff with two players.
Trial bet
A trial bet is associated with a pre-flop raise. Let's say you raised from the big blind having, on the flop the dealer opened the following cards - . Many poker players advise making a trial bet, about 1/2 the size of the pot, to get an idea of the strength of your opponents' cards. However, there have been too many aggressive players lately, and your trial bet could run into a bluff. If you can read your opponents well and you know that they are more conservative, you can try this bet, in which case they will not raise with weak cards. However, these days it's best to check/raise to determine the strength of your opponents. Only all this knowledge together will paint a complete picture of whether you need to make a continuation bet or not.
Check / Raise
There are several situations in which a check/raise play can be perfectly acceptable. Since all the details cannot be covered in this lesson, you should have a basic understanding of the general situations in which you can check/raise.
Determine the strength of your hand - of course, this can give you information about your cards and opponents' cards, but this is an expensive way.
In online poker - In most cases, check/raise is played with strong cards, so this situation is often used for bluffing, especially if the opponent likes continuation bets.
Force your opponent to make a mistake - You can force your opponent to call, even if it is not so beneficial for him.
Calling a Reraise - If your opponent doesn't understand the power of this play and will raise again in response, this is the best way to get more chips from that player.
The value of the stakes
As we have already noted, aggressive style is crucial in poker. But when the river comes and you have a potentially winning hand, it's time to think about the importance of betting. In this case, you can just relax and stop thinking about the game, but most often there is a situation when you have medium-strength cards in your hands and you are faced with the question of what to do next. Here is a list that will help you figure it out and give you all the answers.
- Are you equalized? There is always a risk of losing when betting, so sometimes it is better to play.
- Will the opponent call to find out your cards? This situation can easily encourage you to bluff.
- Will your opponent check/raise? The answer to this question is hidden in your knowledge of the features of the opponent's game.
- Will he bluff? Everything again depends on your ability to read your opponent and the ability to understand his features of the game.
- If you play , will it encourage your opponent to bluff? More often than not, especially with medium-strength cards, checking the river is the best way to call your opponent.
Using chips as weapons
As you can see, there are several factors to consider when placing a bet or raising it. Your image, stack size, and opponent behavior are just a few of them. Aggressive play is also important. Use your chips as a weapon, but think about what outcome you want and bet accordingly.
To succeed at the lowest stakes in today's poker, it is simply necessary to have an aggressive strategy both pre-flop and post-flop. In some situations, it will be more preferable to play aggressively not only strong value hands, but also some marginal hands that other players will usually just check with. In other situations, you should bluff aggressively, taking pots that other players are afraid to fight for.
Either way, the key to success at these stakes is aggression. But once you get above the micro limits, you will run into many players who have also learned this lesson well. An aggressive game is a profitable game. And here we have a logical question. If aggression always wins, how do you beat aggressive players?
When making forays into higher stakes, micro-limit players usually get a serious rebuff. They have learned how to fold weak hands, but like all other players, they have such hands most of the time. They understand every such fold as correct, so when they look at their results, they wonder what they are doing wrong.
The problem is that these folds were indeed correct at the lower stakes, but only because their opponents weren't aggressive enough. However, when playing against overly aggressive opponents, "correct" folds become costly, and most players, sooner or later, realize that they need to change something.
At the next stage, many players come to the strategy of "fight with fire" and try to counter aggressive players with retaliatory aggression. After all, a little more aggression never hurts, right?
However, this approach is doomed to failure for two reasons. First, you are not creating enough advantage. If your opponents are pushing too often with weak hands and you are also expanding your shoving range, then neither you nor your opponents are winning in this situation. You are simply playing a high variance game with minimal benefits.
Secondly, if you play a full ring by creating an ultra-aggressive dynamic with some opponents, you create an advantageous situation for other players who are not in your "arms race" to wait for strong hands and take pots. That is why this approach usually does not bring the desired results.
The correct counter-strategy against aggressive players is to play passively in the right situations, but for most winning players this will be a very difficult adjustment, as they don't have the best associations with passive play.
To understand why passive play might be the right fit, you have to understand that what you think is aggressive play can actually be overly aggressive.
Very aggressive play is the best strategy for the micros in a vacuum. If you're ripping nl10-25, you're most likely doing it because you're expanding your ranges a little preflop and applying extra postflop aggression in certain key spots.
This style is considered overly aggressive, as additional preflop hands give more weak hands postflop. At the micros, you can profit from these extra weak hands by playing them aggressively, but you will be vulnerable against an opponent who understands the concept and plays accordingly.
An overly aggressive player's worst nightmare is an opponent who plays tight pre-flop (and therefore gets good hands post-flop more often) and shows up frequently and unpredictably.
It is this kind of counter-strategy that beats overly aggressive players. You want your opponent to always be guessing what your hand is, which means you need to call him more often before showdown.
Example
$5-$10 live limit with $2000 stacks. A very aggressive player raises to $50 from middle position. The player on the button calls. You call in the big blind with QJ. There's $155 in the pot.
Flop: 983. You check, the preflop raiser bets $100, the button folds, you call.
turn: Q. You check, preflop raiser bets $300, you call. There's $955 in the pot.
river: A. You check, the preflop raiser bets $800.
This is a good calldown situation against many aggressive players. The ace on the river is definitely a scary card as it closes the flush and is also an overcard to the board. Chances are you're behind now, but the pot odds are $1,755-to-$800, or just over 2:1. This means that you need to win just over 31% of the time to be worth the call.
At the micros, pot odds of 31% would be a hopeless hope. Micro-stakes players would never be aggressive on this river without a flush, or at least a straight. Of course, sometimes they can decide on a big bluff, but this probability is definitely not even close with 31%.
But smart, aggressive higher stakes players often see this river as a great bluffing spot. C-betting on a flop like this will be the standard for many players, regardless of their cards. The queen on the turn seems like a terrible overcard to such players. where they simply have to keep bluffing.
Called on the turn and perhaps the perfect scare card on the river, these players simply can't help but bet a third barrel. Therefore, if you call on this river, some aggressive players will show literally any two cards they started with, regardless of the strength of the hand. Their aggressive play was driven by board texture and turn and river runouts, not by the strength of their own hand. And even if your opponent bluffs a little less than in this example, you will still win more than 31 times. So this call will be positive.
Conclusion
Learning to play against aggressive players can be a significant shift in your understanding of poker. If at the micro limits the main winning strategy was one according to which you should always show aggression, and without a hand just fold when aggression is in your direction, then at higher limits you should already understand that your opponents will themselves try to squeeze you out of the pot, and skillfully recognize these situations. Therefore, the best weapon against aggressive players will sometimes be a regular calldown.
Ability to play aggressively- an important quality, especially when it comes to playing online poker. Aggression is the opposite of passivity. Aggressive play style suggests that instead of constantly checking and calling, you will bet or raise more often. Compared to passive play, aggression provides more opportunities.
If any of the terms in this article seem not entirely clear to you, we advise you to seek their interpretation in poker dictionary.
Correct using aggression at the poker table opens up more prospects and overall chances for success in your poker career, which you will not be able to achieve if you use a passive approach to the game. This is why many successful players try to play their hands aggressively.
It is very important to learn how to play poker aggressively. However, being aggressive in poker doesn't mean that you should bet and raise your opponents' bets every hand.
Aggressive poker involves you betting and rearranging other players' bets when you have an advantage over them. Advantage means that you have stronger cards, better positions or game experience. Aggression in poker works to your advantage only when you apply it in a sober mind and carefully choose the right situations for this.
An example of the use of aggression in poker
Imagine that you have the flop and you are heads-up with your opponent.
Using Aggression to Buy a Position
Buying a position can only be done preflop. This can be done by betting/raising which will force opponents in position on you to fold preflop. As a result, you will be in position for the rest of the players who decide to take part in the draw.
To give a small example, you are in middle position at a 9max table with . All players before you have folded except for one player who called. If you raise to 4BB and the CO and BTN players fold, you will "buy position" for the remainder of the hand. In other words, you will be the last to decide in the hand. And as you know, playing in position gives you a very strong advantage over players who will play out of position post-flop.
To reiterate, aggressive play has clear advantages over passive play, because if we had called in the example above, it is likely that CO and BTN players would also have entered the game. In this case, we would lose the positional advantage in playing our hand.
Using aggression to get a free card
If you play aggressively, then your opponents are more likely to just check to you than to bet themselves, as they would like to see what you do next in this hand. Villains will be less likely to bet with medium hands because they will be afraid that you will raise and they will have to call a large bet. They will do the same with strong hands, because they will hope that you will start bluffing.
This can work in our favor, since in situations where we have a straight or flush draw on the flop, we can take a free card and try to complete our draw as cheaply as possible.
Using Aggression to Get More Benefits
If you constantly play in an aggressive style, opponents will no longer give you enough credit for your actions. Sooner or later they will think that you can't always have a strong hand when you bet or raise, so they will start calling with weaker hands to catch you bluffing. This will work for you in situations where you have a strong hand, as your opponents will pay all your bets. But you also need to be careful not to get too aggressive on dangerous board structures as your opponents will also slowplay their nuts.
Conclusions on the use of aggression in poker
We hope you realize that the use of aggression in poker is one of the factors for a profitable game in Texas Hold'em and other types of poker games. Whether you play loose or tight, you should use aggression as it has a lot more advantages over passive play.
Passive play will very rarely bring you wins in big pots (because passive play is hard to form a big pot), so learn to play aggressively.
Loose-aggressive players are probably the most difficult opponents. If you have one or two LAGs to your right, they will frequently raise in front of you, making it impossible for you to steal much-needed blinds and antes. If they're sitting to your left, they'll often 3-bet your raises, forcing you to either fold or play out of position.
If you do not fight back such players, they will rob your blinds, systematically eating your entire stack. Typically, you won't get enough premium hands to survive. What to do in the circumstances?
If you are playing deep stacks with no ante (100BB or more) and an aggressive player to your right raises frequently, just play your normal game following the 5-10 Rule.
If your effective stack size is around 50BB in an ante game and the aggressive player to your right raises frequently, you can still follow the 5-10 Rule. But also consider re-raising with strong hands (99+, AQ+, AJs+, KQs) and occasionally weak hands that have some post-flop equity, such as one- or two-hole suited connectors, Axs, and offsuit connectors. If an aggressive opponent 4-bets, shove your strong hands, TT+, AK, AQs and fold everything else.
If an aggressive opponent to your right regularly raises to 2-2.5BB with stacks of 25-40BB, 3-bet him to 6-7BB with strong hands and sometimes weak hands to balance the range and make him float in the guesswork. If you haven't been in the game for a long time, your 3-bets will get more respect, so you can widen your range if you've been passive for a while, or narrow it down if you've been active.
With stacks of 18-25BB, look for the right spots to 3-bet all-in with strong hands, as well as some weak hands where the aggressive player to your right is constantly raising from late positions (HJ, CO and BTN).
Deal: Pocket Kings vs. LAG
Description: About half of the players remained in the tournament. Blinds 400/800, ante 100. Pretty aggressive HJ player raises to 2'800, you're on the button with kings.
Your actions?
Call!
You have a great hand that would definitely not be a mistake to re-raise with. Or you can just call with AA or KK because you know that an aggressive opponent plays a lot of hands and is more likely to fold to a raise. You may also notice that he almost always c-bets, and you will most likely be in position throughout the hand.
Your potential losses if you call preflop are much lower than the potential to take his entire stack. If he hits top pair on the flop without an ace, then you will probably take a significant part of his stack. If you hit a set of kings, count to 20 and then call a continuation bet. If the flop comes an ace, you must decide whether your opponent has it or not; of course, he will almost always show an ace... and he could easily have A7o or A3o.
The added bonus of flatting in this situation is that one of the players in the blinds can try to squeeze-shove. Well, very nice! Of course, we call without hesitation!
Key moment: When you have a very strong hand and your opponent doesn't have a very large stack, do your best to maximize your chances of taking all of his chips. If an aggressive player behind you tries to squeeze-push, well, that's even better!
This excerpt is taken from the book Flop, Turn, River, which provides a wealth of useful information on tournament poker, moving from basic concepts to more advanced tactics. The book covers 75 hands and offers more than 150 game solutions, which were jointly worked on by five well-known authors, including ME WSOP champion Joe Hush. You can right now.