|
 Playing Aggressive a winning poker strategy for Texas Holdem.
One important factor of playing poker is how you actually play the game. What this actually has to do with is with table image or with how the other poker players see you and how they will play against you.
There are a few basic poker styles, Aggressive, Tight or Loose. Loose can also look like manic. Playing Aggressive is the winning style of poker that you see most pro?s use. Let me go over the basic concepts of what each one of these styles of poker looks like.
A tight poker player will only raise before the flop with monster hands like AA, KK, QQ, depending on how tight a player they may raise with AK, AQ, or AJ as well and maybe A10 depends on how tight a poker player they are. I have some extreme cases where they raise with nothing and only call. Also a tight player will usually not bet unless the poker hand they have is a top hand. This sounds like a reasonable way to play except for one problem. The problem is this type of poker strategy will not give you the opportunity to make money on your big hands. What I mean is that if you are always tight it won?t take long and players will not play against you when you make a raise. Therefore when you do get a monster hand like AA or KK and you raise before the flop. You will not get any action. Think about it if you watched a guy only bet when he had the nuts why would you stay in the hand with them and just hand them your money. This is why a tight playing style all the time will not get you paid when you hit monsters. You will hear a player that uses a tight poker strategy complain that no one will play with them, or when I bet everyone folds. This is why it?s important to mix it up. Tight is not a bad way to play however if you do it all the time you will not get action when you want it therefore it is a poker strategy that has its place but also needs to change up and go with a more aggressive style of poker.
A loose poker strategy is one where you call pre flop raises with marginal hands or you stay in after the flop with big betting where you have very few outs. This type of play will get you broke quick. Right now we are lucking at the two extreme opposites in poker styles. If you use this style of poker play all the time you will not be able to steal pots or bluff. Mainly because people will not respect youre bets because you bet with nothing and call with nothing. So sometimes a tight table image is good because stealing pots are much easier when players see you as tight. However the draw back is that when you do get big hands and players thing you are tight you will not make money on those hands. The key to winning poker is to switch things up. You never want the players you play against to know what you are holding or how you play therefore constantly switching up your style of poker play becomes important to a winning poker strategy.
Lets cover the manic really quickly and then we will progress to the predominant style of poker that you see all the professional poker players? use. The manic is a player that will push all in with a crap hand like 72 or call your bets with nothing hoping to hit an over card. Basically this type of poker is completely irrational. However Manic are part of the game because they do win and have good nights. Typically a manic is either out real fast or he is sitting on a huge stack of chips that will dwindle quickly. We will talk about how to play the manic and how to play the tight player later on.
Now lets talk about the winning poker strategy that most professional poker players use. This one is called aggressive. An aggressive player pushes action with a variety of hands and uses position to his advantage to steal pots or bluff. An aggressive poker strategy is one that pushes action. That means if you are on a draw you bet if you have the outs to go chasing that is and you can get control of the hand. Another part of this winning poker strategy is to use your position. For example on the button which is what the dealer position is called a good poker player will play marginal hands and push action with them. This is the best position on the table after the flop. You get to see what everyone else does before you have to act. The other thing an aggressive style of poker does is to represent the board lets say you raised before the flop and you have pocket 6?s. So you represent a hi pair and raise the blinds 5 or 6 times. You get one caller.
The flop comes A210. The caller checks to you. Know you want to make a good bet to represent the ace since the caller checked it you need to represent it and pretend it helps you. About 75 percent of the time they will fold because they didn?t hit anything. Now if you would have checked a smart player would have raised and you would have probably had to fold. The bet after the flop does two things it gives you a chance to take the pot down and lets you know where the other player is at if they call then you have to put him on the ace or maybe a good draw and you may want to fold the hand unless you have enough outs to draw out, this also depends on the bet. This is basically what aggressive poker strategy looks like. What it does is keep your opponents guessing. So you will switch it up one time you are raising with a low pocket pair the next time it might be aces, the time after that it may be suited connectors. Good aggressive poker strategy will keep your opponents on their toes and will help you win more pots playing poker. Now when I say aggressive poker that is not like loose players. Play aggressive not reckless. If you feel you are beat get out of the hand and live another day, however if you find a way to mix up your strategy between tight and aggressive you will develop a consistent way of winning Texas Holdem poker tournaments online or in real cash games. In real texas holdem poker tournaments this becomes even more important then online. Online poker has the advantage of generally you will not play against the same people where if you are playing poker in home games you will encounter the same opponents often therefore you will need to switch your game up often.
Switching gear is an important part of winning poker strategy. If you use the same poker strategy over and over again people will get a read on you and you will loose the edge of them not knowing what you have. This is something that you will have to play around with. I suggest you find a poker league to go play in and test out theories. Be aware you will find crazy plays in free games like this so it is some times better for your poker strategy to find a low level money game where there is something at stake and people will play better poker.
I hope this short article on winning poker strategy. I hope you will join us in our online poker room and rake some pots.
|
