3 Tips to Improve Your Aggressive Playing Style in Poker

You might have heard people using such terms as “Calling Station”, “Tag”, “Rock”, “LAG”. These are the names of different playing styles in poker. If you have not heard anything about poker playing styles, then you are in for a treat.

Whenever you sit down at a table to play poker, you have to play against other people, although not always. Each of the players can be classified according to their decisions during the game and matched with one of the six poker playing style stereotypes.

A good understanding of the table in general and people playing it allows you to plan out and build up your own playing strategy much better. Basically, careful analyses of the actions of your opponents will give you enough insight to guess the reasons for their raising, folding, calling, etc.

In this article, we will be discussing one of the oldest and most stable playing styles out there. That is if the style is executed properly. A misunderstanding of this style leads to below-average performance and, obviously, continuous losses rather than wins.

What is Tight Aggressive Poker Playing?

Let us dissect the name of this style. There are only two words of value to us here: ‘tight’ and ‘aggressive’.

‘Tight’ concerns the number of hands that the poker player uses during a game. When you are playing tight, you are always highly selective and careful about your dealt hands. Also, the position from which a tight player plays his hand influences the decisions as well.

Extremely tight playstyle increases the win rate significantly, but not necessarily the monetary gain. However, such a systematic and almost algorithmic approach to playing poker can be quite obvious and predictable to other players.

Tight is a complete opposite of loose where a player allows for a greater margin of risk and likes to take their chances with medium to bad hands. A loose player will eagerly enter just about any pot. This makes it hard to figure out whether the player has a good or a bad hand.

The second word, ‘aggressive’, defines the attitude of the poker player to their hand during a game. If you are the one who is aggressive in the game of poker, then it is you forcing the pot to grow. You raise and reraise when you think your hand is the winning one.

In stark contrast to aggressive poker players, passive players rarely make any exciting plays. They usually call and seldom raise. As an aggressive player, you can majorly profit off of the passive playstyle players by continuously dragging them into the pot and taking their chips.

Tight aggressive playstyle does not mean that you should disregard general rules of poker playing. If you want to appear and play like a professional you combine the tight-aggressive methodology with the common ground rules of poker. If you are not familiar with them, here is a great article from Gambling News Magazine [3].

Benefits

There are a couple of reasons why the tight-aggressive methodology is one of the oldest yet most ubiquitous ones among great poker players. Here is why tight-aggressive playstyle is beneficial for you:

• The tight aspect of the methodology offers you easy patterns to follow. You never play bad hands; you only play the ones that are allowed by the methodology. This brings cognitive processing down to a minimum.
• The already existing pattern of game actions is optimized for the best win rate possible. The specified hands by this methodology have only the best chances of winning an average game of poker.
• The aggressiveness of the playstyle maximizes profits. If you are playing aggressively, it can prompt other players to raise and re-raise, bringing more spending cash to you in the end.
• It can make other weaker players crumble under the pressure you put on them. Passive players especially can end up in a dead-end loop of losing money to you.
• The algorithm-like playing enables multi-tabling or playing a couple of rooms on online casinos. Considering all of the pros, with a tight-aggressive playstyle, you are sure to walk away with a net gain in funds.

Downsides to Playing

The cons of playing this way are less abundant. On the other hand, they are significant:

• Tight aggressive playstyle is incredibly easy to spot, which annihilates any possibility of bluffing [4]. When this happens, you are forced to either change your playstyle completely or double down on the tightness.
• There is a chance to lose majorly lose money when holding a strong hand that is not extremely strong.
• The tight-aggressive methodology cannot be applied to video poker. According to Gamblers Daily Digest [5], video poker requires its own strategy and approach.

3 Tips to Boost Your Aggressive Playstyle

Let us try to avoid the disadvantages and trade-offs of this style. You can improve this playstyle by keeping 3 things in your mind.

Know Your Expected Values

Do not value your hand incorrectly. High-marginal hands are stepping stones for numerous tight-aggressive players. A hand A-Q is not better than an 8-6 hand. The latter has a 12% bigger chance to be the winning hand than the former one. Study the winning percentages of hands like you have studied the multiplication table at school. The best hands out there are A-A, K-K, Q-Q, K-A, J-J, 10-10, A-Q, and 9-9.

Be Dynamic

Make your opponents think that you are reckless. You and your playing will be constantly evaluated and analyzed by other players in a real scenario, unlike in a virtual one [6]. In reality, you cannot be applying only one playstyle continually throughout the game. You have to change, adapt, and evolve as a player over the span of one poker game session. Keep your opponents on their toes, guessing. Throw into the mix a couple of loose plays, a couple of passive plays during the game. However, always make an emphasis on staying aggressive and tight.

Practice, Practice, and Practice

Practice makes perfect. Before trying out any new strategy in the wild, in a real casino, you have to test it on safe simulated grounds. There are numerous online casinos that are completely safe for you to practice and realize your ideas. OnlineCasinoGems is one of the best hosts that curate online poker rooms. Here [7] you will be able to try out being tight-aggressive. You will encounter many situations where you will have to diverge from the methodology, making yourself a better player.

Aggressively Winning

This approach to playing poker will bring consistency and structure to your playing, as well as a reliable increase in the win rate. Despite being a nice addition to your arsenal, tightness and aggressiveness should not be exploited in poker.