Do You Play Tight and Aggressive?

Many people are playing Texas Hold'em poker today, and while not all are winners, there are definitely key strategies that have proven to be effective in increasing your Hold'em win rate. One important strategy involves your style of play. The proper style can be one of the most important factors in whether or not you are successful. Understanding your opponent's styles and acting accordingly is also a key element of top Hold'em strategy.

It is commonly agreed that the best style to play is a tight aggressive style. This means that you play very few hands, but when you do play them, you play them strongly, taking the lead in hands with betting and putting pressure on your opponents to fold. The reason this style is best is because it gives you the best chance to win, either by making the best hand, since you start with a better hand on average than your opponents, or by intimidating your opponents to go away with your aggressive betting.

Many players think they have a tight aggressive style when they do not. A lot of players who think they are tight are still playing more hands than they should. Players who pride themselves on their aggression often do not understand the distinction between wild aggression and selective aggression. Just throwing chips into the pot at every opportunity will not get you the money. You have to sense when your opponents are weak or when you appear strong. If you are not selective with your aggression, opponents will not respect your bets and your strategy will be ineffective.

Some players brag that they have a "tight aggressive table image," meaning they appear to other players at the table to be tight aggressive. It is more likely that this is the way they wish to appear. Having a tight aggressive table image is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, it is good to have any image other than the one that reflects your actual style. If you really are a tight aggressive player, your image should vary depending on the opponents that you face. You should be adjusting your style according to your opponents as well. You generally should be playing tight against loose opponents, waiting for them to try and bully you when you have a big hand so that you can trap them, and more aggressively against tight, passive opponents, forcing them off hands that are better than yours but not the best. In the first case, it would be best to have a loose passive image, with opponents thinking that you are playing with weak holdings that you can be forced off of, and in the second case, you hope opponents give you a tight image, so that they will respect your bets even when you have nothing.

The concepts of loose vs. tight and passive vs. aggressive are not static. They are dimensions along which all players fall, and they vary according from player to player. However if you are biased towards tighter and more aggressive play, you will give yourself the strongest chance to beat any game you play.