Poker Strategy: What's the Deal with Being Aggressive?

27.11.2009, I don't think there are many poker players today who haven't at least somewhere read or heard that they're supposed to be "tight and aggressive." This is the winning style, we're told, and the expert professionals are exactly that: Tight and aggressive.

Sometimes it's described as "tight but aggressive," a phrase that works just as well, but why this is a winning style of poker is not immediately obvious. Making a case for playing tightly is fairly easy - fold the worst hands, and you will save money. Most of the time, you will have the worst hand, therefore you should spend most of your time folding. But understanding why aggressive play pays off is not as easy to explain, or understand, and being aggressive in the wrong way (or at the wrong time) is often a worse mistake than being passive. Let's examine this idea of being aggressive a bit closer.

Being aggressive - betting and raising instead of checking and calling - gets its value from several factors combined. Raising with the best hand gets more money in the pot and raising with the worst hand wins when you convince someone with a better hand to fold. Betting and raising gives you control of the hand, making the other people at the table check to you, at which point you can decide if you want to bet or check and take a free card. Etc. All of these are good things, and in a game where it's about repeating tiny edges to make any profit at all, taking advantage of this particular edge is good.

But it isn't always an edge. The aggressor at the table gets noticed quickly - very quickly. Even players who seem completely oblivious to anything going on around them will notice someone who raises them. Some people see it as an offense against them personally, and want to extract revenge (not necessarily bad for you, but noteworthy, and furthermore it means that even the worst players have picked up a read on you), yet others will after noticing the fact then routinely check to you and trap you by checkraising when they have a strong hand. Or maybe they don't even checkraise; maybe they just call, figuring that you will bet again - and since you want to play aggressively you will. Against an overly aggressive player, who's not a maniac, just calling is a very powerful tool when you have a strong hand. It's not slowplaying, exactly, because you're not trying to sucker someone in, and you're not hoping that he will necessarily improve (criterias of Sklansky's definition of slowplaying) but instead you let an aggressive player bet the hand for you. If you raise him, he may realize he's beat and fold, but if you just call he will have difficulty putting you on a hand and quite possibly keep betting.

The problem with a poorly played aggressive style is that you may end up getting reverse implied odds, that is, you don't get paid off when you have a hand, but you will shell out money when your opponent does. Conversely, and this is the bad news if smart players pick up on it, you give implied odds. You may make inside straights worth chasing. If you're pissed off at a player who drew out on you (spiking his kicker for two pairs that beat your top pair, for instance), have a look at how much you paid him off. I routinely peel a card on the flop against aggressive players who I know will pay me off when I hit. Understanding that aggressive play, when misapplied, gives implied odds - and doesn't get them - is important to understand how to adjust your play to different situations. Let's look at some examples.

Example 1 - the worthless river bet You're playing against loose, but not stupid, players and your table image - for those that have noticed - is pretty good. You haven't pulled off any obscene bluffs (none that made you show your hand, anyway) and you don't think anyone has any particular reason to believe you're betting with air. So after raising preflop, betting the flop and betting the turn from the button, you have this board on the river:

A-9-6-7-5

... and you hold J-J. The sole remaining player is a pretty standard for the low limit tables. You bet on the flop because there was a good chance that no one had an ace, and two people folded. You bet the turn to charge your opponent for a draw, if that was what he was on, and to make sure you didn't give any medium pair hands a free card to spike two pairs or so. The fact that your opponent called your turn bet was bad news for you, though, because clearly he thought the odds were worth a look at the river. He could very conceivably have an ace here.

Do you bet the river?
No, you should not bet this river against a standard opponent (against a calling station, bet away - they will call with all sorts of hands that you can beat). If he was on a straight draw, there's a very good chance he just filled up on this river, and if he has an ace, he's not folding. Sure, once in awhile, you miss a bet from a hand like T- 9 that would have looked you up if you had bet again, but as a rule of thumb, don't bet rivers unless you can

a) get better hands to fold (no way on this board)

b) get worse hands to call (not entirely likely, but possible)
If you bet and he checkraises, you will almost certainly have to lay your hand down. Take the free showdown and see if you win. If you have the best hand, try to think to yourself "would he have called with his worse hand if I had bet?" and see if you actually missed out on a lost bet here after all, even if it feels stupid not to bet the best hand on the river.

Example 2 - the unnecessary flop raise You are on the button with A-K, and you raise a single limper preflop. The big blind and the limper both call, and the flop comes

K-8-3 (rainbow)

The big blind checks and the limper bets into you. Neither of them have shown any signs of being maniacs or calling stations. Should you raise? Again, I give away the answer in the title of the example.

No, raising this flop is not necessarily good. You do figure to have the best hand right now (barring sets or a hand like K-9, both pretty unlikely), but more importantly, if you have the best hand you won't accomplish much profit by raising. Look at it this way: The pot is currently 7 small bets, and there are no draws available that will let your opponents profitably call even a single bet. If you raise the flop, the big blind cannot have many hands that he will want to call that doesn't already have you beat. True, he could have a pair of kings, something like K-T. But in that case, he may just checkraise the flop and you will have effectively trapped both of them for two bets anyway, without having to do it yourself. If he calls a single bet with a hand like 9-8, he's making a mistake, since he does not have the odds for that. If you raise and he folds you have let him get away without making a mistake. Calling a single bet here is a worse mistake for him than folding to two bets. Give him the chance to make that mistake. If he has nothing - absolutely nothing - then you don't lose all that much by not raising this flop anyway.

So instead, you just call, and give the big blind a chance to make a mistake. Then when the turn comes, you have a chance to trap the limper for two big bets.

What's important about this hand is to recognize that there are no profitable draws available on the board, and your hand is not very vulnerable. With a hand like 9-9, on a 8-5-2 board, on the other hand, you should raise without a doubt. Almost the entire deck consists of scare cards for you on that board, so raising is imperative. Learn to analyze the flop texture and see these differences.

Example 3 - the bet that couldn't win I have to include an example with a bluff, since bluffing, or at least betting highly mediocre hands, is a part of the aggressive players arsenal. I borrow this - or am at least inspired by it - from a thread recently. If I happen to have gotten some of the details wrong, you will have to forgive me - but I'm after a symptomatic idea, not to be precise in my narrative.

No-limit hold 'em tournament, stacks are still pretty decent in size compared to the blinds, two limpers and the big blind see the flop, which is

10-4-4

It is checked around. The turn brings a 3. One player bets the minimum. Both other players call. The river is a third 4, making the final board

10-4-4-3-4.

The player who bet small on the turn now goes all-in. Our hero calls with his 10-5 hand (why he hadn't bet it up until now is not important to illustrate the greater point), and finds that his opponent has a 3 (for a 4-4-4-3-3 full house) and our hero takes the pot. What an awful bet on the river this guy made with his bottom full house, didn't he? What worse hand was going to call his all-in? Someone with ace-high hoping that he was bluffing? No, the only people who call this bet either have a better full house or four of a kind (or, less likely, another 3 giving them a split). His all-in bet could not win here. He will not be able to fold a many better hands (would you have folded 5-5 in the pocket?) and he could definitely not hope for worse hands to call.

Observant readers will notice that this is a variation of the first example, but shows a mistake severely compounded by the fact that it's no-limit and this particular board. If the first example had been no-limit, an all-in bet would not have been awful for the pocket jacks. He could quite possibly have made a pair of aces fold.

Don't get me wrong I'm not advocating a weak or passive style. I'm, by most counts anyway, an aggressive player myself and I will happily bet, raise and checkraise. But it's important to understand why and when to be aggressive, and not just blindly raise whenever you have a piece of the flop. You must give your opponents a chance to make mistakes, and sometimes raising allows them to make correct folds when you should have wanted them to make a bad call. And sometimes - often, even - raising will accomplish nothing more than making a dead draw fold and picking up a pot not bigger than had you checked.

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