Free Online Poker Site Lesson On How To Counter Tight-Aggressive Poker Players
You’ve arrived at the flop with a decent hand but what do you do next? For many players postflop is the weakest part of their game. A key part of postflop play (as with preflop) is knowing the type of players you are up against and playing specifically to counter their style.
Overall there are 4 main types of poker player, tight-loose and passive-aggressive.
In the free poker and online nanostakes (.02/.05 blinds), each of these player types make a few key mistakes.
In this free online poker games lesson we’ll look at how to exploit the Tight-Aggressive style player.
Methods to compete the Tight Aggressive Player (TAG) Style
The TAG is going to be the best player you face in free online poker and micro stakes games, happily they are also quite rare!
Tight aggressive is the way that you should aim to play as well and by virtue of this fact you should try to avoid getting into pots with other TAGs where possible.
Typically the TAG will open with sensible ranges preflop for raises and be more aggressive postflop.
They’ll be cbetting pretty wide but shutting down on later streets a fair amount and they’re most unlikely to spew off their stacks by check-raising or betting down with nothing.
That said, they also won’t be calling down with their weak pair hands (think second pair and often top pair hands) or draws (without proper odds.
They will normally get out of the way if out of position if they have nothing and play a solid style when In Position that is difficult to exploit since it is centered around playing with solid hand ranges and betting for value to get folds out of other TAGs and Tight Passive players.
They do not get out of line very much. The way to profit out of these guys (when IP) is to cbet flop wide (you’ll get a lot of folds) and to generally slow down if you’re raised.
When you’re Out Of Position you are limited to check-raising flop and turn wide, though it’s best not to do so with weak hands against TAGs especially in micro stakes as varaince will work against you and lead to a lot of nasty wipe outs.
Again, TAG is the style of play we should be emulating as it’s just all-around solid and hard to exploit – don’t get out of line too much (unless you have a read or some other reason to), pick your spots, and get lots of value from other players’ mistakes.
And keep in mind there are degrees of player styles. Some styles share traits with the most closely related group, TAGs with LAG bits, TPs that lean toward LPs and so on, so keep your wits about you and adjust your play per opponents using player style models as a tool to guide observation and decision making.
Learning to recognize player types and the degree to which a player fits a type isn’t easy.
You need to practice your game plenty though for some of you it will come faster than others. If you’re new to poker do not risk much or even any cash as you learn.
Start of with the lowest stakes games or with free online poker games and work up from there.
For the main large version of this lesson where all the 4 styles are covered along with some extra postflop methods get over to the play free poker online blog on NoPayPOKER.
