Poker Strategies – Being The Aggressor
Experienced, successful hold’em players can tell you that poker is a game of betting, not calling. The amount of pressure that you can constantly direct onto your opponents can frequently be measured in parallel with your general success in poker.
When your opponent bets into you, they force you to be the one who has to make a decision – do you feel you have the better hand or not? If you’re holding a margin hand then it’s not easy to make that decision, which often means you’re forced to fold. So it is almost always better to be the aggressor in a hand, unless of course you relaly have a very strong hand and you are trapping your opponent. The idea of being aggressive is to persuade your rival to guess incorrectly about what you’re holding. Whether you want them to fold or call is dependent on the situation, but what you always want is for him to make a mistake. By constantly betting and applying pressure you encourage your opponents to make errors.
Selecting which hole cards to be aggressive with, and from which position, is a required skill in poker, and if you do it right your aggression will be more effective. If you are selective enough, you can often get away with re-raising your opponent and taking the pot down without ever revealing your hand. This requires the right table image, and an opponent with enough skill not to simply call with very weak hands.
Calling stations in poker are generally losing players, and regularly give up precious chips because of an irrepressible inquisitiveness. You do not want to be a calling station in poker, but you do want to recognize them in order to take money from them in the most effectual way possible. And that is simply value betting your good quality hands in average increments, to keep them in the hand.
The essential rule here is that you want to be the aggressor in the game, but you want to do it against the right opponents with the correct hands. If your Ace King hits nothing the flop, you should almost certainly still do a lead out bet to keep the pressure on, but after that, you ought to be using profiling information to decide what to do beyond that.
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