Aggressive poker players are can be annoying. Aggressive poker players with too many chips ARE annoying AND dangerous. So how do you deal with them? By taking advantage of vulnerability many of them share: they lack balls. That’s right, you read this correctly. Many aggressive players lack balls because many of them love to push people around, but when someone pushes back, they pull their tails between their legs and run like little girls! Their poker strategy relies on bullying and when it’s not working, they get nervous.
Here’s a poker strategy that can do wonders against aggressive players and this works well in Sit N Go settings or in cash game settings. Aggressive players love to do two things pre-flop:
- See cheap flops when they’re in early positions.
- Steal pots from late positions. Particularly when blinds get more expensive, or when they sense weakness (i.e. opponents limped in before them).
Your first task is to identify who’s an aggressive player at your table, and that’s fairly easy to pick up. Just look for the following:
- The number of hands they play. Aggressive players play more hands while tight players tend to fold a lot.
- Frequent raising post flop.
Sometimes you need to mix it up, particularly when you are battling someone who you have played with for quite awhile. You should be able to pick apart many players’ game once you have played a few hundred hands with them, if not you should be paying more attention to what is going on.
Fold equity is a concept that poker players tend to overlook, but it is extremely important. Fold equity, in a nutshell, is what is going to be derived from the times where you make a play and are happy with forcing a fold. These situations will often be spots where you will be happy with a fold, but aren’t going to be upset if the player makes a call. Different draws are great hands to have when trying to maximize your fold equity, but there are many other situations where your raise is going to compensate for those times where you get called and are behind.
Why You Need to Maximize Fold Equity
If you don’t maximize your fold equity there is a good chance that you are missing out on all kinds of value. This can either mean that you are folding hands too easily or that you are simply not playing them optimally. You can’t pass up on a hand simply because you are scared, the reality of poker is that you will be involved in many pots where your edge is razor thing. These situations are unavoidable and you can’t try to weasel your way out of them.
2-7 Triple Draw is a form of poker that many people are unfamiliar with, but PokerStars has made it available for its players to check out. Other popular sites such as Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker, however, do not feature the game in their current repertoire. 2-7 Triple Draw is an interesting variation of poker in which players aim to complete the worst hand possible.
Think about what a good hand would be in Omaha or Texas Hold’em, this would be an example of a terrible hand in 2-7 Triple Draw. Your goal in 2-7 Triple Draw is to compile a hand with the lowest value cards that do not form any type of pair, two pair, straight, flush, or full house combination. The final hand that you have will be comprised of 5 total cards with the absolute nuts being 7, 5, 4, 3, 2. If you think you have bad luck in Texas Hold’em you might be pleasantly surprised that your awful hands will now be a goldmine.
Playing 2-7 Triple Draw Poker
2-7 Triple Draw poker is of course a draw game, meaning that you will multiple opportunities to discard cards from your hand at different times in the action. This is where the skill element comes into play. You will have to be able to judge what types of starting hands are worth continuing with, what types of cards you should throw away, and how to judge your hand’s relative strength. If you continually play poor starting hands you will eventually find that you are not making many good hands because you don’t give yourself a fighting chance. Hand selection is important in 2-7 Triple Draw just as it is in the more popular variations of poker.
3-Betting is a valuable weapon when you are holding a strong starting hand, but it can also be incredibly strong when you are holding suited connectors. There is a common misconception that some poker players have that you should only be re raising pre flop with strong hands. This notion is an old school approach to the game, but some players still believe it is true.
Think about what would happen if you had a strong hand each and every time that you 3-Bet pre flop. If you ever played with someone on multiple occasions it would be easy for them to realize that you have a solid hand the second that you 3-Bet. The players who pick up on this tendency would have a very easy time making a fold whenever you 3-Bet them. You shouldn’t want everyone to fold whenever you re raise with a strong hand, instead you should want them to get involved in the pot. When you start to 3-Bet your opponents you will be balancing your range.
Balancing Your Range
In online poker you are balancing your range when you begin to make the same move (be it folding, calling, or raising) when you are holding different types of hands. If you make an occasional 3-Bet with a suited connector type hand you will be offsetting the times where you 3-Bet with a big hand like pocket queens or pocket kings.
AK is a tricky hand to play. AK is an incredibly strong hand, there is no debating that, but at the same time it is not a made hand. Any pocket pair has an edge over AK. Part of the reason why AK is so valuable stems from the times where it is able to take down a pot before you even get to the flop.
Poker players have a tendency to think that AK is only going to turn them a profit if they are “lucky” enough to connect with the board. This is completely incorrect. Think about how many hands have AK crushed, there are only two, AA and KK. Even when you do face KK you will have a shot at pairing your ace. You are definitely at a big disadvantage when you get AK all in vs. AA, but even then you still have a chance to take down the pot. You will only see a lot of value from AK once you learn to play it correctly.
1 Comment - Click Here to Speak Up