Learning To Bet Aggressively in Texas Hold’em

By Bill Kernow • February 8th, 2010

Once you have played just a few games of poker, you will have realized that no limit hold’em is a betting game, not a calling game. Exerting persistent pressure on opponents is a common characteristic of practically all professional poker players.

You know this feeling yourself from experience – basically every time someone bets into you. As you well know, it’s never easy to make a big decision with a marginal hand. In that sense, it is constantly better to be the aggressor in a hand, except of course you are trapping your antagonist. The idea of using aggression is to persuade your opponent to guess incorrectly about what you’re holding. Whether you want them to fold or call depends on the situation, but you always want him to make a error. Exerting pressure on your opponent encourages 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 money-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 plainly value betting your good quality hands in medium increments, to keep them in the pot.

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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