Poker Strategies – Being The Aggressor | Poker News

Poker Strategies – Being The Aggressor

By Bill Kernow • February 7th, 2010

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.

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.

Careful selection of hole cards is a required skill in poker, and if you do it right your aggression will be more effective. If you are discerning enough, you can regularly get away with re-raising your opponent and winning a nice pot without ever revealing your hand, based on your stringent image.

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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