Winning At Poker Through Aggressive Play

By Billy Kernow • February 6th, 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.

Think about when your opponents bet into you – in effect, forcing you to figure things out. As you well know, it’s by no means 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 rival to guess incorrectly about what you’re holding. Whether you want them to fold or call depends on the circumstances, but you always want him to make a misstep. 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 fundamental tenet here is that you want to be the aggressor in the game, but you want to do it against the correct opponents with the correct hands. If your Ace King misses the flop, you should probably still do a continuation bet to keep the pressure on, but after that, you should be using profiling information to decide what to do beyond that.

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