Playing Aggressive Poker

When you are an aggressive poker player things tend to go your way. This is because you make them go your way by being aggressive. When you play aggressive you are applying pressure on your weak opponents attempting to force them into making mistakes. Once they make a mistake you then make the correct following play and capitalize on it. You have fold equity on your side as well when you play aggressive.

Here are our top five tips for playing aggressive poker. These poker tips should step your game up to the next level of aggression and have your opponents begging you to leave the table!

Top Five Tips for Playing Aggressive Poker

1. Early Position – You can still be aggressive from early position, but make sure that you are only playing some of the strongest hands from your range. If you are playing higher than the micros and notice there are a lot of other grinders at the poker room you are at merge your range a little and randomly raise with hands like suited As and TJ suited etc to keep your observant opponents off your tracks. Hopefully they will think you are a fish and stack off light to you.
2. Late Position – The other players at the table might hate you, but you need to open up like crazy in late position. You have position so play as many hands in position as you can. This doesn’t mean that you need to go crazy and play bad hands, but you most definitely want to play a lot more hands in attempt to steal and get value from them. This will normally encourage players to make plays at you. Since you know you are only trying to steal give up, but when you do have a good hand and are playing that loose you normally get someone’s entire stack.
3. Aggressive Draws – When you are playing aggressively you will see that you can gain a lot of value from draws by simply betting with them before they hit. When you play your draws aggressively you will have a large pot on the river with a big hand like a flush or a straight. It is no problem to get the rest of your chips in the pot when you hit. Your opponents will fold a lot as well. By playing draws aggressively you will get a lot of value from hands like 99 or TT that missed their set but still call a flop bet.
4. Target Weakness – You play very aggressive against passive players because that is their weakness. They don’t like to play big pots so you can force them to so that they are out of their comfort zone. You can also minimize the size of the pot with your draws against tight players who want to play big pots with their top pair top kicker hands. Checking behind when they intend to check/raise is a great way to keep the pot as small as possible until you have a made hand.
5. Value Bet – When you have a good made hand post flop you need to just value bet. This is where the most money from your aggression will come from. You cannot win money if it is never put into the pot. You cannot count on your opponent to bet, so you need to build the pot you intend to win on your own. As hard as it may seem it is solely up to you. Make sure you figure out around how much your opponent is willing to call. The closest to the maximum that they will call is best. Also figuring out the minimum amount you need to bet for a bluff will save money as well.

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