Preflop Play for the Tight-Aggressive Player
The most important part of a tai-aggressive player’s (tag) strategy is to know which hands to play and which to pass up. If you want to make a lot of money playing online poker, you must be very choosy in your choice of starting hands.
It can be tempting to keep playing a hand on the flop, especially if you have folded many times before the flop. When you have finally gathered a strong enough hand to play, it can be quite painful to pass when you miss the flop.
The types of hands you look for on the flop are more likely to resemble a ready hand that will make you exclaim “oh my!” rather than a marginal hand that suggests “well, I’ve got something, and my opponent might be bluffing…”.
Hands like top pair + top pick (TPTK), two pair, sets, streets, and flushes are what you need. Hands like top pair + weak kicker or second pair will get you into trouble.
The problem with hands like top pair with a weak kicker is that you’re unlikely to get activity from the worst hands. In this case, you’re more likely to be tied with the hands that beat the combination. People with worse hands than a top pair and a weak kicker will usually fold on any decent size bet.
Understanding whether your hand is good is knowing your opponents. If you’re playing a hand like AA and some fish call your bets, you’re in a good position. If you bet with AA and the rock makes a huge check-raise on the turn, you’ll probably be beaten.
Playing with such high pairs is similar to playing with TPTK. If you raise with AQ on the preflop and 2Q7 comes in on the flop, you probably have a good hand, but not an invincible one. Pair is just a pair, and while you should bet with it for a windfall, you need to be careful. You should play this hand as your best hand until someone convinces you otherwise.
This brings us to another important component of the TAG style: aggression. When you’ve collected strong hands on the flop, the best time to bet with them. By betting with a strong hand on the flop, you accomplish two separate goals: you take money in the middle with a strong hand and you protect your hand from draws.
You can make a combination with almost every hand, so bet with your hands from the start. If you have TPTK, it’s vulnerable from all sides – people can collect two pairs, flushes, straits etc. You can’t stop people collecting draws against you, but you can make it expensive.
When you bet with strong hands on the flop, you cut off your opponents’ chances of the pot, making it unprofitable for them to chase droos. Since you can’t really guess what kind of draw your opponents have and calculate the odds of putting together a combination (while you’re at the table), a good rule of thumb for betting with strong hands is to bet between 3/4 of the pot size and up to the full pot size.
When you bet correctly with strong hands, you want your opponents to chase droos, as your profit increases when opponents chase droos against the odds. When you make big bets and your opponents keep chasing droos, they won’t collect their draws often enough to make a profit from you. Sometimes it may seem like everyone is trying to collect the draw against you, but over the long haul, a draw against the odds will be a losing game, like a slot machine in a casino.
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