Three universal Holdem Concepts
Three points about holdem will be universal, and so they will be presented first. You would always have to keep these in mind, at every stage of the hand. These would be
- Your playing style: some ways of playing will be profitable, while other won’t.
- The great importance of position in holdem poker.
- The significance that pot odds will have on your decisions.
The first three tips will deal with these universal concepts.
Adopting a tight-aggressive playing style will be a winning strategy in all forms of poker. You will have a hard time finding a poker game in which this will not be the case. To play a winning game of holdem poker, you would have to (and must) adopt this style of play.
How would ‘tight-aggressive’ be defined?
Tight would mean entering fewer pots than most of your opponents. Being selective by playing only quality starting hand will be the key here. ‘Quality starting hands,’ will be a relative term – sometimes a hand that will be good in one situation will be quite weak in another, and vice versa.
As this book will progress, you will learn to read situations and how your read will influence which hands will be playable in holdem poker, and which will not. Aggressive would mean that when you do decide to enter a pot, you would play the hand for all it’s worth. You will place emphasis on betting, raising, and check-raising. Checking and calling just would not get the job done most of the time.
There will be some situations in which this will be the correct play (and the text will identify these situations for you), but they will be the exception. By the way, an aggressive approach would not mean that once you were to decide to play a hand, you will jam your foot on the gas pedal and won’t ease up until the pot will be played out. Like most things in life, holdem poker will require discretion, and that will come from experience.
How the World Poker Tournament Has Affected Poker Play
One by-product of the recent popularity of the World Poker Tournament (WPT) has been that a whole new breed of poker player had been created. If you have been watching the show with your goal being to learn how to be a world-class poker player, you might have been in for a rude awakening when you would have gone to play. The problems with using the show as a learning device for live game limit holdem would be numerous.
Right away, you would have realized that you were watching a different poker game. It might have looked the same; after all, the poker players had been dealt two cards, and there were blinds, flops, turns, and rivers. That is where the similarities would have ended, though. What you would have been witnessing would be the end of a no-limit tournament, in which the blinds were high, the game was shorthanded, and the program had been edited to showcase the more interesting hands.
This book will talk about limit holdem poker, which will play completely different from the no-limit game. Also, when you were to play in a brick-and-mortar cardroom or online, unless you were to be in a tournament, the blinds will not be large compared to your stack size. You will probably be in a nine-or-ten-handed game. And you will see all of the hands dealt, not just those that some producer would think might turn out to be interesting.
Loose-aggressive play would appear to be a winning style on the WPT. The successful poker players will be in there dancing around with hands that you will toss into muck without a second thought. And the thing would be, they would be correct (most of the time) to play these hands, and you would be correct to throw them away. The reason for this will be that we would be dealing with totally different circumstances.
As a newer poker player who would not yet have developed a good understanding of the game, you might be thinking it self-evident to emulate the style of play you would witness on television. After all, ten-two will be good enough for a world-class poker player; it would have to be good enough for you.
So, as a new ‘television era’ player, you might enter the game playing an extremely loose-aggressive style, and you would believe that to be a winning strategy. In reality, what you would be doing is playing final table no-limit short-handed poker in full limit holdem game. You would not win playing this way, unless your opponents were all doing the same (only doing it worse).
The Tight-Aggressive Edge
So, how exactly would a tight-aggressive approach give you an edge over your opponents? If you had played much low-limit holdem poker, you would have probably found the games typically to be loose (with four or more opponents seeing the flop on average), and for many hands to go to the showdown. This would mean that to win you would have to show the best hand most of the time, as bluffing would be difficult in these poker games (it would be one more down side to being a TV student).
The Tight part of tight-aggressive has meant that you would play fewer hands than your average opponent. Thus, it would stand to reason that the quality of your starting cards would be typically higher than those of other poker players, which in turn would mean that a higher percentage of the hands you would play would reach the showdown as the best hand.
Since bluffing would typically not be a viable option in loose low-limit poker games, playing hands that often would end up at the river as the best hand would obviously be a desirable strategy. This book will teach you which hands would be worth playing and which would not, based on the situation. By playing good cards aggressively, you will win the maximum amount from your winning hands.
If your opponents will wish to stay in the pot against you with inferior cards, you would have to charge them as much as possible to do so. An added benefit of aggressive play (and a key one) would be that you would win some pots that your more passive poker-playing opponents would not, by inducing opponents to fold hands that would ultimately have won the pot. You couldn’t win these ‘default pots’ by checking and calling.