Poker Axiom #2: Stay Aggressive

In recent years the idea of playing tight has fallen out of fashion: Players are still able to beat the game by employing a tight strategy, but many players have proven that the game is just as beatable if you employ a semi-loose, or even a loose, strategy. However, one old-school line of thinking still remains: Stay aggressive!

Despite all the changes to poker in the last decade, no player is running around touting the virtues of passive play, every poker player knows that aggression reigns supreme on the felt! The primary reason for this is that aggression gives you a second way to win, by causing a better hand to fold. But, in this article I will show you an underlying reason on why aggression works so well in poker.

This is an aspect of poker that you will not find in other games that people like to compare with poker. Because of the hidden information inherent in poker, players are able to bluff and deceive their opponents: The closest comparison I can think of is the trick play in football, and even that doesn’t really offer a valid comparison because the other team can see what you are doing.

But in poker your opposition is clueless to what you really hold, their only information is by piecing together your habits and tendencies that they have gathered through playing with you. And even then they have to be wary that you are not suddenly changing your style of play!

The more you think about it, aggression isn’t much of a strategic strategy, it’s a mental game of chicken you are playing with your opponents: Do I have it this time, or am I bluffing? Are you willing to call based on your guess, or are you still uncertain of how I am playing?

So playing aggressively doesn’t simply give you that second way of winning that so many players think is the main reason -or only reason– for aggression: Aggression is a way of dominating your opponents, especially the more timid and conservative players in the game. And if your opponents want to get into a battle of aggression with you, you are able to simply back off the accelerator a tad, and wait for them to crash and burn.

The key to aggression is to play aggressively enough to run over your weaker competition, but at the same time not simply put the pedal to the metal and crash and burn yourself.

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