Image courtesy of World Poker Tour
To thrive in modern poker, you have to play more aggressively! Days of playing rigid, tight, weak, passive, and very straightforward poker are long gone, and this approach will no longer cut it.
To win at the tables, you must learn to be more aggressive. This doesn’t mean you should play like a maniac, but by applying intelligent aggression, you’ll pick up many pots that don’t “belong” to you.
In this article, I’ll share with you three tips on how to improve your aggression before the flop, after the flop, and when running deep in tournaments by targeting players who don’t want to go broke.
Tip #1: Stop 3-Betting Only With Your Best Hands
If you only 3-bet before the flop with your good hands, you’ll be easy to play against, as your opponents can simply get out of the way.
Most people don’t 3-bet nearly enough. If you look at the first chart below, you can see all the hands we should be re-raising in button vs. hijack confrontations (marked in red). In addition to our best hands (which most players do 3-bet), we are also re-raising with a variety of other holdings, like suited aces, suited kings, and some off-suit aces with solid kickers.
Hands containing an ace have good blocker properties, which means they reduce the likelihood of the opponent holding a strong hand. The same applies to hands containing a king, as they reduce the number of AK and KK combos.
Suited and connected hands are good 3-bet candidates because they have good playability after the flop. It’s advantageous to have these hands in your range, as it allows you to connect with various straight runouts in spots where your opponents won’t be expecting it.
By adding bluffs to your preflop 3-betting repertoire, you’ll pick up many pots that other players won’t, because they’re still 3-betting only with the best of their holdings.
This approach will allow you to win a bunch of small and medium pots without too much resistance, and those chips add up quickly.
Tip #2: Bluff More Postflop in Good Spots
There are many spots where you can efficiently increase your postflop bluffing frequency, and you can discover and explore these spots using poker solver analysis. In this article, however, I’ll keep things simple and give you two situations where you can easily ramp up aggression and expect positive results.
Firstly, you can increase your c-betting frequency on the flop. During the early days of poker, players would continuation bet on almost all flops. Over the years, they learned to tone it down, and today, they are c-betting closer to the optimal frequency.
However, the fact of the matter is that many players don’t defend adequately against continuation bets, which opens the door for you to increase your frequency, primarily using smaller sizing. By making this adjustment, you’ll put yourself in a position to win a bunch of small to medium pots without ever risking many chips or cash.
The second spot where you can ramp up your aggression is on board-changing turns and rivers, especially if you have any kind of equity.
Let’s look at an example. Playing 60 big blinds effective, we open Q♥10♥ from the hijack and the big blind calls. The flop comes 9♦8♥4♣.
This is the spot that we should be c-betting pretty much always, unless there is a very specific reason to believe that the opponent will check-raise frequently.
So, we c-bet for 3.5 big blind, the opponent calls, and then checks once again on the K♠ turn.
What’s really important to realize is that a pair of nines becomes significantly worse on this turn, and it’s not like the big blind will always have a nine when they call on the flop. They’ll also have an eight, a four, or even some ace-high hands with a backdoor.
So, this is a situation in which we want to keep putting on the pressure and betting big (around two-thirds of the pot), using a polarized range of our best hands and draws.
Many players are satisfied to check back on the flop and the turn here, and maybe put out a river bet, making it easy for the opponent to find a hero call with a hand like a pair of eights. By applying pressure on the flop and the turn, you get your opponents to fold way more often than they should.
Tip #3: Increase Your Aggression Deep in Tournaments
In tournaments, most players are afraid to go broke and are too passive when the stakes and pressure are at their highest, especially in small stakes games.
Knowing this, you’ll want to increase your aggression when deep in tournaments, especially when there are money implications or there is a final table looming. You can do this by employing the following strategies:
- Re-jam over short stacks’ opens – jam over raises from short stacks, especially if they are aggressive, forcing them to fold way more often than they should. They’ll fold hands like AT and 77, waiting for a better spot, which doesn’t come around that often.
- 3-bet small and frequently when playing deep stacked – don’t be afraid to attack opens with small 3-bets. If they make it 2 big blinds, 3-bet to 5, and even though they’ll usually call, they’ll fold way too much on different flops. When they do 4-bet you, you can fold easily, knowing you’re way behind.
- Open slightly wider and c-bet more often – if you’d normally raise 20% of hands and you have a bigger stack than opponents and there are payout implications, you’ll want to increase your raising range to 25, 30, even 40% if they are passive. After the flop, c-bet more often, as players have a tendency to call a lot against small preflop raises, but give up on flops way too easily.
These three tips will help you ramp up your aggression across the board and make you a more profitable player, especially at small stakes. Remember, you don’t need to go crazy; you just need to be more aggressive than your opponents and pick up a bunch of pots that they’ll let you have while they’re waiting for “a better spot.”
