You’ve arrived at the flop with a decent hand but what do you do next? For most of us postflop play is the weakest part of our game. Postflop as preflop knowing who you are playing against and adapting your play to combat them is essential.
Overall there are 4 main types of poker player, tight-loose and passive-aggressive.
In free online poker micro stakes (.02/.05 blinds), each style of player tends to make certain key errors.
In this free online poker site lesson we’ll look at how to exploit the Tight-Aggressive style player.
The way to combat the Tight Aggressive Player (TAG) Style
In microstakes games, these are generally the most solid opponents you’ll face, but thankfully they’re also pretty rare.
Basically, TAG is how we should be playing at these stakes and we should generally avoid getting into large pots with other TAGs.
Typically the TAG will open with sensible ranges preflop for raises and be more aggressive postflop.
They will be cbetting pretty wide but closing down on later streets a fair amount and they are most unlikely to spew off their stacks by check-raising or betting down with air.
However they won’t call down with weaker pair hands such as 2nd pair and often top pair hands, or draws if the odds are poor.
They’ll just be generally getting out of the way OOP (Out of position) when they have nothing and playing a solid style IP (In Position) that’s hard to exploit centered around playing solid hand ranges and betting often for value and to get folds out of other tags and tight-passive players.
They don’t get out of line too much. The way to profit out of these guys (when IP) is to cbet flop wide (you’ll get a lot of folds) and to generally slow down if you’re raised.
When you’re OOP, the only real way to exploit these players is to be check/raising flop and turn wide, but you don’t really want to be check/raising with air against thinking players especially at nanos, it’s just super high variance, unnecessary, and will lead to a lot of ugly spots (like when you get flatted after c/ring).
TAG is the way you should aim and practice to play, it’s solid and hard to exploit, stay solid unless you have a strong reason to do otherwise, choose your moments and you will get a lot of profit from the mistakes of others.
And keep in mind there are degrees of player styles. Some TAGs are almost LAG, some TPs are almost LPs, etc, so you have to adjust your play to your individual opponents, these player types are just a tool to help you do that.
Learning to recognize player types and the degree to which a player fits a type isn’t easy.
Yes, sorry to say, plenty of practice is required though if you really focus on this and keep good game notes it will come faster for you. If you’re new to poker do not risk much or even any cash as you learn.
Start of with the lowest stakes games or with free online poker games and work up from there.
For the big edition of this article which covers all the player styles and adds some further postflop tips see the free poker online blog at NoPayPOKER.