Poker Skills – Aggression Wins

Most poker players will tell you that calling is weak, and betting is strong, but let’s take a look at why being aggressive at the poker table tends to be the profitable way to play, and how to adjust your game accordingly. The amount of pressure that you can constantly direct onto your opponents can frequently be measured in parallel with your general success in poker.

You know this feeling yourself from experience – basically every time someone bets into you. As you well know, it’s never easy to make a big decision with a marginal hand. In that sense, it is constantly better to be the aggressor in a hand, except of course you are trapping your antagonist. The idea of using aggression is to persuade your opponent to guess incorrectly about what you’re holding. Whether you want them to fold or call depends on the situation, but you always want him to make a error. Exerting pressure on your opponent encourages errors.

Careful selection of hole cards is a required skill in poker, and if you do it right your aggression will be more effective. If you are discerning enough, you can regularly get away with re-raising your opponent and winning a nice pot without ever revealing your hand, based on your stringent image.

So called “calling stations” (players who constantly call) in poker are almost always losing players in the long run, and frequently give up their chips because of their curiosity and lack of skill. You never want to be a calling station in poker, but you do want to realise who they are so you can take money from them in the most valuable way possible. And that is simply value betting your decent hands in average increments, to keep them in the hand rather than pushing them off a hand too early.

The fundamental tenet here is that you want to be the aggressor in the game, but you want to do it against the correct opponents with the correct hands. If your Ace King misses the flop, you should probably still do a continuation bet to keep the pressure on, but after that, you should be using profiling information to decide what to do beyond that.