3 spots you should get more aggressive in

3 Spots You Should Get More Aggressive In

New Online PokerPoker Strategy

In this post we are going to tackle 3 key spots where many players are playing too passively, in a constant strive to help our readers to plug their leaks and play like the best Pros around, this is one of the biggest changes you will need to make if you are playing passively in the spots we mention.

Players in low stakes games are generally going to be playing too passively… meaning that even with strong holdings they are less likely to 3-Bet, we’ve all seen it, some nitty player shows up with pocket Queens in a spot where most aggressive players would have put in a tonne more action!

So to counter this passiveness we will want to widen our ranges and be more aggressive, let’s look at some spots to put in aggressive action pre-flop.

Re-Raising an Early Position Open

People give far too much respect to early position opens, the fact is low stakes players don’t construct their ranges how a good player might, so they will show up with strange hands within their early position raising hands, I’ve personally seen hands like A6o being raised from UTG… a poor hand that plays terribly post-flop, that we would probably only look to play on the Button.

Whilst we know that players are shy on their 3-Betting ranges, they are going to be even more shy with 4-Bets.

Therefore 3-Betting players that will only 4-Bet with the nuts is a great opportunity for us, we will get to play a bloated pot, with the betting lead, in position, usually heads up and with a stronger looking range than our opponent.

Too many players will flat call with hands even as strong as JJ, QQ and AK when players raise from early position, but this is far too weak we should pretty much always be looking to bloat the pot with these holdings, we can get value from all lower pairs that will call and all weaker Ace highs.

If we have seen that the player opening from early position is very active, or a typical aggressive player then we should be widening our opening ranges to include hands like any suited broadways and even some hands like K9s A9s and low suited Ace highs like A2s-A5s.

These hands will play well post-flop and with our perceived tighter range it’s going to be easier for us to win the pot with continuation bets.

Re-raising from the Big Blind Vs Late Position Raises

Most good players will look to open a huge portion of their range from late position, in fact, most good players will open near 100% of their hands from the button.

So we will want to construct a 3-betting range from the Big Blind with value hands like A9s+ KTs+ QJs+ 88+ as well as mixing in some 3-Bet bluffs with hands like K6o, K7o, K8o these hands have good removal but don’t play well post-flop so it’s good to use some of our worst hands when it comes to what we want to call with to use as a 3-Bet bluff in these spots.

Where we might flat call with hands like Q5s because they play decently after the flop some of our unconnected offsuit combinations will make the best bluffs as they will have less value post-flop.

Extra Tip
We don’t always have to re-raise our opponents though, we can do this some of the time as part of our strategy, but another good trick to have up our sleeves is to check-raise bluff flops that are dry and therefore unlikely to hit the raisers range or attack boards that are more likely to connect with our defending range that will include a lot of low cards.

Re-Raising from the Big Blind Vs Small Blind Raise

Once again just like late position raises ranges are huge from the Small blind, especially when antes are in place and there are a tonne of chips in the middle to be one with just one player to get through.

So when facing a raise from the small blind it is likely to be of a much wider range than of usual, the likelihood that this is a steal is very high.

Re-steals from this position are great, because we can look to win the pot pre-flop and when we don’t manage to take the pot down with our initial 3-Bet we will be playing in position for the rest of the hand with our range advantage.

We will want to include a lot of suited and connected hands in our 3-Bet range that can flop well and win us a big pot or when high cards come we can represent these with our range advantage.

Extra Tip
Many good players will have a balanced limping strategy from the small blind where they will include poor hands that want to continue for the minimum cost, along with having good hands that will be looking to limp-raise.

However in general low stakes/less skilled players will be limping fairly unbalanced, so look to size up your opponent and put in steal raises against limps with very poor hands that have little chance of winning post-flop. This is a great way to win chips with our junk as well as remaining balanced as we would do the same thing with our good hands too!

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