I’m doing a series of companion articles to my most recent book, The Course: Serious Hold ’Em Strategy For Smart Players. It’s a step-by-step guide to mastering the live no-limit hold’em games that you will find in most cardrooms around the world.

• How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players
• Best Poker Beats
• Aggressive Poker Player Crossword
• How To Beat Aggressive Poker Players Test

Click here to claim your FREE tournament report so you can CRUSH the beginning of tournaments. Any player knows that many online cash tables have hyper-aggressive players that can only be described as 'maniacs.' These players play with extreme aggression for the sole purpose of being feared, or they may just be intoxicated or a beginner to the game.

SHOPPING How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players Reviews: You want to buy How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players. Get Cheap How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players at best online store now!! How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players BY How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players in Articles #Get it  How To Beat Loose Aggressive. A lifelong poker player who moved online in 2004, Josh founded Beat The Fish in 2005 to help online poker players make more-informed decisions on where to play and how to win once they got there. He hopes to counter the rampant dishonesty in online gaming media with objective reviews and relevant features. The biggest strengths of loose aggressive player is that they are aware of how important the initiative is and they find lots of spots to bet and take down the pot with a weak holding.

In this article we get to the material on $5-$10 games. These ideas can apply to games of all stakes, but generally they will apply most once you get to the more experienced—and unpredictable—players that inhabit higher stakes games.

Succeeding at $1-$2 and $2-$5 means developing an aggressive post-flop game. In some situations, you want to bet your good hands for value aggressively, even taking risks with some marginal hands others would just check down. In other situations, you want to bluff aggressively, stealing the pots that others are too timid to fight for.

But either way, the key to success at these levels usually involves aggression. Once you get to $5-$10, however, you will encounter many players who have learned this lesson. Aggressive play is successful play. And that brings a new question. If aggression wins, then how do you beat players who are also aggressive?

When successful $2-$5 players first encounter the aggressive players from higher levels, they tend to get run over. That’s because they’ve trained themselves to fold their weak hands to bets, and they get lots of weak hands, as do we all. Each of these folds they see as “correct,” so they get puzzled when it seems obvious in the bigger picture that something is wrong.

The problem is that the folds were indeed correct at lower levels, but only because their opponents weren’t aggressive enough. It can be right to fold a hand to a bet from a passive player, but to call (or raise) against a more aggressive opponent.

How To Beat Loose Aggressive Poker Players

When your opponents get much more aggressive, “correct” folds become costly. It doesn’t take most players getting run over for too long before they figure out that they need to change something.

The next stage many players go through is the “fight fire with fire” stage, where they try to out-aggression the aggressive players. After all, if a little aggression is good, then more must be better, right?

This tends to be a poor approach, however, for two reasons. First, it doesn’t create solid, reliable edges. If your opponents are pushing too hard with weak hands, and you react by also pushing too hard with weak hands, then neither you nor your opponents are getting the better of the deal. You’re just playing a high variance game with perhaps small edges going one way or the other.

Second, if you play in full-ring games, when you and a few opponents play in an ultra-aggressive dynamic, you create situations for other bystander opponents who aren’t participating in the arms race to wait for hands and pick off pots.

Because of these reasons, it’s hard to make progress with the fight fire with fire approach.

The key to handling aggressive players is to go passive in the right situations. This is a very difficult adjustment for many winning players to make, as playing hands passively often offends their sensibilities to the core.

To understand why playing passively can be a correct adjustment, you have to understand that what you may think of as aggressive play could actually be overaggressive.

The best style in a smaller stakes game is often actually overaggressive in a vacuum. If you absolutely dominate your local $2-$5 game, there’s a good chance you do so by playing a few extra hands preflop and hammering the pot in certain key situations after the flop.

This is overaggressive because the extra preflop hands make extra weak hands after the flop. In soft, smaller games, you can turn these extra weak hands into profitable ones by playing them aggressively. But you are vulnerable to an opponent who understands this and reacts by calling down.

Best Poker Beats

The worst nightmare of the overaggressive player is an opponent who is tight preflop (and therefore tends to make good hands post-flop), and who calls down unpredictably, but frequently.

This is the tactic that beats overaggressive players. You want to keep your opponent guessing about how you plan to play out the hand, and you want to end up calling all the way down often.

Here’s an example. It’s a $5-$10 game with $2,000 stacks. A very aggressive player makes it $50 to go from four off the button. The player on the button calls. You call in the big blind with Q J. There’s $155 in the pot.

The flop is 9 8 3. You check, the preflop raiser bets $100, and the button folds. You call.

The turn is the Q. You check, the preflop raiser bets $300, and you call. There’s $955 in the pot.

The river is the A. You check, and the preflop raiser bets $800.

This is a good situation to call down against many aggressive players. That river ace is surely a scare card, as it completes the flush as well as being an overcard. There’s a decent chance that the card beat you—or that you were beaten already. But the pot is laying $1,755-to-$800 or over 2:1. That means you have to win a little over 31 percent of the time to make calling better than folding.

At lower stakes, often winning 31 percent of the time in this situation would be a pipe dream. These players realistically wouldn’t be aggressive on the river like that without holding a flush—or at least a straight. Sure, maybe once in a while they would throw in a big bluff, but nowhere near 31 percent.

But aggressive players would often find themselves in a situation to be bluffing here. The flop continuation on a rag board would be standard for many players no matter their two cards. When the queen hits the turn, many players would see an overcard and feel like they should continue the bluff.

After getting called and catching perhaps the perfect river scare card, they wouldn’t be able to resist firing again on the river. So if you call down certain aggressive players here, they will show up with literally any two cards that they started the hand with, regardless of hand strength. Their aggressive play was dictated by the board texture and the turn and river cards, not by anything about their own hand.

If this read is correct—or even if your opponent is bluffing somewhat less often than this, but still bluffing—then you will win well more often than 31 percent of the time, and you should call.

Final Thoughts

Learning to beat aggressive players can mean a dramatic shift in how you approach the game. When at lower stakes winning play just meant finding the right places to shove your chips around, when you play bigger you have to think more about how your opponents are trying to push you around and where not to back down. Because against aggressive players, sometimes just calling down is the best weapon that you have. ♠

Ed’s newest book, The Course: Serious Hold ‘Em Strategy For Smart Players is available now at his website edmillerpoker.com. You can also find original articles and instructional videos by Ed at the training site redchippoker.com.

Playing versus an aggressive opponent heads up is extremely annoying. These players like to constantly apply pressure by raising, 3-betting and pulling off plays like check-raises or bluffs. These players just don't give us a break.

Many players, myself included, tend to react to this in a negative way. Instead of trying to figure out a strategy to overcome this opponent, we will be counterproductive in our actions. An action I've been guilty of taking (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is becoming frustrated or tilted. Often times my first response once I reached this point is to fight fire with fire - or aggression with aggression.

The problem with this more often than not is that it is blind aggression. We're being aggressive simply for the sake of being aggressive. This eventually leads to further irritation, spewing of our stacks and possibly even damage to our bankroll and/or confidence.

In my experience, albeit it's very short, the best approach to facing these players is to remain calm and make tiny adjustments in your strategy. I prefer to make one adjustment at a time. A few of these adjustments include how wide I open or defend post flop, my overall bluffing strategy and the thinness of my calls or value bets post flop.

Preflop Adjustments for Aggressive Heads Up Players

Aggressive Poker Player Crossword

The adjustment I make for aggressive players is to adapt an opposite style of play. In other words, I will be more passive and calling station-y. This is actually common advice (to do the opposite of what the other player is doing). The most popular example of this advice in action is versus a tight opponent. It's often suggested that versus a tight player you loosen up and steal his or her blinds since they'll only play strong hands. All other pots are up for grabs.

I take a similar approach when playing against aggressive players. But the thoughts behind my adjustments vary slightly depending on whether I'm opening or calling (defending). Let me explain further.

When I'm opening versus an aggressive opponent, the first question I ask myself is, 'can I call a 3-bet?' I mean, I'm playing verses an aggressive player. I have to expect that he'll 3-bet me often. If I can't continue to a 3-bet, I'll generally fold my hand or in other words, I'll narrow my opening range. My range will only include hands I can 4-bet (and call 5-bets) with or defend to 3-bets with. All of these hands should more or less be for value. So my 'thought' behind my action here is more or less based on his aggressive tendency.

Defending opens, on the other hand, I actually look at what I perceive my opponent's opening range to be. I know if my opponent is aggressive, he's likely to be loose too (this is heads up after all). So, my opponent's range will have a lot of 'air' or 'bluffs' in it. My strategy for countering this is to have a wider defending range. I'm going to defend a lot with raggedy aces, my medium kings and queens. Again, this is all from a value perspective. I'm defending with a wider range, but it's still narrower than what I perceive his opening range to be.

Bluff Adjustments for Aggressive Players

The bluff adjustment that I make is to avoid bluffing with a high frequency - if I choose to bluff at all. My reasoning simply boils down to what I outlined previously. Most of my actions versus an aggressive player are going to be for value. If I can't withstand a check-raise, 3-bet or shove, then I shouldn't be doing anything that can provoke that action.

I realize that probably sounds extremely passive or even fishy. But hear me out. To me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to c-bet a flop if you know that 9 times out of 10 you're going to get check-raised or shoved on. Most times, because c-bets are bluffs a large portion of the time, you're going to have to fold. That adds up to a lot of money only to give up. So instead, I choose to avoid it altogether and come up with an alternative strategy. Either I'll go for a delayed c-bet (c-bet the turn) or just check behind since I should expect to have showdown value a majority of the time.

Versus some aggressive players, you might be able to get away with an occasional bluff in the form of a check-raise, c-bet on a super dry board or something to that effect. As with anything poker related, it's player dependent.

How To Beat Aggressive Poker Players Test

Postflop Adjustments for Aggressive Players - Thinner Calls/Value Bets

I think one of the hardest adjustments to make in regards to playing verses aggressive players is making thinner value bets or calls. At least it was for me.

A 'thin' value bet is making a bet with a hand like second or third pair. The bet is for 'value' because you expect worse to call. It's thin because there isn't much worse that can call you. For example, say you have KT on an A-J-T-4-2 board. The action is check/check on the flop, your opponent bets the turn and you call and on the river your opponent checks. You can make a small bet here and get value from a pair of 9s or worse or even king high.

Another good example would be KT on a Th-9h-6c-5h-2d board. This board is pretty gross with a flush draw, straight draw and a few two pair combos. But you can still make a bet here and get value from worse tens, pairs or even ace high. Many players would pass on this spot because of how texture the flop is. But the thing is, is that an aggressive player will have a much wider range that consist of more than just the hands that make up the scary draws on that board texture. This is what we're getting 'thin' value from.

Making thin calls is the same idea as making this value bets. You are making a call with a hand such as 2nd or 3rd pair, or even ace high. I've called all-in shoves on a dry flop with ace high verses some players because of how aggressive they are. What is so sick about these calls (except for the fact that I was able to make them ;) ) is the fact that my call was for value - they had a much worse hand than I did.

I'm not trying to say that you should be making hero calls with ace high every time the situation presents itself. What I am saying though is to analyze the situation and if the aggressor's line doesn't make sense and he makes an odd river bet, than a thin call might be in order. You don't have to have 'A' high either - I've made thin calls as light as 'J' high knowing my opponent was capable of showing up with worse and turning his hand into a bluff.

Summary of How to Play HU Poker Verses an Aggressive Opponent

Playing versus an aggressive player can become frustrating, tilting even. The most important thing you can do is to remain calm, analyze the situation and come up with a strategy to overcome your specific opponent. You'll find that by doing this and coming up with minor adjustments on the fly that you can tame even the most aggressive of players.