Loose Aggressive or Tight Aggressive

Well, under some circumstances it can be – and it can be even more successful.

But when opponents are playing good poker, at full ring table with average stack depth (100 big blinds) there is only one style that is truly successful and that is Tight Aggressive. By the way, I am talking Texas Hold’em No limit games here.

It took me a long while (years) and quite a bit of money to figure this out. I hope you will not make the same mistake. Because it is more fun to be splashing money around and outplay your opponents and put fear into their hearts than sitting around waiting for that good hand, right?

Some of you might argue that this might be true for cash games, but there is no way this is true for tournaments? Well, in a way you are right. But you are missing one thing. I mentioned that this is true when opponents are playing good poker. And you might also be missing the stack sizes, which are an important factor.

So what do I mean, are tournament players not playing good poker? Well, many of them are. But MANY of the tournament players are really scared of busting so they are playing very few hands preflop and fold after the flop if they don’t make a good hand. Especially in live tournaments. I probably would to if I had traveled 1000’s of miles and paid 10 000 $ to enter.

But that is not how you should play if you want to play good poker. And it is not the way most players are playing in online cash games or early stages of tournaments. From the levels when people start playing decent poker, let’s say $0,5-1, a lot of the players are Tight Aggressive and will not be bullied around be someone who is playing a lot of hands.

And now you are thinking, yeah, yeah, this guy has lost some money playing loose, maybe he’s just a bad player and now he is bitter?

That could have been the case. But it isn’t. What has convinced me of the merits of Tight Aggressive play on decent playing tables, regardless of if it’s a tournament or a cash game is deep analysis of my hand history database with 5 million played hands and 100 000 players. I have not yet found a cash game player who has been really successful and who is playing more than 25% of all hands at decent levels.

So I challenge you!
Show me a player who’s playing more than 25 % of the hands and who has a winrate of more than 2 BB/100 hands (2 big bets = 4 big blinds) on $1-2 or higher over more than 50 000 hands at full ring!


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