If you find yourself playing a loose passive style, the first thing you must do is tighten up your starting hand requirements. Less than 5% of online poker players play anywhere near too tight. The odds are that if you are reading this you should be playing a tighter pre flop strategy. This alone will improve your game over time. Selective Aggression. Poker Style: Outplaying Tight-Passive Players on the Flop. So, let’s look at the big strategy here – you can actually take out these players even when you’re one of the players with the blind, often even before the flop comes around. Unfortunately, when a player is passive there is only one way to win the pot – by having the best hand. This difference is hugely important and is the reason all big winners are aggressive poker players; while most losing poker players are quite passive. Preflop poker strategy Tip 3: Take the initiative and be aggressive. Poker Player Styles Tight Aggressive (TAG). Tight aggressive players are involved in few hands but tend to dominate their opponents when. Tight Passive (TP). Tight passive player, or in short TP have as many benefits as they do short comings. Loose Passive (LP). Should a loose-passive open-limp, stick in a raise to force any players yet to act out of the pot. This isolating of the player can be done with a wider range of hands than usual, because your.
While good, aggressive opponents can be extremely difficult to play against, passive players sometimes can be equally as frustrating to lock horns with in both tournament poker and cash games. It often seems like these so-called “calling stations” are impossible to shake from a pot and that they suck out with a weird two pair all the time (they don’t, by the way), becoming a royal pain in the backside as a result.
In fact, loose-passive players should be welcomed to your game with open arms because they are as close as you will ever get to a goldmine or money printing press seated at your table. These fishy foes are easy to identify and once you have, you can take them on and take their money.
They’ll be found limping into more than their fair share of pots, calling any preflop raises that come after they’ve entered a pot. They then often will proceed to check-call all the way to the river or check-fold, only raising if they have an ultra-strong hand. Loose-passives are always on the lookout for a reason to call — bear that in mind for a little later on.
You’d think that these characteristics would make them the perfect opponents to play against, and you’d be right. But you’d also be surprised to see how many poker players struggle to beat them.
More often than not, the root of the frustration associated with playing against passive players is self-inflicted. By that I mean whoever is moaning about their bad luck or “how the fish always has it” often only has themselves to blame for handing over their stack or a large percentage of it.
The biggest culprits on this front are not listening to the betting or attempting to bluff a loose-passive off a pot. If one of these players has called a raise preflop, called a continuation bet on the flop, and then called a second barrel on the turn, there is no way on this planet that the player is folding on the river, regardless of how the board texture is — third pair is the mortal nuts for these guys!
So how do we beat these impossible-to-bluff types? One way is to use their own style of play against them.
Most of your money in poker will come from value betting. Good players don’t pay off as many value bets as weaker players, but loose-passives love calling value bets. It is this fact alone that makes them super profitable to play against.
If you have a strong hand, then make sure you’re extracting the maximum value from it. You can alter your bet sizes to assist you here because to a loose-passive a two-thirds-pot bet is just as easy to call as a half-pot bet. Bet the flop, bet the turn, and bet the river unless they’ve shown any indication of strength.
Another tip is to isolate these players preflop so that you can have them all to yourself. Should a loose-passive open-limp, stick in a raise to force any players yet to act out of the pot. This isolating of the player can be done with a wider range of hands than usual, because your implied odds are much greater than they would be against a strong, aggressive player.
You could even make your isolating raise larger than usual — or your blind-stealing raise if you have a loose-passive in the blinds — because the player is still likely to call and you’ll have positional advantage for the rest of the hand in a bloated pot. (And such a player is almost never going to get tricky postflop either — bonus!)
How you approach loose-passives on later streets comes down to any reads or notes that you may have. If they float the flop a lot — that is, call with nothing or a weak hand — then you can fire a continuation bet with a higher frequency with your good hands and check back weaker holdings.
When they call your flop bet and a turn bet, you need to start worrying about your own hand strength — because they won’t be! It is here that a lot of players go wrong and they continue stubbornly to bet into an opponent who has shown no inclination to fold.
Stop bluffing the loose-passives, respect any aggression they show, and value bet them out of the water, and you should do just fine.
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While there are certainly infinite ways to play a tournament, there are two basic approaches that tend to apply to the majority of players. If you take an unbiased look at your play, you should be able to aptly determine whether you would be considered a passive or an aggressive player. For example, do you like to flat call raises with AK, or will you make every attempt to get it all in pre-flop? There’s nothing that’s inherently wrong with either style of play, but it’s instead a matter of combining the two strategies to form one optimal, winning combination.
The stages of a tournament will always be the biggest factor in how you should be playing. It makes little sense to be wildly aggressive just as a tournament begins, just as it makes no sense to be passive when there’s a significant number of blinds up for grabs. Shifting gears is perhaps the single biggest thing that a poker player can do in a tournament. Get caught speeding in a slow zone and you’ll be busted. Slow down in the fast lane and you’ll get burned.
Passive Play
Passive play is most ideal when you are in a position to accumulate a lot of chips without putting yourself in a lot of danger. As a general rule of thumb, with turbos and other similar structures being an exception, the early stages of a tournament will call for the most passive play. At this point in an event, you should be working with a large number of big blinds. You’ll also be able to see a number of flops and will be afforded with the opportunity to outplay your opponents in post-flop situations. As a tournament progresses, however, these chances to win based on skillful plays will be greatly diminished.
It’s important to define exactly what passive play is before you attempt to implement it into your game. To some people, passive play is simply playing a hand in a more laid back way than would normally be advisable. While this is technically correct, it does not always translate into winning passive play. You need to be able to pick your spots exceptionally well if you want to be able to adapt to the passive game plan.
Passive tournament play doesn’t mean that you should call off every bet. There’s a big difference between seeing lots of flops with playable hands and seeing lots of flops with any hands. A lot of tournament players feel the need to get involved in just about every pot. They will limp in, call raises, check call bets, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, this is a perfect illustration of the type of passive tournament play that will be punished. While you aren’t going to typically lose your entire stack in one shot with this type of play, you’ll likely be bleeding off chips at a continuous pace. This is passive tournament play, but it’s bad passive play.
Winning passive tournament strategy calls for players to get involved in pots cheaply, but to also put themselves in positions where their opponents are prone to paying them off. In other words, look for hands that can allow you to play in position with an aggressive opponent betting into you. If you have hands that have lots of value when they hit the flop, but are useless without improving, you are going to be in a situation where you effectively apply passive play.
Think about a hand like 8s/9s. If someone raises, a re-raise might take down the pot. In later stages of tournament play this may very well be advisable. At most other points, however, calling off a raise is a much better idea. Your losing nothing if you brick, you make the most if you hit, and your opponent has motivation to take the initiative in the hand. Use passive play as a combatant against overly aggressive players.
Aggressive Play
Just as passive play works wonders against aggressive players, so too does aggressive play work well against passive players. There’s no easier way to understand how to instill an aggressive style of tournament play than to consider what would most effectively beat a passive player. This isn’t to say that you should relentlessly be attacking a particular player simply because they are passive, however. It will almost always be the case that your style of play is a product of circumstance. Using aggressive play, you should be looking for spots where you can push opponents around without much fear of negative reactions.
Think about the mid and later stages of tournaments. When you are in late position with a small pocket pair, you aren’t going to have much leverage when you flat call. Against a passive player, calling off may very well convince them that you are weak (and rightfully so). If you decide to instead raise, however, you have now changed everything. You won’t only change that passive player’s perception of your strategy, but you’ll also be able to better take down post-flop pots with further aggression. Aggressive tournament play doesn’t work if you are going to be aggressive one street, passive the next, and aggressive on the river.
The most important thing to remember with an aggressive tournament strategy is that reckless play isn’t the same thing as aggressive play. There are almost never ending amounts of tournament players who see some wild play on TV and therefore think that 4-bet shoving K4 off suit is the right play. Poker isn’t nearly as much of an abstract game as it might seem. Players who are new to or are unfamiliar with the idea of playing aggressively will often times become wild and reckless. Before you start trying to take down every pot, you need to slow down and think carefully. While passive play can only hurt you so much at a time, there are a few stacks that aggressive play isn’t capable of imploding.
Passive Poker Strategy Games
Passive and aggressive tournament play aren’t so much specific skills as they are learned mind sets. You need to know which hand is going to call for what type of play given the specific circumstances. There’s no blind level where your play should change, there’s no hand that should later your style of play. Poker tournaments call for constant adaptations, and the shift between passive and aggressive play is just one of the ways that you can capitalize on your opponents’ weaknesses.