This article will cover the basics of table selection and the importance of position in no limit texas holdem when playing tight aggressive poker.
It’s amazing how many poker players sit at an online or live poker table regardless of where they are sitting in relation to other players.
I am going to target this article to beginner online poker players who are just learning the strict and aggressive style of play and want to explore other ways to increase their win rate.
There are so many tools available today that can help you choose the best tables to play and what you are looking for are essentially fish (bad poker players) to sit back and throw money at.
Fish come in many forms that will be discussed in more depth in a separate article, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s start by looking for loose players. Now if you are using software like Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager, you can extract data from the tables before you sit down and play. A lazy player could be considered anyone who plays between 30-100% of their hands (the higher the percentage the better) and you will be surprised how many players I have found who play between 70-80% even with moderate stakes. you just have to look for them a bit.
Now, why is it so important to have such loose players in your game? Well these guys play so many hands that they will often find themselves in dominance situations against a tight / aggressive player. For example, these players often limp most hands and pay raises, they usually love playing cards of the same suit, like A7, even out of position. Now if you’re playing a hand like AK and both have high pairs on the flop, you can expect to extract a lot of value from these guys, as another big weakness of them is that when they hit the flop, they just can’t fold. . Ironically, these players tend to break quickly and either walk away or sit with a huge stack because they will flop well with their dominated hands or hit a triple on the river when dominated. Don’t be put off by their stack size as these guys keep playing the same way mainly because they remember the time they folded A3 vs AK and they keep doing the same. This will be great for you in the long run, but don’t be mad when your AA is broken by their QJ after they flop a high pair and river two pairs, you’re just printing money against them in the long run.
So now that we know what we are looking for, how will we recognize them? Well, if you are using tracking software, you will have a statistic called VPIP. VPIP stands for voluntarily putting money into the pot and essentially tells you what percentage of hands the players are playing. A high VPIP is loose and at the other end of the spectrum would be considered adjusted between 0 and 18%.
Now the last thing to consider in the table selection process is your position relative to the fish. You want the fish to sit directly to your right or to your right plus one. The reason for this is simple, you will have a weak / weak player position most of the time and will be able to make better decisions after the flop when it comes to creating a big pot or keeping it small.
As we talk about ideal table positions, if we can find a fish and make it sit to our right, what we would really like is a tight player sitting to our left who loves to fold. Why is this? Simply put, we can become blind thieves. If the two players to your left fold all the time and are very tight, when we are sitting on the button, we can raise a lot of hands knowing that they fold so often that once again we are simply printing money.
So, in short, let’s find a table with a loose fish to our right and two tight players to our left and don’t be afraid to leave the table when the dynamics change (the fish breaks) as this is where much of your winnings will accumulate. comes from. Once you leave the table, if you want to continue playing poker, simply open a few more tables and start the table selection process again. You will see your poker results improve dramatically if you follow this simple advice.
In addition to a great selection of tables, working on your game is also very important. Here are some free poker training videos that will help beginner players become stronger players.
Good luck at the tables
Tagpoker team
