Today’s Texas Hold’em Strategy is about one of the drawbacks of over aggressive play. Online poker players tend to be a tad on the aggressive side. From a poker strategy standpoint, they are the holdem equivalent of those killer bees from Africa that so many bad movies have been made about. The truth of the matter is that yes, they win a lot of poker hands, but last week in one of our editorials we also pointed out that despite the number of hands they win, they tend to lose money over the long haul. A big reason for this is that playing poker with the aggression of an angry ferret generally takes the bluff off of the table.
If you are sitting in one of the blinds, occupy another early seat, or are somewhere in the middle, and your opponents have attached the “loose” or “maniac” label to your particular brand of poker strategy, then when you bet out of position, many of your fellow poker players will not take that bet seriously. At the very least they will look at it sideways. In a lot of cases, if the rest of the table are playing poker with subpar hole cards, then you stand a good chance of stealing the blinds. If one or two players do have playable hands though, then your bet will not represent any sort of clear and present danger to them.
When a loose player bets out of position during a game of holdem, their opponents will not reflexively put them on a superior poker hand. In short, they will lower the threshold for what sort of hand it takes to challenge that loose player. Unless the maniac is truly holding cards worth the dramatic move of betting out of position, that player will probably loose. This is why table image is important.
That is the Texas Hold’em Strategy for today.
