How to Play Tight

Everyone at some point in time will take a big loss when playing online poker. No matter how experienced or popular a poker player you are, everyone will at some point lose a few hands when the cards go against them.

The natural reaction to this is to increase your own bet to try and win the pot back from the player that just knocked you out of the game. This is the quickest way to losing a lot of money. However, this doesn’t really work. If the person that just played a big hand is the same one that you are playing against, there will be little to gain from trying to knock them out. So, if you are trying to win back money from this person, there is another strategy that you need to try.

Before you even sit at a table, you should set a limit on your bankroll. This should be a low amount that you will not easily afford to waste of your bankroll. Once you have set a limit, you need to observe the players that are playing before you actually make your first hand. This will help you to see who is a loose aggressive player and who is a tight passive player. This is quite a cliche, but it works.

Once you have located the player that you want to try your luck against, you will need to get a read on them. You can usually get a read by watching how the player plays his hands pre-flop. If he doesn’t bet very aggressively, he is probably some kind of tight player. Likewise, if he lays down quite a bit of cash, he is probably a loose player.

The play best managed by the tight passive player is usually to call pre-flop raises with decent hands, and sometimes even raise with the best hand. The calls are semi-bluffs because the player is representing a big hand, but in reality, he has something good. The hands through which you can observe this are big pocket pairs, like AA orKK or AK or AQ. Also, the hands of medium value like 10 9 10 or A8, where the odds are greater that the next card will be better, are better to play than hands that are normally played, like 6 6 Q, J, K or A5, etc.

The loose aggressive player is the one who re-raises before the flop with a wide range of hands. This player usually gets called by the tight passive player when he makes a raise, and the tight passive player will sometimes re-raise to eliminate the threat of the loose player. The first thing you need to know about this strategy is that it works. If the situation arises where the loose aggressive player is really good, but you know that you have better hands, then you can make a move on the pot, even if the tight passive player is making a similar raise. In that case, you will be able to make a big win. The play I am about to give you is from a position where I was the tight passive player. It was a hand that I didn’t necessarily expect to see a flop, but it was a hand that I remembered seeing where I would have had a made hand.

The flop came down Acrossing, village, and luckily for me, the tight passive player had AK, and the AK did the trick for me, rivering about as well as the flop hit the turn and river. It was a hand of the remaining three cards, and I felt that at that moment, any tight passive player, had either QQ, JJ, or AA. Obviously, that was not the case, and if he had, he would have slow played QQ, or made a huge raise, which would have forced me to either fold my hand, or have found a much weaker hand to call.

This is the play that I would recommend for learning how to play tight passive. The play is tight, but aggressive. Even when you do hit hands, like Dewapoker, you can win just by betting aggressively. Most times when you do hit hands, you do win. Not all times, but majority of the time. It’s a crazy hand to play, but one that is also one of the easiest to make a play with. So, that’s all I’m saying, just play tight passive and you will be fine. It doesn’t hurt to try out a new play, but you just have to make sure that it really works.