Introduction to the Tight Aggressive Playing Style

We’ve covered all the basics of preparing to play; now it’s time to actually get to our playing strategy. In these next articles we will outline a strategy for playing basic, winning online poker. This strategy, with some advancement and experience, can help you beat the lower limits of online poker and start making money.

This is the Tight Aggressive strategy (TAG) and, unsurprisingly, focuses around playing tight poker and aggressive poker.

What Is Meant By ‘Tight’ and ‘Aggressive’?

The term ‘tight’ refers to the selection of our starting hands. That is, which hole cards do we play and which do we fold? A tight playing style is based around only playing with the top section of hole cards. The opposite end of this spectrum is called ‘loose’, and that type of strategy focuses on playing a large amount of hands.

Whilst tight and loose play refers to the starting hand selection, the term ‘aggressive’ refers to the manner in which we play these starting hands. Aggressive play focuses around taking our starting hands and playing them in an aggressive fashion, betting and raising a lot. The opposite side of aggressive play is called ‘passive’ play, where players call a lot and raise little. This is generally seen as the sign of a bad player.

Why Play the Tight Aggressive Strategy?

There are a number of reasons for utilising this style of play, especially as a beginner. This strategy offers the best compromise between profitability and low variance. This makes it perfect for beginners, who want to start winning at poker but don’t want to increase their chances of suffering from bad luck.

Tight Is Right

Playing tight poker may sound boring to some, but it doesn’t mean just waiting until you have two Aces as your hole cards. The reason we play tight is to focus our energy on playing hands that have good value. This, for obvious reasons, increases the chances of us ending up with the best hand at showdown. Another reason it is perfect for beginners is because it limits the amount of very tough, marginal spots you encounter, where you are unsure on what is the correct play.

This isn’t to say that loose poker is necessarily wrong, many experienced players make a living playing loose poker, namely the Loose Aggressive Strategy (LAG).

Aggression Is Key

Poker legend Doyle Brunson famously said that the key to poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips. This is an aggressive act, and the cornerstone of all successful poker strategies is aggression.

There are multiple reasons that we use an aggressive strategy, one of these is to put pressure on our opponents and force them to make mistakes, and people make mistakes when they are put under pressure. But the main reason is that, coupled with our tight playing style, we often have the best hand, and we want to increase the pot as much as we can in order to get paid off with our good hands.

Summary

• The best strategy for beginners to use is the Tight Aggressive Strategy
• This focuses on playing a small selection of hands, and betting and raising with them aggressively
• Using this strategy we end up in less marginal spots
• This means that we can increase the amount of money in the pot so we can get paid off with our good hands
• It also means we can put our opponents under pressure and force them to make mistakes