Beyond Tight Aggressive: An Introduction To Exploitative Poker

There are two ways to win pots in poker. The first is to get value from made hands. You wait until you make a good hand and try to extract maximum value from your opponent with a lesser holding. This is the classic tight aggressive style. It’s the style that most good poker players play and it’s the one that I myself played for most of my poker career. It is the foundation of winning poker.

But most players stop there, assuming that is all there is to winning poker, and that is a big mistake. Because there is another way to win pots: stealing. That is, you force your opponent to fold the better hand by applying controlled aggression. This is what distinguishes the crushers from the merely good tight aggressive players. While I had solid results as a tight aggressive player, since I added some basic exploitative plays to my game my results have skyrocketed.

The best resource I have found for this aspect of the game is Jonathan Little and Albert Hart’s book Bluffs: How To Intelligently Apply Aggression To Increase Your Profits From Poker (2016). Little and Hart outline 18 strategies to add controlled aggression to your game and steal pots. In this blog, I’m going to discuss the four that I have adopted and work best for me. (Little and Hart list continuation betting as a separate strategy but since it’s used in conjunction with the three I’m going to review I’m really outlining 4 of their 18 strategies).

The first is raising more hands and continuation betting the flop regardless of if I hit. Many players will fold hands like 87 suited or QJ off in early position but I suggest raising them. You can always fold to a 3-bet. Most players only 3-bet with premium hands so you can easily get away from these marginal holdings. Most of the time, however, players will just call and you can c-bet the flop, taking down a lot of pots. This works best when you are in position; for instance, making a late position raise and getting called by the big blind. Players acting after you are more likely to float your c-bet. Nevertheless, I still recommend raising more hands to give yourself a chance to take down more pots.

The second strategy is to 3-bet with a polarized range and continuation bet. As I said in the last paragraph, most players only 3-bet with their premium holdings: JJ+ and AQ suited+. While you want to continue 3-betting with your premium hands to get more chips in the pot when you have a monster, you also want to 3-bet hands that are decent but not good enough to call a raise. Hands like A9 off and Q10 off. You don’t want to call raises with these hands because you are behind most players raising range. That’s why most players always fold these types of hands. But that’s a mistake.

Occasionally you want to raise these moderate holdings for three reasons. First, if you only 3-bet premium hands, you’re easy to read and won’t get paid by good players who will just throw away their lesser hands. 3-betting more means you’re more likely to get paid when you have a monster because your opponent can’t be sure you’re not 3-betting light.

Second, sometimes your opponent will have raised light and simply fold to your 3-bet allowing you to win the pot without a fight. For example, he may have raised with QJ off which is not strong enough to call a 3-bet with.

Third, when your opponent calls you can steal pots with these hands regardless of if you hit when your opponent misses the flop. The truth is that most of the time you miss the flop. For example, we’ve all had the experience of 3-betting with AK only to see the flop come down 10 5 4 rainbow. That’s why AK is called the “Anna Kournikouva”: looks good but never wins.

Consider the following example. A player in early position raises with AJ off and you 3-bet with Q-10 off. The flop comes down K 8 4. He checks and you bet about the same size as your original 3-bet. What can he do? Unless he knows what you’re up to, it’s very hard for him to call out of position with just A high. The vast majority of the time he’s going to fold and you’re going to scoop the pot even though he has the better hand.

The third strategy is to float the flop. That is, you call an initial raise and then call your opponents continuation bet even when you miss the flop. As I said above, most players continuation bet after raising regardless of if they hit the flop or not. And most of the time they miss. Further, they shut down and check the turn when they miss. Therefore, a very simply strategy for stealing pots is to float the flop and bet the turn when they check to you. For example, let’s say a player in early position raises with 66 and you call with J10 suited. The flop comes down Q 8 4 rainbow. He c-bets and you call. The turn is a 3. He checks, you bet and most the time he will fold.

These are simple strategies that will take you from being a good tight aggressive player to a crusher. For more advanced turn and river strategies for stealing pots, I recommend buying Little and Hart’s book.