Aggressiveness In Poker (Adjustment Factor)

Welcome to my personal blog for CoinPoker! After playing and placing In-The-Money in the most recent NLH One Million Freebuy tournament, I wanted to prepare a special series about aggressiveness in poker. As such, we are taking a momentary break from the blogs about best openings in Open Face Chinese Poker in order to go back to the roots of No Limit Hold’em play. Aggressiveness In Poker (Adjustment Factor). Shuffle up and deal!

Aggressiveness is a good thing but there is a “but”…

As we saw last week in the first part about aggressiveness in poker, it’s a common belief in the Hold’em Poker world that you have to be very aggressive in order to win. However, in order to know how aggressive one should be, there will be a few factors needed to be taken into consideration, such as your level of play.

Here are other points to keep in mind in order to know how aggressive you should be:

Did you know that adjustment is the key?

Are you in a “Bully the bully” situation?

Do you show signs of lack of aggressiveness?

Remember that the game keeps changing!

Let’s cover this week the adjustment factor and why this is important to consider with regards to aggressiveness.

Poker games are never alike. Depending on whether you play low limits, in a full ring format (9 players), 4-max, 6-max, Sit n’ Gos, a two-days tournament structure or on the contrary a “hyper-turbo” tournament, if you play cash game, or anything else…

All these parameters should influence the way you play and the level of aggression you should use. If you are in 6-handed game for example, you MUST open up your game, have a much wider open range of hands, and in some ways be more aggressive than if you were sitting at a 9-handed table.

Opening up your range comes less in a form of aggression than in the form of a necessity in these types of games, but it is still a usage of aggressiveness.

Let’s say you’re at a very passive table where no one is doing any 3-bets, everybody is very neat and playing like in 1998, then you’d better play aggro so you can take advantage of this general passiveness to win pots easily.

On the opposite, if you find yourself at a table with crazy players who play 90% of their hands and make 4-bets more often than you breathe, you will have to adjust your game because aggression in this case will serve no other purpose than to going all-in very quickly and put your fate and your tournament in the hands of the “God of Variance”.

This is actually a common saying in poker: In order to be a winning player, you should adjust and play the opposite style of your table!

That being said, there will also be cases where you should engage against bully players and where it would not be optimal to adopt a passive or a low-ball style of play. Let’s learn more on that in the next blog post!

Rendezvous in two weeks for the continuation of these series of tips on Aggressiveness in Poker!

Meet me at the tables on CoinPoker to practice your skills and enjoy the action. Open yourself a CoinPoker account today!

Isabelle “No Mercy” Mercier

WPT Champion

OFC “Progressive” World Champion

Read the previous part here: Aggressiveness in Poker (Playing Level)

Read the next part here: Aggressiveness In Poker (“Bully The Bully” situation)