Following on then from part one…. “If I bet $100-$130 then they might think that this bet is weak and re-raise me. I would like to bet more than the pot but I would hate to give this dude the pleasure of having sucked me in for half of my stack. If I check then they may check it back and I will get the chance to see another card”

So they check and then I bet $130 and the pot is mine as they cannot call with no pair. Here I am using the leverage of our entire stacks to frighten my opponent away. I am using my opponent’s aggression as a weapon against him rather than let their aggression bully me into submission. Sure they will have big pairs sometime and sure they will flop monsters but that is poker. If you do not take risks then you do not win big.

Sometime ago I bought into a $5-$10 no-limit texas hold’ em cash game for $500 and had built it up to $4000 within two hours. I had taken advantage of aggressive players and built my stack up to $800. I re-raised all in with a powerful draw expecting my opponent to fold which he didn’t. I made my draw and doubled up, this made me the second biggest stack on the table and I busted the next biggest stack beneath me when I flopped a concealed straight. This made me the big stack and the rest was easy.

Top players just do not back off that easy

Whenever you see a top poker player in action you will notice that it sometimes takes an awful lot to get them out of a hand when they and their opponent have deep money. They know that their opponents know that they need to be aggressive and they counter this like a martial artist using his opponent’s weight and momentum against them.

Top poker players will call your flop bet with nothing just to see what you do on the turn. If you meekly submit every time an opponent shows aggression then you are going to miss out on an awful lot of opportunities. Obviously this also means that you need to be careful as well. I made the play with the 5-3 because I had a good read on my opponent and it was heads up play, a multi-way pot would have been a different story.

So here we have what is the beginnings of a poker food chain, at the bottom we have all of the passive players and the solid predictable players. The solid ones can make a bit of money because they understand good hands from bad ones etc. But both types tend to only be aggressive with good hands and to only call raises with good hands.

Then we move onto level two and come to the player who has figured out that he can win more pots by being aggressive and all of the pots that they have won playing this way reinforces that belief. They take money from the solid poker players and the passives through their aggression.

But they are like a young boy racer that has just been given the keys to their dad’s high powered Porsche 911. Going fast is easy, all you have to do is put your foot down but you need to know when to back off.

This is where I come in; I take the money from the aggressive boy racers. I hope that this lesson has been very instructive because it highlights something that is very important in poker. That responding to aggression and taking advantage of aggression is the hallmark of a solid poker player.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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