Poker
Playing Styles
There
are two main styles of poker playing that people speak
of, and four categories of “poker players.”
You can play loose or tight, and you can find yourself
categorized as loose-passive, loose-aggressive, tight-passive,
or tight-aggressive. Loose
players are the ones who seem to play every single hand,
always paying to see the cards. They almost never fold,
but try to play every hand whether they’re good
or bad. This is definitely not the kind of
player you want to be; they do win hands every now and
then, but because of their silly playing they usually
win just by sheer luck.
Tight
players are the exact opposite: they fold pretty much
every hand! They’re very cautious players,
and if they don’t think their cards will end up
being the winning hand they’ll likely fold even
before the Flop comes. It may sound strange, but by
playing fewer hands you actually have a better overall
chance of winning.
To
these styles you can consider characteristics like aggressive
playing and passive playing. This has to do with how
the player bets from round to round, whether they’re
very conservative and check or call all the hands, or
if they bet wildly, throwing cash on the table every
chance they get. Aggressive players will raise on pretty
much anything, and that’s what makes them dangerous
opponents at the table: because they’ll bet on
anything you never really know what they’ve got.
Passive players are a little easier to read because
of their tendency to want to protect their chips; if
a player has been playing passively all along, and then
suddenly throws a big bet into the pot, you know they’ve
got something.
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