Tight-aggressive style in poker – TAG strategy
Poker can be somewhat intimidating for an inexperienced player. Online poker removes a lot of that fear factor because it eliminates a couple of important things – being in a real game room, interacting with your opponents live, being unable to hide your emotions.
When it comes to an experienced player, the list of his fears is not as small as it seems in comparison with a beginner. He also has to make difficult decisions based on strategies that will determine his expectations. There is a certain “range” of schemes that a poker player can use. Consider a basic tight-aggressive (TAG) strategy.
Briefly about the strategy
The tight-aggressive style is perhaps one of the easiest to learn in No Limit Texas Hold’em, simply because there are fewer hands played. The word “tight” in this case refers to the starting hand requirements. Tight poker players will rarely open a pot with a very weak starting hand (although a TAG player can loosen his requirements by opening the pot in position).
The word “aggressive” in this case refers to how you play your hand in relation to the size of the pot, as well as to the actions and reactions of your opponents. The typical tight aggressive player will mostly force action preflop and postflop by raising or betting and constantly making opponents pay to enter the pot with mediocre hands by putting them to the test after seeing the flop.
A consistent TAG player should always pay attention to two things:
- The strength of the kicker.
- Possibility of dominating a strong hand post-flop.
Many novice players may see each other learn that a basic tight-aggressive strategy alone is not enough to be profitable at any level of play above the micros. If you’re going to use any kind of broad strategy, you need to learn and adapt to how your opponents play.
Peculiarities
Tight-aggressive players, for the most part, enter pots where their starting hand has above-average showdown value while still having a reasonable chance of dominating other players’ starting hands. In other words, raising with ace-queen on the button and getting one of the blinds to call with a weaker ace is really very value. More often than not, your continuation bet will double as an value bet, since you will likely have the best hand after the flop.
Beginning TAG players bet aggressively. Hence the beauty of having your opponents repeatedly get paid for the privilege of seeing the flop with the worst starting hand range. Villains are constantly forced to either sacrifice waiting with their draws post-flop or fold. This is pretty much elementary theory of tight-aggressive play.
However, the TAG strategy is highly exploitable and simply cannot survive on its own. Players who are not TAG experts are constantly caught off guard by those who catch with their own premium hands. Perhaps the most common feature of playing this type of strategy is the ease with which you become stubborn.
Once you’ve entered the pot or bet a relatively strong hand post-flop, it takes tremendous discipline to rethink your betting lines once your opponent starts playing against you.
