Why playing weak tight poker is bad

One of the most exploitable poker games in no-limit hold‘em is a game that is classified as “weak tight”. After loose-passive games then this is the easiest game to beat. Weak-tight games can be found at the lower limits from NL25 to perhaps NL100 on occasion. Once you hit the NL200 mark then this particular style of poker gets less prevalent.

Weak tight players basically fold too much and back down to pressure too often. They are afraid to commit chips unless they have a powerful hand, unless of course they have a short stack. Weak-tight players are also one of the most tilt prone types of players that there are in the game of poker.

They pride themselves in being able to make good laydowns and that they can keep things under control all the time. However this feeling of control is an illusion and it is also harmful. Being tight is only good if you are tight aggressive or for want of a better description…..tight-very aggressive.

The following hand indicates a weak-tight player in action and this was a hand that was sent to me by a student of mine. It was folded around to him in the cut-off and he had the Jc-Jd and he raised the pot to $1.75 in a NL50 game.

The button three bet him to $5.50 and the two blinds folded. Firstly I asked what his habits were in and around the blinds and he told me that he attacked the blinds with any decent hand when it was folded to him. His raise frequency was too high in my opinion. I had advised him to use Poker Office as this was what I used and he was attacking the blinds from either the cut-off or the button with over 50% of his range when it was folded to him.

There is fundamentally nothing wrong with this in a weak-tight game but not all of his opponents will be weak tight. Some will notice his patterns and play back and especially when he is raising from an obvious steal seat. As it turned out, his opponent was a regular winning player on the site and so was likely to notice such a thing. The flop came Kc-10d-8s and our hero checked.

His opponent bet close to the pot and our hero folded his hand fearing the king. This is precisely what I was referring to by weak-tight. Our hero was fine as long as he was the one pushing people around but as soon as someone gave him a little push back…..he capitulated.

His entire method revolved around him pushing other players as often as he could. There is nothing wrong in this but you need to find the proper ratios here as well. He also paid careful attention to pot escalation issues and once again, there is nothing wrong in this at all. These are all good no-limit hold ‘em skills but our hero did have one overriding problem.

He was overly cautious whenever anyone played back at him. This would be something that he would have to face far more frequently in the pro infested NL100 and NL200 levels. Strong players didn’t always frequent these levels in years gone by but with the ability to be able to multi-table, now they do.

So our hero is going to have to learn a whole new aggressive style of play if his game is not only going to flourish at NL50 but if he desires to move up to NL100 and beyond. At these levels then weak-tight simply will not cut-it.

By Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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