Controlling your emotion and aggression in poker part two

I don’t read all that many poker books these days and certainly not as many as I used to but in years gone by, I was one of he most avid poker readers around. But for me one of the most instrumental books in my poker development was The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. This was the type of book that was so deep that you could never get the full value out of this book as a novice or even intermediate poker player and as you play Texas Hold’em poker then reading will certainly enhance your game.

For me, this was one of those books that simply had to be read repeatedly at different stages of your development because it would teach you something at various stages of your poker life. But having said that, I have my own unique way of reading poker books. Quite often, an idea that I have got by reading a particular poker book was not actually mentioned in the book itself.

I just happened to read a certain thing that was worded in a certain way and that prompted me to think about something else. It was quite strange really how I sometimes arrived at my poker knowledge or some of the concepts that I now use. But in The Theory of Poker , Sklansky talks about correct bluffing frequencies and it was reading this all those years ago that set me thinking about exploiting over aggression in NLHE.

Of course, we all know how important aggression is in poker right and we pick this up as we learn poker! You cannot be successful in most poker games without showing aggression. But if you think about this for a moment, any fool can be aggressive. If aggression was the be all and end all of a successful poker player then everyone would be an expert poker player. But like Sklansky points out in his book, if you knew that a certain player always calls when you bet then it is correct to never bluff. Likewise if someone always folded when you bet then you would be correct in bluffing every single time.

Of course we don’t know what our opponents hold with poker being a game of incomplete information. But you must strive to achieve the proper frequencies in poker and by that I mean how often you bet, raise, re-raise, check raise and of course bluff!

But when I am sat in a sizeable game then I have not done so without ghosting the game for at least thirty minutes or so beforehand. Even if some of the players have left the game in that time, I still have a feel for what type of game it is and what the remaining players are doing when I take a seat in that game.

But the types of players who I like the most are the ones who are super aggressive. These used to be my least favourite opponents earlier in my career for the simple reason that getting involved in pots with them sharply increased the variance and with it the monetary swings.

But as my knowledge and bankroll increased over the years then it slowly became apparent to me that it was the aggressive players who were actually doing me a favour in many of the games. I found that I could actually begin to use their style almost as a weapon in order to beat the games and this applied to whether I was playing limit holdem, PLH, PLO, NLHE or whatever. Part three of this series will be coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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