So I mostly play at the 1/2 or 1/3 level in a very nitty ABC game locking small wins/losses over time. However, to develop as a better poker player, I think it's necessary to experiment different styles and techniques which may be high variance but evolve you as a poker player and can also be very profitable.

Ofcourse, it's not easy to be a good LAG but you have to start somewhere. I watch some of Bart's videos at 2/5 or 5/5 where the play is very loose in general, not sure if my games are any close to that. But there are some good LAGs in my room that are usually sitting at the tables with towers of chips.

However, in my case, I probably suck at being LAG and end up dumping 4-5 buyins trying to bluff people off, value-owning myself, etc. and feeling sh***y in general after that and jump back to my ABC boring game.

But in the process, I feel like I'm stuck at where I was and my game hasn't evolved. I don't wish to evolve as a TAG ABC player but a good LAG because that's where most of the money and skill is at.

How should I proceed? It's almost impossible to change your thinking/playing style by watching a couple of videos or reading some books, add to that the constant invincible fear of losing lots of buyins that discourage me to try this approach most of the times.

Before you get good at bluffing, you have to get good at thin value betting. If you miss a value bet, that means you can't bluff as often in that spot.

Think about it this way. Let's say that an okay player arrives at the river and knows to value bet 10 hands. This means he can bluff 10 hands. (I'm making up numbers here but just go with it for a second). But let's say a really good player arrives at the same spot and knows -- because of his image, hand reading/board reading skills, and his opponent's range -- that he can value bet 20 hands. Now he can bluff 20 hands. The latter player is much scarier to play against. A good LAG never misses a value bet so that he can bluff more.

So the first step in transitioning from TAG to LAG is challenging yourself to value bet as thinly as possible imo. I really kick myself whenever I check back a river and realize I should have bet for value, for this very reason.

Table timing and dynamics have a lot to do with being a good player, no matter what a player wants to be. As you write (know), you can't be a successful LAG at a nitty table just as you can't do well being a nit at a LAG table.

I would not get wrapped up in labels. Labels are for Ego's. Egos ruin (get broke) many otherwise very good players. Would you really rather be a winning LAG who sits around bored waiting for a tight table to loosen up so you can enjoy yourself, or be a good player who can float along adjusting easily to changing table dynamics?

I think if you watch closely you will see those LAGS are really strong players who know how and when to adjust to take advantage of table dynamics and players. Good Luck.

Sounds like you say to yourself, OK I shall LAG today, RAWRRR!! and then find that gets you killed. If you're just going to randomly start playing way more aggro, it will.

You need to build as a player, starting with the thin value spots as identified above.

Also, hand reading is critical to playing more aggressively. If you can't put your villain on mostly a meh TP-type hand that he will fold to 2 barrels, then you can't really two barrel bluff.

Then of course you need to know your guy can fold to two barrels, so that's observation and reading players.

All of which is to say, concentrate on getting better, not being LAG.

Last comment, when you talk about LAGs sitting on piles of chips, yeah I have seen plenty of bad LAGgy players scoop a bunch of pots too. They stick around and become a lot more noticeable when they build a massive chip fortress compared to the many other times they spunked off three buyins in quick succession and then slunk quietly away.

EDIT

I notice that you say you're in a very nitty game, that being the case the first thing you can look to do is open up on the button and cutoff. Your more marginal hands can be used to steal the blinds. You can raise into weak-tight limpers who will fold. You can 3bet bluff with well chosen hands.

Your thinking on this is a bit muddled.

1. For the VAST majority of players, and here I mean probably 99.5%, playing Lag is no more profitable than Tag. I exploded the "lag is more profitable" myth back in 2009 or so. The simple fact is that the very real collection of theoretical marginal advantages you gain from playing a lag style are swallowed up in the mistakes mere mortals make in executing the style, or, for that matter, that they make executing the basics of a Tag style.

Phrased differently, if you add 4 hands to your starting range, you'd be doing well for two of them to be winners and two of them losers, and for them to basically offset one another, leaving your WR unchanged.

2. The profitability of your starting hands depends on your marginal skill edge. Back when I was playing online, we used to demonstrate this with fun we called a "100% VPIP challenge." We'd drop down in stakes and play every hand. When I was playing .50/1.00, I dropped down to the .02/.05 games and played 5000 hands, putting preflop money in on every one, and achieved a win rate of around 6 or 7 bb/100 hands. If I had tried that in my normal game I would have gone busto, rather than won.

The point is that J8s isn't a profitable or unprofitable hand. I play it often enough in a live 1/2 game that I'm certain it's making me a tiny amount of money. Maybe a quarter on average each time I play it. But if I tried to play it in a 5/10 game against better opponents, it would lose me a decent amount of money.

OK, you see the point: your skill edge isn't that you play more hands, your skill edge allows you to play more hands. In other words, your opening range should be proportional to the size of your skill edge. You can't just make more money by playing more hands. Lag style depends on your ability to make smaller mistakes than your opponents. Basically, you're using skill edge to subsidize hand strength. In order to do that, you need surplus skill edge.

2. Lag style isn't radically different than Tag style. They slide into each other. Back in the heyday of online, it was conventional to refer to someone in a full ring game playing 12% of hands and 9% for a raise as a nit, someone at 15% and 12% as a tag, and someone playing 18% and 15% as a lag (These numbers slid over time toward higher numbers as the cool kids all tried to play lag).

So think about that. The difference between a tag and a lag started out as the difference in how you played 3 or 4% of your hands. The differences were pretty subtle: you steal 50% from the button instead of a taggy 40%, you steal 40% from the cutoff, and you 3 bet a few more percent than a tag, and, presto, you're a lag. It's not, look at me, I'm opening 54s from UTG and then triple barreling nits because I'm cool." That's not lag, that's just dumb. It's just being able to find a few more spots than a tag.

3. Which suggests the way to move from tag to lag is to evolve. If you can profitably 3 bet k9s OTB, then you can probably also 3 bet K8s. If you can profitably open 40% OTB, then you can probably up that to 50%. If you can profitably iso with ATo, then you can probably also iso KTo. Etc. Once you're isolating with KTO with confidence, you'll see an occasional spot where K9o looks good enough. Etc.

4. The goal isn't to be playing a certain style, although at least 9 of 10 lags play lag only to stroke their ego, and have introduced as many leaks into their game as they have new profits, and could switch to ABC tomorrow and see no change in their WR. The goal is to have a clear idea of your skills, your opponents' tendencies to make mistakes, and to not miss any opportunities to profit from that margin.

As you begin to understand your skill edge better, and as you work to improve your skills, your opening range should naturally open. It's as simple as seeing someone limp Q8o in MP, and then, when he limps again in MP, and you're behind him with K8, going "this is trash, but it's better than his trash," and raising instead of folding. Repeated 7 or 8 times a session, it's what really makes the difference between a skilled lag and a skilled tag.

5. What you are seeing in your donk ing off stacks when you try to open up is the simple reality that your skill edge is not big enough for you to be playing marginal hands. You are making big mistakes that are wiping out the theoretical advantages of opening more hands. It is a reminder that playing Lag before mastering tag is a losing proposition. (Yes, lots of people do it; they are playing poker with their dicks, rather than their brains).

6. Truthfully, playing Lag at low stakes makes no sense. If you have such a huge skill edge at 1/2 that you can play lag more profitably than tag, then you could make even more by moving up to 2/5 and reverting to tag play. Granted, there may be rare instances where a player is stuck grinding a game where his lag style really is more profitable than tag. But most players who really could pull more profit from 1/3 or 2/5 as a lag than as a tag really ought to just be moving up as a tag.

When you're in the biggest game you have access to, and you have a giant edge, it makes sense to be opening up. But not before that.

6. Played correctly, lag style is less prone to variance than Tag style. The reason for this is simple: lags make a much higher proportion of their profits from nonshowdown winnings than tags. Think of it this way: suppose a Tag playing 1/2 is up $200 on the session. Then, 7.5 hours in, he gets AIPF with AA and gets cracked. He's at $0 for the session. 3 hands later, it's limped to him in the hj, he has K8 and folds. Now suppose the exact same thing for the lag, but instead of folding, he raises to iso, it works, and he wins $12. The Tag finishes at $0, and the Lag finishes at +$12, because he is less reliant than the tag for his profits on winning at showdown. Those $12 wins buffer and smooth out the effects of variance.

Hope this helped you clarify your thinking.

I would think that as a corollary of this, in a (compared to online) slow-paced live game, sorting out a good LAG from a good TAG would be next to impossible in the space of a single session, right?

Exploiting the tendencies of your opponents is far more profitable than trying to play one specific style.

Awesome post mpethy

I really liked this point. And thanks for the great post.

In reference to your K8 hand above, my problems begin when those isos stop getting respect and people start calling your cbets and double barrels thereby forcing you to TAG it up again from being LAG, but in the process you quickly lose half a buyin trying to b/b/b.

Grunch.

This is wrong on many levels. In LLSNL, most of the money comes from playing good hands and gathering fat value. Those LAGs you see with a mound of chips are the same ones that leave the room after 1/2 hour after blowing 3 BI like you did but you didn't happen to see it. People want to play LAG because deep down many players believe that poker is just about having balls and making sick bluffs. It looks good because that's what impresses your friends.

The way you get to LAG is by evolving your TAG game. Rather than changing everything at once, the way you get to LAG is by adding one hand to your range at a time. Maybe you're folding suited one gappers on the button. You open up by starting to play T8s and see how it goes.

This right here.

Or maybe all.

If somebody is in the habit of laying out bluffs that can only be one of two things -- nothing, or the everlasting nuts -- he is betting on a binary outcome, and I don't think you can win at a game like that over the long haul, any more than you can win at Casino War (although I had a friend once who considered himself a fine advantage player at that game.)

The average 1/2 player is just out there gambling, but I think the same is true for your average 1/2 LAG. THe task isn't to develop the skill to boss people around with ATC, but rather to develop the ability to see value where one couldn't see it before.

Experimenting and improving your style is good and necessary in the long run as the game evolves. The idea that LAG play is fundamentally more profitable then TAG play is not true. Table conditions may make one or the other more profitable even if you are equally good at at both. If you have pool of regular opponents learning how to exploit their mistakes without exposing yours will be more important then any particular style. Low stakes table tend towards loose/passive/stationary play that generally favors a TAG style of play.

It also sounds like you may be trying to jump from being TAG to being very LAG in one step, which probably isn't the best way to about it. Instead, open your game up some in LP. When you learn how to make that work, open your game a little further in LP and add some more hands in MP. If you where opening AJs+ in LP (which would be nitty tight) then add AJo/ATs and some A9s. Just a few hands and stick with those a few sessions until you can really see how it affects your EV.

It isn't just ego, a lot of LAGs are kids with no attention span or patience. These are the ones playing video games on their phones between hands or signed into online poker games. The TAG guys are watching movies or doing something they can simply pause when they need to watch the game. And either way, the good ones are paying more attention to the live game then their toys.

Yep. If they are good the quality of the cards they are getting and the situations at the table that come up may mask their intended play style. The bad LAGs tend to try to force the issue out of boredom or aggression but good ones will wait if they are getting useless cards or there are raises in front of them.

After the flop, there is no LAG and TAG, there is just good poker and bad poker. If you have an opportunity to make a bluff raise that is +EV and you fold instead because you're "playing TAG," it's just bad. If you make a bluff that doesn't show a profit because you're "playing LAG" and think you'll get paid off easier later, you're almost certainly just playing bad. Once you get good at postflop, you will eventually start to find that weaker and weaker hands can be played profitably against your opponents. (If you get very good, you'll start to worry about playing a wider range of hands for board coverage reasons too, but that's not really relevant here.)

So to start raising all kinds of bad hands preflop because you think a LAG style is best is completely backwards. You should start focusing on your postflop play and work to identify good bluffing spots and good thin value spots you aren't currently taking advantage of. Once you're playing good poker postflop, you can revisit your starting hand selection and see if some of the hands you're currently folding have become playable.

It's fun to play more hands. So there's that.

Seriously though if your goal is to develop as a player why not focus on individual concepts rather than a blanket ambition to be "LAG"?

I'll say up front that I'm a CLP subscriber. Some of Bart's stuff will apply and some won't. If you have nits getting to the river "thin" value isn't going to look the same as Bart often describes in those LA area games. The concepts apply but the ranges are different so there may be less opportunity.

So a concept like thin value betting requires utilizing some tools. Namely Hand reading, understanding the elasticity of villain calling ranges, their raising tendencies, sizing bets profitably and of course bet/folding.

If you focus on just those tools and concepts for some period of time you will strengthen that part of your game and develop the correct style for you in your game right now. As you improve other skills and incorporate other concepts (maybe 3 betting preflop, delayed c betting or whatever) then you incorporate more of that. The label you place on the resulting style is unimportant.

Focus on honing the various skills and picking up new tools. Look for the spots those can be applied. Slowly add to your game.

Even if being a LAG was demonstrably more profitable than TAG or ABC, a drastic change in style is a recipe for disaster. You simply won't be equipped for the changing dynamic.

This x1000.

"Nitty" is a broad term. Too broad, in my opinion. You have to dig deeper, OP. How are the players nitty? Are they playing few hands pre but sticky post? In other words, what kinds of mistakes are they making? Are they making folding errors or calling errors?

Come up with a game plan for each player at the table and your "style" will naturally come out of that analysis.

Bottom line is LAG play has tons more variance. If you can't handle the variance then the style is likely not for you. Not to mention it's pretty hard to just say I'm going to play LAG today. Poker is player dependent and these decisions need to be made in game. You can't simply play loose and agresive a few sessions and expect to print money.

Not to mention it may be the entirely WRONG strategy, given the table dynamics.

Most of the games I'm in have a majority of players who make too many calling errors. My adjustment is to value town the hell out of them, and not just when I make nuttish hands. I'm always betting based on my opponents' range and what they'll call. I'm not trying to bluff them and LAG it up because I know they won't fold.

This is the most important thing like everyone has stated.

But on a blanket statement, TAG vs LAG you should also take into account cost (rake and tip)

If your playing 1/2 1/3 maybe 2/5 I think LAG style is going to cost you alot in tips and rake as a percentage of the overall pot.

Timed rake is would be a different story.

But think about a $50 or $100 pot of your money you put into the pot how much rake and tip you contribute.

Say LAG style your win 3 pots an hr vs TAG style you win 1 pot an hr. It adds up costs wise

So if you were in mp and there was a raise and a large reraise before the action got to you, you had to at least call with ATC?

Here you are evidencing a basic misunderstanding of lag play. The essence of good lag play is not bet, bet, bet. The essence of good lag play is the successful c-bet.

A good lag knows, just as well as a good tag, that most triple barrel bluffs are spew. (H/T to "Building a bankroll,;" the exact quote from that book is "triple barrel bluffs, by default, are spew").

The idea behind good lag play is to collect the easy, nearly dead, money, not to try to bluff everybody off the fourth nuts by representing the nuts.

The perfect isolation play is: he limps KJ, you iso with K8, the flop comes down A94, he checks, you bet and he folds. When he has AJ there, it's not "lag" to go bet, bet, bet. Ordinarily, it's just dumb.

Good lags usually have it when the pot starts to get big.

The style you are trying to emulate thinking it is "lag" is more accurately described as "maniac" or "aggrotard". It is a highly flawed style that is way too weak, and is usually nearly dead money against a genuinely skilled Tag player. The thing about it, though, is it sometimes appears to work, because there are relatively few skilled players at LLSNL, and only a fraction of them actually play a Tag style.

QuadJ made a good point in this thread about the importance of patience. Live players are susceptible to a variety of leaks that all stem from their impatience with the slow pace of live poker. With aggressive players of any description, their sort of global leak can best be described as "trying to win every pot they enter." Live players are generally much worse than online players in knowing when the best play is to just cut your losses and give up on a hand. This is why you see people doing insane things like 3 betting 77 OTB when there's a raise and three calls ahead of them. This is why the typical live lag builds so many big pots with air or marginal holdings and wind up with a river range heavily weighted toward air.

It's a giant leak, and one you'll need to plug in order to open up your range and make money, rather than losing it.

When I was coaching online, a fantastic win rate with an isolation range was about 1bb per hand. For a button steal, it was a little lower. What good lags understood about those situations was that the math of how often people make a hand dictates that there is a tiny per hand profit to be made from the fact that when you are HU, your opponent out flops you only a minority of the time. So, in position with initiative, you should win when both of you miss, you should win and maximize value when you out flop him, and you should use your position to lose the minimum when he out flops you. Done correctly, it yields a big blind on average per hand.

Button stealing, much less important live than online, works in pretty much the same way.

Those maniacs you see bombing the pot so often are doing that because they don't know what else to do. You don't want to be emulating those guys, you want to be taking their money.

Yes. Doing my challenge, I ran into 3 or 4 players that recognized that I was not folding anything at any time to a raise in front of me, and started open shoving their premium hands. The rules of the challenge required calling players who did that. Probably lost 8 or 10 buy ins to the smart players who figured that out (and I DID suck out on AA once with something like J3o, lol).

I'm going to build on this and say that the LAGs that I respect are those who are capable of getting opponents to believe they are maniacs/aggrotards but are actually not quite as loose or aggressive as they seem.

The trick to playing lag is to play position - and have a wide 3bet range so your big hands get paid off when you raise big pre flop.

Ideally you don't want to spew - and still want to play solid. Make bets with blockers rather than with air.

Example - you hold 99 on a T87 board. You can theoritically bet/bet/shove this board if turn and river fall Q/A or 5/4 ect. Most people will fold a T in this spot.

Also 3betting with hands like A3dd or any Ax is better than just 3betting random trash. You have blocker to AA and you should have at least 30% equity if you see all 5 cards.

It takes some time to get used to - but if you are playing too loose you are spewing. Just play more hands in late position if no one has opened and if you get a hand like A7s in late position mix in a 3bet.

Some really good material itt. Some I don't quite agree with but mostly great.

This forum has come a long ways on this topic. When I first started frequenting LLSNL most assumed LAG>>>TAG and the good players were super loose. Not really true. It's good to see most adopting the (IMO) correct approach that it is a dynamic issue that a good player MAY use but also MAY NOT. I like to think of it in terms of spots. The better you get the more spots you'll recognize as +EV. The less spots you'll misidentify. The better you'll play them. It's not really tag and lag at all. It's just a function of game
Conditions and your skill level. The first task is to eliminate playing -EV spots. Then as you get better you'll naturally start playing more +EV spots and playing them better.