Excellent article by Amit Makhija on adjusting your postflop style to match your preflop style.

I recall reading in Harrington on Cash Games something along the lines that loose players have to c-bet more because they miss more often. This didn't sound right at all to me and I'm glad Makhija seems to think the same.

With 80bb or less, most of us here advocate a tight range preflop and, in a heads up pot, a default line of bet/bet/bet. I wouldn't disagree. But I think Amak makes an important point that if stacks are deeper and we decide to loosen up our range, then against perceptive opponents we need to cbet less (to avoid being check/raised with air) and become more creative with our lines.

Apologies in advance to those of us who only have access to games where LAG is not a profitable option. To you, this article will simply sound like FPS in the context of low stakes live.

Would have posted the link but it seems to be down right now.

Choosing Your Style
Amit Makhija, Bluff Europe Magazine, January 2011

At a very early point for most people studying No Limit Texas holdem it is very apparent that there are many different styles preflop that a player can employ successfully. Top players usually are able to manipulate the percentage of hands they play preflop based on the overall table dynamics and easily determine the best preflop playing style to utilize at any given table. Good preflop play is something that most professional players are capable of grasping and executing flawlessly; where many of these same professionals often fall short, however, is adjusting their postflop play based on the percentage of hands they decide to play. It seems intuitive that if you are constantly making drastic changes to your preflop game plan, you should also be adjusting your postflop play style as well, but even most top players tend to make little to no adiustments postflop. Instead, most tend to just have one basic postflop plan and employ it regardless of their preflop adjustments. For the sake of simplicity let’s look at two different basic preflop playing styles most people employ, Tight Aggressive and Loose Aggressive, and compare adjustments that you should be making postñop based on these styles.

Playing Tight Aggressive

A tight aggressive preflop playing style is one that many pros utilize as their go to “standard” style. It is essentially what its name implies, nothing sexy, simply playing good-to-very-good hands that have a great deal of absolute value and figure to he best at showdown a large per- centage the time. Now what does this mean for pestflop play? Its quite simple actually: When you are playing extremely tight preflop, you should be borderline maniacal postflop. Why is that? Because you usually have the best hand! If you started with a big pair or a big ace, more often than not you have a very strong hand by the river. Your perceptive opponents know this and they will give you a lot of credit very often, most likely too often. One way to turn a large profit when you have tight ranges that include mostly value hands is to fire a continuation bet a high percentage of the time and fire multiple barrels with the bottom and top of your range as well. Just because you aren’t playing a lot of hands preflop doesn't mean you are playing scared! There are many extremely successful highstakes players that people think are "nitty" who actually get away with murder after the flop, people just don’t realize it!
The reason people playing a tight preflop style in the poker world often get a bad reputation is that usually they are simply doing it wrong. If you are going to play tight you have to be willing to play extremely aggressive and fire some big bluffs; it becomes amazing how many chips you are capable of winning without tabling a single hand. Playing tight preflop can be simple, effective, and extremely profitable if you have a good grasp of playing this hand range well after the flop.

Playing Loose Aggressive

This is definitely the sexy playing style these days. Everyone loves a good Loose Aggressive player, they are fun to watch, bold, daring, imaginative, and creative. It”s amazing to see Tom Dwan open 52s under the gun and find a way to put in $2OOK and make it work to his benefit. Its also fascinating when Phil Ivey maneuvers with cards most wouldn’t deem suitabie to use as toilet paper. The fact of the matter is that most people who try to emulate these styles might as well be lighting their money on fire. This preflop strategy requires a lot of skill postflop as it puts players in Some very marginal postflop spots, which often require very high level hand*reading skills combined with creative control of bet sizing to find a profitable line.

That being said there are certain adjustments that will help people employ the loose-aggressive style profitably. One adjustment that works pretty well for players trying this strategy is to check behind a ton of flops. If you watch High Stakes Poker you will see Tom Dwan checking a lot more flops and continuation betting a lot less than many of his tighter counterparts. This is important because most flops will miss you if you are playing any two suited cards and a ton of random holdings. When playing perceptive opponents they know this and will not be making any tight folds to you, and you will also find people calling you down with hands as bad as unimproved Ace highs. Even worse, the people who notice you are involved in every hand and continuation betting with a high frequency will pick up on this inconsistency and look to bluff raise you on the flop with any two cards! To balance This you need to check the flop with some good, but not great, hands that you would check back For pot control, some of your complete rags and some of your monsters. It is very hard to play against a good loose aggressive player who understands his image and stays well balanced. Continuation betting too much is the biggest leak of the amateur loose-aggressìve players as it is very easily exploitable and its very hard to command enough respect to make it profitable when you have shown down such marginal holdings with a high frequency.

Another adjustment that it is important to make is to apply maximum pressure in both spots where you have good hands and in spots you decide to bluff. When you have hit value hands its important to try to maximize value. You shouldn’t be pot controlling quite as often as your tighter counterparts because people will simply call you down extremely light. You also should make Your bet sizes bigger because you will often have weak hands so it is bad for your range to often give your opponents favorable pot odds. It is important not to play too scared; you will find yourself value betting with the worst hand some percentage of the time, but in the long run your image will work to your advantage and people will pay you off too light.

Bluffing is ultimately the key to being a successful loose-aggressive player. You obviously don’t win pots at showdown often when you are regularly playing some of the ugliest hands in the deck. When bluffing, it is important that you play your hands in the same way you play your value hands. In spots where your opponents range is weaker than average and you feel they are trying to get to showdown with a decent, but not great, hand you have to often be creative to convince them to find a fold. This may take some very tricky maneuvers, anything from overbetting the pot on the river, to running a fancy river checkraise (you have to do these for value sometimes as well if you use it as a bluff), often times simply firing three barrels will just be pissing away chips with this loose image. Most people trying lo play a loose-aggreäsive preflop style don’t make the necessary postliop adjustments to make it work. These adjustments discussed should help plug some leaks of the average loose-aggressive player but the beauty of this game is that you could write an entire textbook on the intricacies of this playing style and not begin to cover everything.

Great article, I though amak was a nit. What does he know about playing lag. Just jokin, but I would have to disagree that ivey is a lag. He clearly is a tag, as far as dwan that boy is a beast. He is the most skilled oop pro out there. His delayed cbets are clearly a beatiful thing. I have not figured out what board textures to do this on yet. I will figure out one day. Ivey is the best position player out there. These are the guys people need to study on film.

Thanks, I liked the part about cbet's for LAG play.

good article... nice find

The one thing I've been having problems with (when I am LAG'ging it up PF) is that I feel like I give up on too many pots. Cbetting with only my strongest hands and complete air might be the answer I've been looking for. Also, overbetting the river (especially if my opponent checks behind on the turn) is a big, big part of my game; often times (for it to work) ur hand doesn't even have to make any sense. Check-raising the river is also super powerful (as who actually does that as a bluff? lol) The key is doing the same things with big made hands from time to time.

When TAG'ging it up PF, it only makes sense to play like a maniac post flop as like Amit says, u can get away with murder.

We do have to remember that, at these lower stakes 'live' cash games we play in, our opponents often don't pay attention to image at all (especially a tight image.) So tread carefully with the big bluffs.

I guess this is why my c-bets get called so frequently?

I just deleted a massive amount of posts, because they were off topic and I thought this thread could be worthwhile as a discussion point. If people need to snipe at each other, then do it via pms.

As for the article, I think the author uses a premise that is going to cause a lot of players to make mistakes. I'm fairly sure that if I was chatting with him and we got into it, he'd eventually say, "Yeah Venice, you're right, but I can't explain that in a short article for the general public." The premise is that you are aiming for a high cbetF% as a TAG and a lower cbetF% as a LAG.

That premise is completely wrong headed. You need to look at each cbet opportunity as a singular event. Can you make money cbetting here or not. You don't go, "Gee, I've cbet 5 times in a row here, I better check this time." It doesn't matter. Let the % worry about itself.

Now it may be that LAGs face poorer opportunities to cbet due to their style than TAGs, but if a LAG and a TAG face the exact same situation with the same cards, they should not play the hand differently because they are a LAG or TAG. It may be that TAGs turn down opportunities that are good. However, that has nothing to do with generically cbetting less or more.

I also disagree with LAGs playing the ugliest cards in the deck because there is no need to do that. But that's another discussion.

Also, in LLSNL, are there really that many people who are going to c/r a c-bet with air more than every once in a great while? IME no. More of an internet thing. I do it only occassionally, and I would really have to feel like I have a read or be feeling really sheriff-y to do it like twice in two orbits or something.

I think Amak makes it clear that he takes the exact opposite view.

Against perceptive opponents, the range of hands that our opponent will fold, call or raise on each street will change depending on whether they view us as LAG or TAG. It only makes sense therefore that we should adjust to this.

A simple example is that a LAG can overbet the river with top pair and expect to get called whereas a TAG might have to bet smaller.

In another example, stacks are 200bb+ and hero is an MP raiser with AQ. We get called from the LAG bb who then donks a third of the pot on a board of 643. In this situation, clearly if hero is a LAG player himself he has the option of either calling or raising because he can represent having hit this flop hard. Our TAG friend on the other hand mostly has to call because everyone knows he only plays AQ/JJ+ and is incapable of stacking off with an overpair for 200bb.

I've played in 11 different cities in 8 different countries (no doubt there will be others here who've travelled more). Trust me there is large variability between different tables even at LLSNL.

That's the key. In a LLSNL situation, you're rarely up against a villain that can auto adjust ranges and has the background to decide that against this player they call and the other player they don't. Mpethy had a great post where he mentioned that of the hundreds of players he's looked at over the years, ranging from 5nl to people who are playing durrrr, their cbet success rate is the same within a couple of points.

i think there is something up with this, statistically. it must just be because a player's cbet success rate goes up as his table image gets tighter, but at the same time the more likely other players are to float or bluff raise him OTF, which would push that stat back down.

similarly, as a player's table image gets looser, his cbet success rate goes down, but his opponents can call with a wider range preflop because they have better implieds given this player's style. which pushes this player's opponents somewhat towards a fit-or-fold style, which in turn pushes the cbet success rate back up.

i'm guessing a bit here. but i think it would be a jump to conclusions to say that players generally don't adjust their flop calling frequency almost at all based on the fact that cbet success rates are virtually the same across a wide range of playing styles and game conditions.

link to mpethy's post on this?

I don't have it. It wasn't in a specific thread on the subject. It just was one of those nuggets of information you get and it sticks with you.

I've thought of some more situations where in my view we should play differently postflop depending on our preflop image.

These don't appear in any book (as far as I know) but I feel like I've known about them for a while (that's meant to instill you with confidence).

Example 1:
Live 1/2 against perceptive players
Effective stacks 80bb
Villains appear relatively solid postflop but are a little too loose/passive preflop (they can limp/call preflop with e.g. A7~AQ)

1 mp limper
hero raises to 10 from cutoff with JT
BB calls
mp calls

Pot: £31

Flop: A97

In my view, with a super tight image we should lean towards c-betting. With a very loose image we should lean towards checking.

Why we should be more likely to c-bet with a tight image:
- Villains may fold suited ace rag.
- Villains will often only call with AK/AQ/A9/A7/97 (because they think they're up against a tight range of e.g. AQ+, 99+ and are comfortable playing future streets)
- Villains will almost always fold 9x hands
- If we hit an 8 on the turn or river, we will have great implied odds because our opponents are very unlikely to put us on JT

Why we should be less likely to c-bet with a loose image:
- Villains will never fold suited ace rag or any 9x hand.
- If BB folds, MP will often check-raise with AK/AQ/A9/A7/97 (thinking that against us on this board their hand is the virtual nuts and they need to protect their hand against hero's random straight draw garbage hands)
- If we check behind and bink the nuts on the turn or river then villains will still pay off a big bet with any Ace or better because of our lag image.

Example 2:
Live 1/2 against perceptive players
Effective stacks 80bb
Villains appear relatively solid postflop but are a little too loose/passive preflop (they can limp/call preflop with e.g. A7~AQ)

1 mp limper
hero raises to 10 from cutoff with JT
BB calls
mp folds

Pot: £23
Flop: A96

Hero cbets £17
BB calls

Pot: £57
Turn: A968

In my view, with a super tight image we should lean towards barreling the turn. With a very loose image we should lean towards checking.

Why we should be more likely to barrel this turn with a tight image:
- Villain will almost always fold suited ace rag.
- Villain will often only call with AK/AQ/AJ and even A9/A8 if they think our range is weighted far more to AK/AQ than flush draws (partly because they're not so scared of hero jamming the river)
- Villain will almost never put us on air and spaz raise with a strong draw
- If we hit an 8 or on the river, we will have great implied odds because our opponents are very unlikely to put us on JT

Why we should be less likely to barrel this turn with a loose image:
- Villain will often call us down with ace rag
- Villain may check raise us with any any ace stronger than A5 (their logic is "this hand is the nuts vs this spewtard's range! and I want to protect my hand against the many random draws in this guy's range").
- Villain will sometimes put us on air and spaz raise with a strong draw
- If we check behind and bink an 8 or on the river then villains will still pay off a big bet with any Ace or better because of our lag image.
- And to a lesser extent (because admittedly people aren't that perceptive at 1/2), by checking here we balance for the times when we decide to take a line of bet-check-overbet with AK/AQ which would allow us to get paid by weaker pairs.

Notice also that your lines for LAG play are often closer to optimal when playing vs inattentive loose players even with a tight image. Basically the tag lines depend on fold equity and not getting raised off of draws instead of absolute hand strength.

for ur examples i think #1 is a c-bet for both images and for #2 its close between checking and betting as a TAG and 3 barreling or checking as a LAG (i think closer to 3 barreling)

Why?

That wouldn't seem consistant at all with Amak's advice (not that he's necessarily got it right but he did take some time to explain his reasoning):

In example 2, I don't think its possible to 3 barrel often. A perceptive opponent will usually either fold or check/raise the turn on such a drawy board. If he's 'good' enough to flat call the turn (and back his river read) then he has usually made up his mind in advance to call a large river bet.

I agree with this.

You've just explained eloquently in one sentence what I've been trying to express in half a page.

#1, just think about it, we're not playing just loose or loose passive, we're playing loose aggressive - we're making money by playing a variety of hands and putting pressure on our opponents (ie. relying on fold equity, esp when we have draws, which we can't get by checking), we aren't just opening up pre flop and then betting a polarized range of super strong and super weak hands (which would of course allow opponents to call down with pretty much any pair), we're putting pressure on them because we are capable of having not just the nuts and ten high, we can have hands like KK-TT, strong 9's, whatever, simply because we are aware of our image, aware that they are aware of it, and therefore aware that they will be calling us down lightly and we can adjust to value betting lighter. Consequently for them, calling us down light becomes harder because we can rep a lot of turn cards, and can be value betting without necessarily top pair, meaning that 2nd and 3rd pair can't just become automatic bluffcatchers. We're forcing them to play against a wide range, which is the key to maximizing opponent mistakes through LAG play, correct?

We still have a hell of a lot of fold equity on that board given how its fairly dry, villains can call with 9x and Ax, and 9x will fold most turns when we double barrel (because we probably give up with a lot of our total air OTT and there aren't many draws we'd be 3 barreling). You seem to be advocating a loose PF style that changes to weak tight post flop.

#2, as a TAG, our range here is quite weak given the board, we can't have two pair or a straight and we can only have AA or 99 for sets. If our opponent has a good ace or two pair he isn't folding because theres only 4 combos of sets we could have. And given the fact that the majority of our range is top pair good kicker while our opponent can plausibly have two pairs sets and straights, its attractive for him to bluffraise us when we bet the turn as a TAG (this is a weakness of TAG play, that our range is so narrow and capped on some boards)

Therefore I think that betting here might be a bit spewy since hearts probably c/r or fold, and nothing else that called the flop is going to consider folding on a turn card that does absolutely nothing for our range while helping theirs. We'd pointlessly risk being blown off our hand unless our bet commits us (in which case we could check turn and play river a hell of a lot better anyway since if we make our hand we'd get paid off regardless if they were going to call turn, since none of our draws are really big parts of our range to scare them)

As a LAG I think we can 3 barrel this board easily, we can credibly have sooooo many hands and draws that villains can't be comfortable check raising weak hands but are even less comfortable check calling since any club, heart, 7, T, Q, 5 could hit us hard, and even if they dodge those cards, we can still have enough made hands that its hard to call for them. If we bet turn they can't call their mediocre hands and would be forced to push all in or fold given how drawy the board is, so I'd just take the FE here because if we check we pretty much kill the strength of our range and are either going to hit our draw and maybe get paid a bit or miss and lose the hand.

I don't think I explained myself very well S: but yeah