Aggressiveness in Tournaments

For many years, poker authors have advocated aggression as one of the key elements for success in tournament poker. The correctness of this advice was proven by the fact that aggressive players won more than their fair share of tournaments, mostly at the expense of the more conservative players, who were unwilling to gamble and held on to the old adage, "When in doubt, fold." While most of these poker authors have emphasized selective aggression, many successful players nowadays employ a very loose-aggressive approach that is close to what we used to call "maniacal." This seems to be particularly true of young Internet players, who tend to play an awful lot of hands, three-bet very liberally, and use the all-in shove on a rather frequent basis.

At this year's World Series, play was more loose-aggressive than ever before -- and what struck me the most was that almost no bet or raise was respected. While my own tournament play used to be quite maniacal, in the past couple of months, I have decided to tone down my aggression a bit because of these recent developments. I have refrained as much as possible from open-raising with weak holdings, and especially have refrained from button steals with young and aggressive guys in the blinds, knowing they almost automatically will respond to a late-position raise with a large reraise. Instead, I picked up my old grinding game of playing extremely tight and coming in with good hands only -- apart, of course, from the occasional steal or bluff that might present itself. One would expect that a guy who is folding for three or four orbits straight won't get any action when he finally makes a move -- right? Well, while good aggressive players may be capable of making this distinction, the vast majority of the young guns just don't seem to respect any bets, and continue to play back at everyone -- even at the guy with dust on his chips who finally has decided to put some chips into the pot.

Some time ago, I wrote a column about the simple but effective strategy that I used in the European Poker Tour San Remo event, where I played tight and overplayed my big hands with large raises, knowing that I would almost always get paid off. At the recent World Series, I was able to take this concept a bit further. Whatever the reason, I don't know, despite playing squeaky tight, almost every preflop raise that I made was reraised. So, I could afford to wait for premium hands, knowing that I would get excessive action from players with hands like 6-6, A-Q, or A-J, who would try to isolate me with position -- a concept that many of these young players are very fond of. In fact, they would sometimes even call me when I came over the top for all of my chips -- in which case they got some 25 or 30 big blinds into the pot with almost always the worst and usually dominated hand. By adapting in this way to the relentless overaggressiveness of my opponents, I could easily sneak into the money in many events, while having enough chips to get really deep once I managed to win one or two key pots at that stage (almost always going in with the best hand).

In the excellent chapter "No-Limit Hold'em: Big Stack Play" from the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Gavin Smith describes in detail the merits of accumulating a big stack early through relentless aggression, and how you can use this big stack as a weapon later on. For many young players, this is exactly what they view as correct tournament strategy, and therefore they are much more willing to gamble, bluff, reraise, or battle the other big stacks than the good tournament players used to be. I have noticed that, possibly in response to this new breed of players, the more experienced live tournament pros also have upped their levels of aggression. Additionally, there seems to be less "dead money" in tournaments nowadays from people who play either a loose-passive or tight-passive style -- because with the end of the poker boom, it seems that we have lost the influx of these new and inexperienced players. What this all means is that, especially in the slightly bigger no-limit hold'em tournaments, almost everybody seems to be playing a highly aggressive game, and often with hands that don't really warrant it.

Under these conditions, the simple strategy of just waiting patiently for a big hand, and anticipating the excessive action that you might get, has suddenly become not such a bad one at all. After all, it may help you to get into the money much more than would seem "normal," and you will not be in all that many tough spots that require expert judgment -- and that can easily lead you to making mistakes. So, even though you may not be winning all that many tournaments by playing this way, you still can be playing with a decent edge by using this rather simple counterapproach, which more than anything exploits the weaknesses of those who are overaggressive.

So, until the new breed of players learns to slow down and give respect to the raise from the guy who has folded the past 27 hands straight, it may be worth it to sometimes just tone down on the stealing, restealing, and bluffing, avoid playing marginal hands, and simply set traps for those who like to bet and raise at every opportunity. And once they have incorporated these adjustments into their play, and finally have learned to respect our raises -- we can slowly but surely go back to bluffing them.

Rolf has been a professional cash-game player since 1998. He is the author of the successful Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha, and the co-author of Hold'em on the Come. He is the creator and presenter of the hold'em four-DVD set Rolf Slotboom's Winning Plays. He is the first-ever Dutch Champion, and maintains his own site at
www.rolfslotboom.com.