Adjusting to a Loose-Aggressive Poker Player. No-Limit Hold'em.

See also

• Trouble and Eye Candy Hands in Pot Limit Omaha
• General Guidelines for Reading Tells

It you're a tight player and you're facing an opponent who's playing a loose-aggressive style, you'll need to adjust your basic approach. At a tight table, you need good values to enter a pot after it's been opened in front of you. If you're sitting behind a loose player and you keep those same standards, he'll chase you out of too many hands. When you do get involved, he'll know you started with a premium hand, and let his hand go unless he hits a strong flop.

Playing your natural style will leave you playing too few hands and conceding too many pots to an opponent holding weaker cards. Here are some of the adjustments you'll need to adopt to accommodate the loose player at the table.

Adjustment № 1: Calling or raising with medium-strength hands. When you're in a heads-up hand with a loose-aggressive player, many of your hands increase in value. The hands which show the greatest increase in strength are the hands which we call the "trouble hands" those with two high cards. Against tight players, hands like AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, and QJ are trouble to play because they can be easily dominated. But against players who will cheerfully raise with queen-ten or jack-nine, these hands are now more likely to be dominating than to be dominated.

Other hands are affected to a lesser degree. Middle pairs do slightly better because a loose player's distribution contains fewer premium pairs on a percentage basis than a tight player's distribution. (Loose players get exactly as many high pairs as tight players, but their effect is diluted by the number of marginal hands that a loose player is playing.) Plus the middle pair is a little more likely to be higher than one of the loose player's cards. Small pairs play about the same. They mostly still need to hit a set to be playable post-flop. Suited connectors also don't change in value much.

Premium pairs also play better, oddly enough. Loose players know that their style is forcing tight players to play more hands. Therefore premium pairs form a smaller percentage of a tight player's distribution than would be the case if a tight player is matched against another tight player. Injecting loose play into a tight game puts a sort of fog over the battlefield and every player, loose and tight, becomes harder to read.

If you're in a multi-way pot with a loose player and a tight player, the situation becomes even less clear. Is your tight opponent playing his normal tight game? Or has he started to react to the loose player and opened up his starting requirements? Is he still betting legitimate hands, or has he increased his bluffing frequency? Evaluating the loose player might be straightforward, but the tight player may have morphed into an unknown quantity.

Remember that the overriding long-term goal of a successful loose-aggressive player is to see a lot of flops cheaply, searching for the monster hands that will let him double up. To thwart that strategy, you have to make the flops expensive, rather than cheap. To do that, you have to be willing to raise, rather than call, preflop.

Adjustment № 2: Position. When one player is entering a lot of pots, the idea of position changes meaning dramatically. "Position" now means "Position relative to the loose player." If the loose player is sitting in Seat 4, the best seat at the table is Seat 3, the seat to the right of the loose player.

At first this seems distinctly counter-intuitive. Why would you want to act before the active player? But when one player is extremely active, he becomes the pivot point at the table. Each hand in effect doesn't start until he's made his play.

Consider a table where a very loose player is sitting at Seat 4 and you're on his right in Seat 3. Let's assume that Seat 1 is under the gun. The first two players fold and the action is on you. You pick up a pair of kings. Instead of raising, you just limp. The loose player behind you now raises, as expected. His raise now drives the action around to you. Before you act again, you'll have seen how everyone at the table reacted to his move. If his raise leads to a couple of calls and then a large reraise from the big blind, you're in position to make a big third raise.

Had you been sitting to the left of the loose player, your advantage wouldn't be so great. True, you'd always get to see what he does before you act, which is worth something. But if he's very loose and aggressive, you often know what he's going to do ("I raise!") so actually seeing it isn't that informative. And from that position, you have to act before seeing what everyone else is going to do.

As an example, suppose you're on his left, the action is folded to him, and you have a medium pair. He raises. If you're last to act in the hand, a medium pair is good for a reraise against his range of hands. But if several players are left, you don't know what to do. If you raise and someone behind you has picked up a real hand, you're in trouble. If you limp, someone behind you might see his raise and your call and decide this is a perfect time to bluff. Because the loose player is the fulcrum of all the action, sitting to his left is, in effect, sitting in early position.

Adjustment No. 3: Check-raising with good hands. Loose-aggressive players usually take their cues from your actions. Since they play a lot of mediocre to weak hands, they have to win a lot of these hands to make their preflop activity profitable. The best time to attack is when you show weakness, so they're looking to attack players who limp preflop or check post-flop.

To combat a loose-aggressive player, you have to be willing to check-raise or limp-raise more often, and with weaker hands, than you would use in a tight game. To make good decisions, you need some idea of just how often a loose player is getting into pots. A player who's involved in 25 to 30 percent of the pots is loose. A player who's getting into 40 to 50 percent of pots (or more) has a big target on his chest.

The caveat here is to remember that there are other players at the table who may or may not be reacting to the loose player. Interpreting exactly what they're going to do can be a problem.

Adjustment No. 4: Calling for information. When a loose player arrives at the table and announces himself by attacking many pots and playing many hands, you need to assign extra value to calling on the river in order to see his hole cards. Recognize that you're going to be playing a lot of hands against this player over the course of a long session, and the more you know about his habits, and the sooner you know it, the better.

If you get to the river and your analysis of the hands indicates that a call is probably only slightly incorrect based on the pot odds, go ahead and make the call. The extra knowledge will probably compensate for any lost equity in the hand itself.