Classifying Players In Texas Hold'em (Part I)

See also

• Classifying Players In Texas Hold'em (Part II)
• No-Limit Texas Hold'em Tips (Part I)
• General Guidelines for Reading Tells

When you play against people on a poker table, to the best of your ability you want to try to classify their play. Beginning and intermediate players tend to think of players by general categories of classification. Eventually, though, you'll want to get to a point where you classify each and every player individually. The more you can say about an individual player whom you're competing against, the more likely you are to beat her in the long run.

In broad terms, many players tend to be either aggressive or passive in their play. Figuring out where your opponents are in the passive-aggressive spectrum can help you not only win more when you have a good hand, but also lose less when he does.

Aggressive players are the easiest to pick out at a table. Aggression can certainly be well defined but you'll feel aggression as much as you actually see it, and the symptoms are fairly blatant.

Aggressive players tend to:

• Raise and reraise fairly often when they're involved in the betting action. Raising is what makes the aggressive players easily identifiable because dealers will always announce "raise," and all eyes on the table immediately turn there.
• Play from their position more heavily. An aggressive player in late position will raise even more often than her usual trigger-happy self, based solely on her position.
• Start the betting rounds. When given a choice between check and bet, an aggressive player usually bets.
• Check-raise. Check-raising is the second most aggressive act you can do on a poker table (the most aggressive act is reraising). And check-raising is sneakier, because the original check implied that the player didn't have a poker hand - the raise indicates very clearly that the person does.
• Be not at all intimidated by anyone at the table. Aggressive players by their very nature are also more self-assured.
• Be less likely to fold a hand after they're playing.
• Be more experienced poker players. As a rough rule, people become more aggressive the more comfortable they get with the game. This is especially true of people who have read a lot of poker strategy books (they repeatedly hammer home the importance of aggression at a table).

Passive players are a bit harder to spot at a table, mostly because their lack of aggression makes them easy to overlook. These are the players who:

• Call rather than raise. The passive player believes she has a hand - she just isn't interested in pushing it forward.
• Check instead of starting the betting.
• Have a greater tendency to fold the hands they're playing.
• May seem intimidated by one or more players at the table - or maybe even playing the game itself.
• Typically have less poker experience. For a passive player, just the act of sitting at a table and betting is scary enough. He doesn't want the added tension of raising. His inexperience also means that he hasn't had any exposure to advanced poker articles that recommend raising.

In addition to aggressiveness, you should try to be making some sort of determination of how loose your opponent's play is.

A player is considered to be tight if he plays an extremely limited set of starting hands. The starting set of hands would be just a tad on the tight side. And although you can't see a player's starting hand very often, you do see how often he decides to play a hand - and this in itself is a clue.

The starting set of hands will have you playing somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all hands (including when you have the blinds and get to play for free or at a greatly reduced rate). If you see a player playing 1-in-5 hands or less (especially over a long period of time, or several sessions), you're looking at a tight player.

Conversely, loose players will play a wide variety of starting hands, and as result, you'll see them in the pot more often. Any player playing something like a third of her hands, or more, over a long session would definitely be considered a loose player.