Tight Passive Poker Strategy
While you may laugh at the idea of tight passive poker players, they’re more common than you know. If you, somehow, don’t know what one is, a tight passive player maintains a tight starting hand selection, but their play is weak after the flop. This means they may flop winning hands thanks to their tight selection but they fail to capitalize on their cards and thus win little money and, in fact, they fold pretty often. This means that you can make some bank just by identifying and attacking them.
- Tight Passive Poker Strategy
- Tight Passive Poker Strategy Games
- Tight Passive Poker Strategy Cheat
- Tight Passive Poker Strategy Rules
- Tight Passive Poker Strategy Tactics
How do you find the tight passive player? Look for the player who’s only going in on a few hands and checks on the flop. On top of this, they’ll very rarely bet or raise and their risk-adversive nature means they can be pushed around. Tight passive players play tight (naturally,) so it’s possible to read their hands. Since they usually play with premium hands, pocket pairs and sometimes suited connectors, you can almost certainly put them on a big pocket pair if they had raised preflop and connectors if they’ve limped in.
The important thing to do when you’re playing against tight passive players is to be aggressive. Don’t even consider calling the tight passive player if they raise. The tight passive player doesn’t like to be re-raised and often thinks you have a better hand when you do. Always reraise him when you have a hand. In this case, even if he has the winning hand, he may fold.
- The concept of a tight-aggressive poker strategy is simple: play very few hands, but play them aggressively. TAG poker worked like magic 10 years ago, when fishy players with loose pre-flop tendencies were a dime a dozen. Heck, even Mike McDermott recommended it to the professor in Rounders (1998).
- A tight passive player is a one-trick pony Hold'em player who has learned just enough about the game to understand the wisdom of being highly selective about what hands he chooses to see the flop with, but doesn't understand very much at all beyond that.
What’s great about tight passive players is that they’re easy to bluff. These players have usually read a poker book or two and have played long enough to understand when and how to represent at the table. However, unlike the tight aggressive player, they’ll reveal their weakness by checking and if your raise is aggressive enough, they’re likely to gold to your bluff.
Tight Passive Poker Strategy
OP Poker 1 month ago in Strategy Videos So now you find a very tight passive player at your Spin & Go table. James explains how to deal with and extract chips from a “rock” in Lesson 4 of Spin & Go Reloaded. Tight poker players (aka nits) can be frustrating to play against. They put in chips with only the strongest hands, but their nitty strategy is easy to beat.
Interestingly, a lot of people think of tight passive players as “rocks” — players that only wait for solid starting hands and then just play poker like one should. In my experience, rocks play very steady poker and are married to their hands. You can drive them up if you’ve got the better hand but need to look out because they will stare down any bluffers. The weak-tight player, on the other hand, doesn’t play as tight and still tries to hit the flop.
An important skill that all successful players must have is the ability to 'classify' or 'label' their opponents. Although every player will be unique in some way from the next guy, labeling players will at least give you some sort of idea or direction as to what strategy you should start with first. From there you just make adjustments.
This is going to be especially true in heads up matches. You're involved in every hand. The longer it takes you to figure out what kind of opponent you're up against, the more mistakes you can make thus resulting in more potential money lost.
So with that being said, in this article I'm going to explain how to classify loose passive opponents. More specifically, I'll show the differences between a loose passive and tight passive player and the different adjustments you should make depending on which one you're up against.
Playing Heads Up Vs Loose Passive Opponents
It's not very hard to identify a loose passive player. These guys are also known as 'calling stations' or just 'stations' for short. So as you can imagine, these guys like to call often and will do so with no real hand or draw to speak of.
Because they never fold, stations can be somewhat tilting to play against. But like any other opponent, it's important that you understand what their tendencies are like so you can figure out what adjustments you need to make. I've outlined a few already below for you.
Don't Bluff
This is pretty generic advice. After all, if a player won't fold, what good does it do to bluff? But it goes a bit deeper than that.
For example, many players don't look at their preflop opening range. Verses some players, you can open up really wide, sometimes as wide as 100% of hands. You do this because you expect your opponents to fold allowing you to steal the blinds. However, verses stations this is a bad idea. Stealing in this case is essentially 'bluffing' if you don't really want to play your hand and/or it has no showdown value.
Continuation betting is another good example of this. I think many players will just c-bet because it's their standard flop play. But, again, often times this is done with a hand that missed the flop aka a bluff. If your opponent won't fold, then c-betting is going to be a waste of time and resources more times than not.
Tight Passive Poker Strategy Games
In short, trying to bluff a station, whether it's stealing preflop, c-betting, double or triple barreling, is going to be a bad idea.
Need to Value Bet Thin
We know that stations like to call and are capable of making light calls with hands like bottom pair or ace high. So it would only make sense that we should be able to bet hands like 2nd or 3rd pair for value verses these players. This is known as a thin value bet or value betting thinly.
Now, this doesn't mean we make smaller bet sizes (if anything, we can almost make them bigger). All it means is that we bet marginal hands for value because there is still worse that can call us.
A good example of a thin value bet would be a hand that you just check behind to a tight player because it has showdown value. Say you have second pair with A8o on a flop of K-8-5. If you c-bet and were called, you'd likely check back the turn and river. You have showdown value and not much worse can call you. But verses a station, you can still bet this second pair for value because a pair of 5s will call, as well as pocket 4s or below.
Tight Passive Poker Strategy Cheat
Avoid Hero Calling
Here calling is a term used for making thin or marginal calls. Verses aggressive players hero calling is necessary because they like to bluff frequently. So you need to adjust and make lighter calls.
But verses a calling station this is a bad idea. The reason being is that the tendency or characteristic of a calling station is to call, not bet or raise. When they do, they likely have the very best of their overall range - this likely beats you. So if you're bet into or raised on the river, it's probably a good idea to fold all of your marginal hands.
Playing Heads Up Vs Tight Passive Opponents
Tight passive players are known in most circles as 'rocks.' These players are easy to spot because they fold all but the very best of hands, don't defend their blinds and don't raise very often.
Here are some adjustments you should make when facing a tight aggressive opponent.
Open a Wider Range of Hands Preflop
Against a tight passive player, you can often times open as wide as 100% of hands preflop. Tight passive players don't defend their blinds aggressively enough and as a result, you pick up many uncontested pots. These pots are small since they only consist of the blinds, but it all adds up.
C-bet Frequently
Now, even if you are called preflop while holding something as trashy as 93o, you can still easily win the pot. Just make a continuation bet of about half the pot or so and you'll most often take it down. This works so well because rocks play what is referred to as 'fit or fold' poker. They either make a hand and continue or they don't and fold.
Donk Bet
For the same reason as why you should c-bet frequently, you should donk bet. A donk bet is a bet made when you don't have initiative in the pot and/or are the first to act post flop.
Tight Passive Poker Strategy Rules
The best flops to donk bet are going to be high card, uncoordinated and/or rainbow. It's just so unlikely that your opponent will connect on these kinds of textures that you should get folds more often than not.
Summary of How to Play Heads Up Against Passive Players
Tight Passive Poker Strategy Tactics
The first step to playing profitably against passive players is to determine whether they're loose or tight. As you can see from the advice above, the strategy is quite a bit different depending on which player you're playing against. But once you're able to do that, it's simply a matter of employing a strategy and making needed the adjustments to suit your particular opponent.