Loose-Aggressive Player

What style of poker do you play? Are you welcomed to a table with open arms by the lively set? Do highly conservative players look for other games when you sit down? Either way, you might have reputation as a bit of maniac at the table, and that means you could be a:

Loose-Aggressive Player

The Loose- Aggressive player is called a “Maniac” because that is how more conservative players perceive him. The Maniac is in every pot and pushing, pushing, pushing with raise after raise. This style of play brings lots of excitement to a game, but also lots of chaos.

Your aggression could be a result of either a poor understanding of how the game is played, betting wise, or simply a love of being “in the action.” You never limp into a pot, you charge in. Calling is almost never an option, you typically raise and re-raise as much as possible. If you cards are good, you raise. If your cards are average, you raise. If your cards are horrible, guess what? You raise.

The pros of being a Loose- Aggressive Player depended a lot on how much you can afford to loose. You will have huge swings in your winnings, taking down some of the most aggressive, juicy pots; but you will also loose big, and more often than you win. If you can afford to play this way, you will be welcome at many tables, and be able to feed your desire to be in the thick of things, mixing it up.

The cons of being a Loose- Aggressive Player are two fold. First, you are going to loose a lot of money. Being loose, in a ton of hands and seeing the through to the end regardless of your cards, is a way to pass out your cash to the other players at the table. Second, you bring chaos to a table, causing tensions to stay high, and this may cause you to be shut out if the other players are fairly conservitive.

Pcychology can help you tell when another poker player is bluffing

“One of the many fun things about poker,” says Dr Paul Seager, “is that it gives us licence to lie – a practice generally frowned upon in polite society.”

In fact, he argues, because we are taught to tell the truth as children, we assume that everyone else does too. This makes us very bad at figuring out when people are lying to us.

Research suggests we are generally so poor spotting when someone is not telling us the truth that the likelihood of our being right is no better than chance. In other words, you might as well toss a coin.

But in poker being able to spot when another player is bluffing is a priceless talent, so can psychology help here?

Dr Seager, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, says it can and gives some practical tips for players.

The first is that you should recognise you are probably not as good at spotting a lie as you think you are. This insight should make you pause and avoid making rash decisions.

It’s worse than that: what you think you know about spotting liars is probably wrong. We tend to think that cues such as a lack of eye contact and nervous shifting of the body are signs that someone is lying.

But research has shown that a good liar may hold your gaze slightly longer than normal to convince you he is telling the truth. And because we are nervous when we tell a lie, we tend to put in more effort into our thinking which, simply put, diverts energy away from our normal bodily movements. So when we lie we tend to move less than when we are telling the truth.

Dr Seager says that if you want to spot when another player is bluffing it is best not to concentrate   on one or two individual signs. It is better to notice people’s behaviour when they are not sitting around the poker table so that you have a sense of how they act when they are behaving honestly.

Then, he says: “When it comes to the point in the play when they’ve put in a bet and you’re not sure whether they’re bluffing you or not, try to compare their demeanour with their honest baseline that you’ve observed earlier. If you instinctively feel that there is a difference, then there is probably something going on.”

But, as Dr Seager points out, their different behaviour could be cause, not because they are bluffing with a weak hand, but because they have a very strong hand. Poker is a difficult game.

Another way to spot bluffing is to listen to what your opponents say. Deception experts generally agree that what people say and the way that they say it give good clues for spotting a lie. When people are being honest their speech is immediate in tone: “I am a good player and don’t need to bluff”.

If another player says “A player of my calibre doesn’t need to bluff,” then you may well suspect they are bluffing.

You may worry that other players will know all these rules too and use them to deceive you, but Dr Seager says this is unlikely.

“Unless you are up against a world-class expert, the chances are that the best player will only be able to fake one or two cues at a time. What you need to do is to base you reading of an opponent on a cluster of cues. That way, even if you opponent is able to fake a couple of cues, you are less likely to be fooled.”

These techniques all take time to master, but Dr Seager says it is worth it in the long run.

“Put away your lucky coin and engage all of your senses instead. That is the way to becoming a master bluff-spotter.”

4 Reasons to Play Aggressively

Reason #1

Initiative. If there is a one word answer that would represent a fantastic reason for you to play aggressively, it would be the word initiative. When you take the initiative in poker, what you are doing is forcing your opponent to make the decision.

Consider a no limit poker hand. If you push all of your chips in, you are forcing your opponent to make the tough decision regarding the call. If they were to push in before you however, you would then be in a position where you needed to make a tough decision for all of the chips in your stack. When these two situations are compared with each other, it becomes very easy to see that you would rather be in the first position than the second. You can do so by taking the initiative and you can’t take the initiative in poker unless you play aggressively.

Reason #2

Another reason that you play aggressively is to set up a play of some sort later on in the session. The human race is a curious one and one particularly interesting point about human beings is that when they are playing poker, they tend to more easily notice and remember players when they play aggressively than when they play conservatively. A person can play 99 hands conservatively and one hand aggressively and chances are that if they make a big enough deal of playing that one hand aggressively, most of the players at the table will peg them as an aggressive player. Playing aggressively, especially early on in the session, can be a good way of pre-emptive gear changing and can allow you to play conservatively later and get some serious action for your big hands.

Reason #3

When you consider the various reasons that are available for aggressive play in poker, another one that picks up is that the best players in the world are aggressive. When you think of players like Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu, you cannot help but notice how aggressive those players are. By the same token, even players like Mike Sexton, Doyle Brunson and Barry Greenstein are all players that play aggressively. That is the only way to play if you want to be successful as a poker player over the course of the long term and that is yet one more reason why aggressive play is absolutely essential when you are seated at a poker table.

Reason #4

One final reason to play aggressively that many people actually miss when they are thinking through the reasons is that playing aggressively actually helps you focus on the task at hand. When you are playing conservatively, it is very easy to let your mind wander because you are involved in the action less often. If you play your hands aggressively however, you are going to be taking the initiative quite often and in the end that means that you will be forced to pay far more attention to the game than you otherwise might do.

The Psychology of Poker

Imagine you are sitting at a poker table with a stranger whose play strategy — how he bets and bluffs — is unknown to you. You are dealt a two-card hand. Your opponent raises. Will you call or will you fold? How do you decide? Conventional wisdom says you look at your hand, gauge the chances of winning based on your cards, and look for clues of bluffing in your opponent’s face and body language. However, recent research published in PLoS One shows that your first impression of the opponent’s trustworthiness influences your decision and that you fold more frequently when the opponent looks trustworthy than when the opponent keeps a neutral expression or a poker face.

Researcher Erik Schlicht and collaborators study a group of 14 novice poker players in a simplified Texas Hold’em. Each poker player is dealt two cards and allowed to see the face of his opponent on the computer screen. The player has to decide if he will fold or call. If he folds, he loses 100 chips that round. If he calls, then he may win or lose 5000 chips depending on how good his hand is compared to his opponent’s. The face of the opponent changes every round. After 300 rounds, the players are awarded money based on their wins and losses during the game.

The Psychology of Losing Poker

It's no secret that there is a lot of psychology to the game of poker. A basic knowledge of psychological principles can help a player plan his approach, read his opponents, and deal with his wins in a tournament setting. One of the most often overlooked psychological aspects of the game is the psychology of losing. Having a better understanding of what happens physiologically and psychologically when one loses the game can help prevent addiction and keep one focused on the game itself.  It is important to realize that when one loses a game, there is a natural physiological response that the body produces. It is uncomfortable. It makes your stomach churn, changes your blood pressure, constricts thousands of muscles and causes physical and mental anguish. The automatic recourse that one has to this reaction is to try to win, and fast. A win would certainly rid the body off this pain, but rushing into another game to quell the loss is the start of a poker addiction. Patience is a very important part of good poker play, as is keeping to be neutral to positive outlook.   Adjusting the way one thinks about the game can prevent this bodily reaction from taking place and allow the player the opportunity to make more rational game decisions, including a more rational response to losing a game. It is vital to one's poker game to make sure that he knows when he is prone to the aforementioned physiological response. It is possible to diffuse it with acceptance of the loss and additional adjustment of one's expectations for his play. Holding lofty expectations only amplifies the effect of said physiological response and proceeds to make it not only a real influence to one's poker game, but his life in general as well. A good way to normalize one's expectations is to keep records of his games and his statistics for play.

Learn the Smokescreen

Poker and sex have a few things in common. First of all, you can pour money into both with the hope of a pay off in the end, only to walk away with an empty wallet and a deep, unsatisfied feeling that is often accompanied with the humiliation of knowing you have been played for a fool. Also in poker, as well as sex, things are not always as they seem. While you be elated that the extremely attractive young lady who looks as though she walked off the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is giving you attention, this can all change when in a moment of passion you discover she has an Adams apple. While no mouthwash in the world can gargle out the shame and disgust of your Crying Game moment, the point is that you had been caught in a situation where perception and reality were two completely different things.

Billions of words have been written about the game of poker, about strategies, and about how to win at the game. Just about every utterance or typed statement comes down to the fact that poker is a game where you are trying to alter your opponent’s perception of reality (or see through your adversaries own perception altering smokescreen).

Unless you have spontaneously developed superpowers chances are you cannot see your opponent’s hand. Nor can they see yours. This leaves us with a game that is based completely on what you think your opponent might have, and how much reality you can alter in the name of winning the pot. This means all the pot odds and mathematics pale in comparison to being someone who can use guile to change how others see reality.

Remember, poker in its simplest form is about perception, not reality. Learn to change the perception and you will win at the game.

Poker and sunglasses

Can you imagine Greg Raymer without his orange fossils? Or Marcel Luske not wearing his sunglasses upside down? Of course not. Its an essential part of their image, something like a trademark. We can bring them into line with Johnny Chans orange and Benny Binions hat. However, there are a lot of people now who say that sunglasses should be banned at casinos. Why is that? Lets try to figure it out.   If you want to find out when the sunglasses were invented, youll see that they were already used in China in the 12th century or possibly even earlier. They were made of smoky quartz in those times and protected not only from the sunshine but from the sights of other people. Those who wear sunglasses leave almost no chance for anybody to read their emotions. Contemporary documents describe the use of such glasses by judges in Chinese courts to conceal their facial expressions while questioning witnesses.   Yes, facing a person wearing sunglasses we feel at a loss because we dont know what he is thinking about and even where he is looking at. This fact is used widely by modern poker players (I emphasize the word modern meaning the players of the new wave. You cant imagine the old-time players using that tricks). They wear shades to make it difficult for their opponents to read them and probably to hide some tells.    I wear prescription sunglasses, says one poker player I love them because simply wearing them makes you look scarier plus, I'm able to watch people look at their hole cards, the flop, turn and river, without them ever knowing I'm staring dead at them. That is crucial for the way I read players. If people don't know your staring at them, they do some pretty stupid things...   So he does not even hide the fact that those who wear sunglasses have more advantages and chances to win. It is on a part with the issue of drug taking in cycling or athletics, it was written in one article.   So a lot of people now say that sunglasses should be banned at casinos. Well, in fact, I dont think this little thing is that bad. If a person has a habit of expressing tells, sunglasses wont help him as he might be read through his voice, movements etc. And if a player feels more comfortable wearing his sunglasses - why not to let him do it? If you do not to give him any advantage, just go and buy those for yourself.   By the way sometimes they can do harm to you. I tried to wear sunglasses once at the World Series and misread my hand, recalls Phil Ivey. I threw them into the garbage can, and they were $1,100 sunglasses they cost me a $100,000 pot.   So who is talking about advantages here? Its poker, thats it.

Psychology (level: intermediate)

1. At MCU, we teach that most weak opponents often seem to call… (a) oddly, primarily with black cards;
   (b) anything that moves;
   (c) often, but almost seldom twice in a row;
   (d) less often than they should.
   
2. It’s psychologically satisfying to maintain a long winning streak. Which statement about such a streak is most true? (a) It’s important to try to keep the streak alive as long as you can afford to do so;
   (b) You might be losing money overall by extending a winning streak;
   (c) The more days in a row you win, the more days in a row you’ll probably lose in the future;
   (d) Players who have the longest winning streaks are, on average, poker’s biggest lifetime winners.
   
3. Caro’s Threshold of Misery states that… (a) You stop feeling any more pain once you’ve lost more than you expected was likely – and this can put you in a dangerous situation;
   (b) Everyone has a different tolerance for losing, and you should develop as great a tolerance as possible;
   (c) Players typically get irritated if they win too many hands in a row – thus, misery applies equally to winners and to losers;
   (d) There’s no way to keep an even disposition at poker, and trying to do so will always cause you to lose in the long run.
   
4. If you feel that you’re being cheated… (a) you’re apt to be wrong, but the feeling itself can cause you to lose;
   (b) you probably won’t be able to concentrate fully on making the best decisions;
   (c) you should often leave the game, even without proof;
   (d) all of the above.
   
5. It’s often profitable to seem like a maniac in poker, especially if… (a) you’re a “friendly” maniac;
   (b) you can avoid being caught up in the act and playing poorly;
   (c) your opponents are paying attention;
   (d) all of the above.
   
6. Most players seem to take turns going on tilt. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   
7. If you say, “I think I have a straight flush, but maybe I’m bluffing,” you’ve given your opponent an “either-or decision.” This can be effective psychology if… (a) you’re bluffing;
   (b) you have a weak hand with vague hopes of winning, but don’t want a call;
   (c) you’ve been losing consistently for at least an hour;
   (d) you have a medium-strong betting hand.
   
8. It’s better to advertise if your weak hand is similar to those your opponents might also play. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   
9. Solid players are not affected much by the table image of their opponents. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   
10. Against typical weak opponents, the best tactic is to… (a) bluff a little more often;
    (b) avoid the urge to bet aggressively with medium-strong hands;
    (c) play more conservatively than your image implies;
    (d) play a little more liberally than they do.

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Answers and explanations (with questions repeated for convenience)
Psychology (level: intermediate)

1. At MCU, we teach that most weak opponents often seem to call… (a) oddly, primarily with black cards;
   (b) anything that moves;
   (c) often, but almost seldom twice in a row;
   (d) less often than they should.
   Answer: (b). At MCU we teach that most weak opponents will call anything that moves. This means that the more animated you are, the more likely you are to be called, and the less movement you make, the more you are likely to be successful bluffing.
   
2. It’s psychologically satisfying to maintain a long winning streak. Which statement about such a streak is most true? (a) It’s important to try to keep the streak alive as long as you can afford to do so;
   (b) You might be losing money overall by extending a winning streak;
   (c) The more days in a row you win, the more days in a row you’ll probably lose in the future;
   (d) Players who have the longest winning streaks are, on average, poker’s biggest lifetime winners.
   Answer: (b). You might cause yourself to lose overall by trying to extend a win streak. That’s because you’re likely to force yourself to play longer under poor conditions — when you’re losing — and quit prematurely to chalk up the win under the better conditions — when you’re ahead.
   
3. Caro’s Threshold of Misery states that… (a) You stop feeling any more pain once you’ve lost more than you expected was likely – and this can put you in a dangerous situation;
   (b) Everyone has a different tolerance for losing, and you should develop as great a tolerance as possible;
   (c) Players typically get irritated if they win too many hands in a row – thus, misery applies equally to winners and to losers;
   (d) There’s no way to keep an even disposition at poker, and trying to do so will always cause you to lose in the long run.
   Answer: (a). Caro’s Threshold of Misery suggests that once you move beyond the maximum you expected you could lose, you stop feeling any more pain, and you’re in danger of damaging yourself further by making weak decisions.
   
4. If you feel that you’re being cheated… (a) you’re apt to be wrong, but the feeling itself can cause you to lose;
   (b) you probably won’t be able to concentrate fully on making the best decisions;
   (c) you should often leave the game, even without proof;
   (d) all of the above.
   Answer: (d). If you feel that you’re being cheated, even if you’re wrong, the feeling itself can cause you to use up valuable time worrying about it, making you less able to concentrate on important game decisions. You should often leave that game, even without proof. So, the answer was “all the above” — A, B, and C.
   
5. It’s often profitable to seem like a maniac in poker, especially if… (a) you’re a “friendly” maniac;
   (b) you can avoid being caught up in the act and playing poorly;
   (c) your opponents are paying attention;
   (d) all of the above.
   Answer: (d). All of the above A, B, and C were true. If you’re going to pretend to be a “maniac” in a game to confuse your opponents and gain extra calls, then you should be friendly, you should avoid being caught up in the act and playing poorly, and your opponents must be paying attention.
   
6. Most players seem to take turns going on tilt. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   Answer: (a). Oddly, it’s true that most opponents take turns going on tilt. It’s kind of fair, if everyone does it sometimes, and it equals out. But, you can make a lot more money by simply passing your turn to go on tilt. Play your best game all the time.
   
7. If you say, “I think I have a straight flush, but maybe I’m bluffing,” you’ve given your opponent an “either-or decision.” This can be effective psychology if… (a) you’re bluffing;
   (b) you have a weak hand with vague hopes of winning, but don’t want a call;
   (c) you’ve been losing consistently for at least an hour;
   (d) you have a medium-strong betting hand.
   Answer: (d). Forcing an opponent into an either-or mode of thinking is a good tactic when you bet a medium-strong hand. If you say, excitedly, that you might have made a straight flush, you’re opponent may call with a weak hand, thinking you either did make it or you’re bluffing. That’s exactly what you want when you’re hands fall in the middle-strength range. You’d like as many weak calls as possible, but you want to discourage raises from better hands than yours.
   
8. It’s better to advertise if your weak hand is similar to those your opponents might also play. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   Answer (b). It’s false that you should tend to advertise with weak hands similar to those your opponents play. Doing so will seem commonplace to them. If you’re going to bluff or play a weak hand to send a message that gains extra calls in the future, make it a hand strange enough or weak enough to get their attention.
   
9. Solid players are not affected much by the table image of their opponents. (a) True;
   (b) False.
   Answer: (b). It’s false — though commonly believed to be true — that solid poker players aren’t affected much by your table image. Almost everyone is affected by image and can be swayed by advertising. People make hasty evaluations based on often faulty perceptions. Learn to profit from this.
   
10. Against typical weak opponents, the best tactic is to… (a) bluff a little more often;
    (b) avoid the urge to bet aggressively with medium-strong hands;
    (c) play more conservatively than your image implies;
    (d) play a little more liberally than they do.
    Answer: (c). Against typical weak opponents, the best tactic is to appear loose, but play more conservatively than your image implies.