Football News Blog » Swinging for the fences in poker

Swinging for the fences in poker

There is an old stock market term called “swinging for the fences” which is actually a term taken from baseball that describes hitters who always try to score home runs all the time. In cricket this would be batsmen who were always looking to score by hitting sixes over the boundary ropes. The analogy with poker here is clear and what I want to discuss in this article is the weakness of being too aggressive. Yes, believe it or not you can actually be too aggressive in poker even though being aggressive is often labelled a prerequisite for poker success.

So what do I mean by swinging for the fences and being too aggressive? Well there are certain alpha male type characters who find it difficult to lay hands down in Texas poker and simply launch far too many aggressive plays and bluffs all the time. When these work frequently in the same session then you can often record very good winning sessions where other players in your position may have broken even or actually lost. However when this sort of play goes wrong either because your opponents are weak enough to call you down or they are strong enough to be better bankrolled and are observing you more then you have something of a problem.

Likewise when you simply run into big hands when you are being aggressive! Hyper aggressive players will tend to stack off as well once they begin bluffs and in the right set of circumstances then this can be very effective play. However when you are losing buy ins all over the place when you could simply have taken the safer option then this can and does often lead to tilt. I have said it before and I will say it again, there are many players who tout loose aggressive styles and although loose aggressive comes in all shapes and sizes, really loose aggressive players can go on some horrendously bad runs.

This is why being loose aggressive is by far the most difficult style to execute in poker and it is the most demanding style when it comes to variance as well. This is where “skill” comes into play and poker is a skill based activity. Having skill means being able to accept and to play through certain situations also. This is why it isn’t really a ready made avenue to success to learn from very good players. Let us look at a LAG who tries teaching a very aggressive LAG style.

This player may be a very successful player but he may regularly encounter losing runs of 30 buy ins in six handed NL400. This equates to $12,000 which may be well beyond the mental financial limit for many players. The amazing thing about all of this is that this player could be taking $12,000 downswings to make an earn rate that he could have amassed multi-tabling a lower level and playing a far better and far more controlled style of poker.

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