For the last five to seven years, it’s been fairly common to hear people in the poker strategy community use the terms ‘TAG’ and ‘LAG’ to refer to different player types – ‘tight-aggressive’ and ‘loose-aggressive’ respectively. These are usually used when talking about the types of players we aspire to be, rather than our opponents – after all, not all of our opponents are aggressive.
However, it’s also reasonably common to hear players use several clichés that are applicable to these two pieces of terminology – each seems to have its own set of connotations and assumptions that are not necessarily based in reality. Let’s take a look at four of the most significant of these assumptions, and why it is that they can be harmful.
LAG is a specific, deliberate approach based on aggression
First and foremost, it’s often assumed that players who play a LAG style are doing so deliberately, as part of a playing style which constitutes their default approach. It’s assumed that looser, more aggressive play forms part of these players’ ‘poker DNA’, and that we should expect them to take the more aggressive option in most situations, or to err on the side of giving them less credit for big hands.
The reality, though, is that many players who play a LAG style are not doing it all the time – nor are they doing it as part of a conscious attempt at aggression for aggression’s sake. In most cases, the reason they’re doing it is because it’s the optimal way to exploit the tight tendencies of the players around them, rather than because it’s just how they play. What we should be doing is considering why it is that they’ve decided that playing LAG is profitable – a lot of the time it may simply be that we don’t realize how tight we ourselves are playing, and the extent to which that tight approach opens up opportunities for our opponents.
Players can be easily identified as LAG
The next issue is that we have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of labeling every player we find into one of these two categories. Most players fall somewhere on a spectrum of playing styles – in fact, if you’re a Holdem Manager 2 user, you can go to the ‘Opponents’ tab in your client and look at bar graphs of where your basic stats fall compared to those of your average opponent.
In addition, we should bear in mind that many players have wildly different preflop strategies than they do postflop – it’s entirely possible for someone to adopt a strategy of highly-aggressive 3-betting preflop, while playing a much more conservative postflop style. Likewise, someone might have fairly tight preflop stats (or a tight image in a live game) but be very prone to firing a lot of two-barrel and three-barrel bluffs postflop. This can be a particularly profitable strategy, as people will be inclined to give them a lot of credit.
What this all adds up to is the reality that it’s virtually impossible to say at what point an opponent crosses the line from TAG to LAG – there’s too much grey area in between, and too much fluctuation in how an opponent might play from one session or one table to the next. The best we can do is to categorize players according to how their tendencies compare to others – after all, everything in poker is relative when it comes to playing styles.
Playing LAG is higher variance than TAG
This misconception, strangely enough, is mostly grounded in fear. Inexperienced players are often prone to being somewhat afraid of variance or playing big pots unnecessarily – they’re prone to wanting to “wait for a better spot”. They seek validation for their belief that ‘tight is right’ – they want to protect themselves from variance by giving themselves additional reasons why they should fold more often preflop.
Of course, it should be obvious that this isn’t the right way to go. In fact, playing a LAG style can actually reduce variance, by ensuring that a player is not dependent upon making big hands to actually pick up pots – after all, very tight players are more or less reduced to waiting until they get a hand and hoping someone else has something too.
Winning more pots without showdown does mean playing bigger pots and backing your decision-making to show up when it counts, but while a LAG style might raise the standard deviation in a player’s EVbb/100 winrate (due to a higher frequency of big pots played), the overall increase in that winrate will offset variance through a resulting increase in ROI. The approach we should be looking to take is to snap up every profitable spot we can find in an effort to maximise our winrate, and that usually involves playing more aggressively.
All the best players play a LAG style
Finally, this is perhaps the biggest misconception of them all. Ever since the days of 2008 and 2009 when Tom Dwan was battling Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius on Poker After Dark or High Stakes Poker, people have believed that aggression was a universally positive quality in poker. While a capacity for aggression is certainly necessary, and a perfectly GTO poker-playing robot would play a very aggressive style, there are plenty of spots where it’s not warranted.
The majority of top-level players don’t necessarily play a hyper-aggressive style – they simply play the style that is most appropriate in the circumstances. There might be certain players out there with a reputation for aggression who may be able to get themselves paid off on the river more than others, but the trade-off for that is that those players have to try a lot harder to find good bluffing spots.
Adaptability is a more valuable quality than out-and-out aggression. Top-level pros pick their spots with pinpoint accuracy – they’ll make a big bluff one hand and a big fold the next. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to be picking a style and sticking with it.
