I’ve spoken to a few students lately who have been having issues when playing against particularly aggressive players. They get 3-bet several times, their c-bets get raised, or a player with a big stack is opening a lot of pots, and suddenly the usual dynamics of MTT play start to shift. Here are some suggestions as to how to combat the various types of aggression you’re likely to see most often in tournament poker.
Players who open lots of pots
The short version of how to play against these players is ‘fold less’, but it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. It depends how much information you have on the player, first and foremost. If you have a reasonable sample of hands (at least a few hundred) then you might have some idea of how you would expect them to interpret your responses. Similarly, if you’ve looked them up on SharkScope or Tournament Shark and you’ve seen they’re a big winning player (or a big losing player) then you can start to make inferences about their ranges and likely responses to your own counter-aggression.
I say ‘counter-aggression’ because countering their aggression with passiveness is only occasionally a good option. It works when you’re in position and you flop a strong hand, but if you’re out of position or you only catch a small piece of the board, trying to simply call down is not going to work very often, since aggressive players are not going to let you show your hand down without a fight. It’s worth pointing out that there are instances where passiveness works, though – slowplaying big hands definitely makes more sense against players whose ranges are so wide that they’ll struggle to pay you off.
When approaching opportunities to play back at villains with wide opening ranges, consider carefully your own stack depth, and the player’s ability. Weaker aggressive players are less likely to be aware of their own table image, and thus more likely to allow you to exploit them. Good aggressive players are immediately going to expect to be played back at more often, and you can’t expect a simple 3-bet to immediately get credit unless you’re a total unknown to him and you’ve been playing tight.
When it comes to stack sizes, it’s important to choose your 3-bet bluffing hands accordingly – the deeper you are, the more likely you are to get flatted, and thus the more you should lean towards choosing flop-friendly, suited-connector type hands. The shallower you are, the more it’s shove-or-fold versus your 3-bet for the villain, so a blocker hand like Ace-x is much more useful.
Players who 3-bet a lot
This is where things get more tricky. Players who show a lot of aggression preflop by 3-betting are liable to put you in very difficult spots. There are several ways to combat these players. The first, and probably simplest, is to simply tighten up your open-raising range. This can be by far the best option in ICM situations at final tables, and is often the best play in spots where your table image dictates that you’re not likely to be given much credit. When your opening range is tighter, you’re comfortable 4-betting or flatting with a greater percentage of that range, and your decisions versus 3-bets get easier.
Of course, folding more often isn’t always the best option, since we don’t want to necessarily just assume that our opponents are going to be 3-betting us more than they actually are. So while tightening up a little is usually fine, tightening up to the point where you’re only opening with hands you’re comfortable 4-betting is probably too tight.
Position is also crucial – when you’re opening in position and getting 3-bet from the blinds, flat-calling the 3-bet is much more likely to be a reasonable option with flop-friendly hands, and becomes a better option as stacks get deeper. Conversely, when you’re out of position, the postflop spot is actually liable to be even more difficult to play versus an aggressive player, so you should be more inclined to lean towards either 4-betting or folding.
The final option in this case is the most high-variance, but can be the most profitable if executed correctly. From time to time, it’s necessary to put an aggressive player to the test by increasing your 4-bet bluffing frequencies against them. Many aggressive players, particularly weaker ones, will be very inclined to 3-bet, but much less inclined to 5-bet when someone plays back at them. If there’s a big gap between someone’s 3-betting range and their 5-betting range, that’s the time to exploit them with a lot of 4-bet bluffs.
Players who like to get tricky postflop
This is perhaps the most nuanced instance, in that the optimal response is almost always dependent on the board texture, positions and preflop ranges. However, there are some things that hold true in a broader sense no matter what. Generally, the principle of ‘fold less’ holds up well, but we should think carefully about in what way we decide to start folding less often.
When out of position versus players with very low fold to c-bet stats (40% or less), consider either check-folding or two-barrelling depending on whether you flop some equity or not. Flopping no equity or backdoor draws and firing away can be dangerous. Once you do flop equity, if you’re going to get floated a lot, fire a lot of turns too – there’s only so many times a player can float you without a hand. If he didn’t pick up equity on the turn, he’s likely to fold.
Additionally, widen your range for c-betting for value, since even bottom pair can get called by worse in these instances. It’s tempting to slowplay big hands often in these spots, but the fact is that it’s much easier to grow a pot by betting the flop than by checking it, so often the only thing that slowplaying will accomplish is to get one extra bet from the bottom of villain’s range, instead of getting three bets from the top.
When in position, continue c-betting regularly, but consider checking back the flop with some middle-strength value hands in order to induce bluffs on future streets. This is much better with, say, KJ on K84r, than it is with 99 on Q73 – a top pair hand is much less vulnerable to future overcards. You can check back the KJ there and call two bluffs on most runouts without many issues.
Players are much less likely to check-call out of position as a float, so c-betting with a wider range of value hands doesn’t add as much value as it does when we’re the one OOP. However, your bottom-pair type hands and vulnerable middle pairs will find themselves in trouble on future streets if you do start checking them back, so consider betting with those hands anyway for protection, and perhaps even think about turning some of them into bluffs on future streets.
The other kind of ‘tricky’ – the kind that likes to raise your c-bets and check-raise the flop a lot – is something that’s hard to plan for. It’s usually very difficult to get a big enough sample of hands on somebody to have a reliable read on their ‘flop raise vs c-bet’ statistic, or their ‘total check-raise’ statistic. However, keeping at least one of those stats on your HUD display – probably the latter – is a good idea. If you have 200 hands on someone and you see that his check-raise percentage is zero over that sample, he’s very unlikely to be bluffing when he check-raises you.
You may also consider checking back the flop a little more often with your missed hands against aggressive players – there is some value in giving yourself the opportunity to turn an unexpectedly strong hand, and there is also value in the ‘delayed c-bet’, which can have the effect of appearing to take all the air hands out of your range once you check the flop, and thus giving you more fold equity on a turn bluff in the event that the villain does check to you.
A final thought
Playing versus aggressive players is tough – it’s why playing aggressively is almost unequivocally a more profitable style than playing tight when it comes to the long run in MTTs, as long as it’s tempered with logical caution. However, the biggest edge that aggressive players possess over their tighter counterparts is the fear they induce in their opponents.
The fact that they can make their opponents fold more often before the action even gets to them in a hand is a big part of why their edges get so big. If you’re struggling to play against these players, then put aside any intimidation, and think carefully – not just about how to respond to them, but about how a greater variety of aggressive strategies might benefit your own game.
