Since the beginning of poker, the best players have known that the path to victory is to be aggressive. Like most advice, this eventually trickled down to the masses. Even at the small stakes I play, I have noticed a lot more aggression, and I have been forced to develop strategies to combat it. Fortunately, most players are inexperienced aggressors, who open themselves up to counterattacks when they try to be the good aggressive players they are not.
Very occasional limp from early positions to induce raises
I usually just fold weak hands from early position, but if a very aggressive player is in late position, I will occasionally limp to try to entice him to raise lightly. I do this with hands that would be difficult to play if I raised and got called by multiple players or if I faced a 3-bet. This includes hands like 77, AJo, and A9s, for example.
If I get the raise I expect from the aggressive player, I can use his aggression against him and come back with a 3-bet that would otherwise be hard to call. The best part about this play is that the other players also know that this particular player is very aggressive and that he was just attacking my limp. They can then call his raise with marginal hands similar to mine in hopes of catching him on a bluff. More often than not, these calls end up being dead money in the pot, which makes the limp and re-raise even more profitable.
If I get raised unexpectedly by a passive player, I can just fold or stay in the play for less money than if I had bet and been 3-bet.
Again, this is something I do very occasionally and because I usually play tight, which usually results in no one reraising me. More often than not, the table will either fold to the blinds or I will run into one or two limpers, since an early position limp from a nit player is something to be respected. I find it funny how in today's aggressive play environment, my early position limps tend to get more folds than my early position raises. If everyone folds and I'm left with the big blind, I usually just need to bet the flop and take down the pot cheaply.
Early Position Check-Raise
This play is very similar to the first one, but less controversial. I use this play when I raise out of position and get called by multiple players. When this happens, I don't C-bet unless I have a very good hand that won't put me in a bad position if someone raises. If that's not the case, I check to see what the other players will do. If the action is too heavy after checking, I usually fold, but checking here opens up an opportunity.
In the small stakes games I play, players will call a C-BET with any pair or backdoor draw on the flop. They just want to see if their hands will improve on the turn. So if I C-BET, I am doing exactly what they expect me to do. However, if I check to a very aggressive player and raise when the action comes back to me, they usually won’t be able to continue with these weak, speculative hands in the bloated pot. Sometimes these players get sticky, so I try to have at least a few draws and a decent backdoor just in case. I also like to balance this type of bluff with value hands that can beat top pair. The nice thing is that check raising usually wards off draws, but can sometimes be called by top pairs.
Opening with high bets in late position
To combat super-aggressive players who 3-bet a lot, I typically use a raise size of 2.5 to 3 times the big blind when in late position or sometimes in middle position. I tend to do this less in early position because I will often have to fold to 3-bets. Therefore, I want to have as few players as possible who play behind me, so there is less chance that one of them will have a good hand and decide to play.
A larger raise makes it more likely that the players who call the bet will be the blinds. Furthermore, the larger bet traps players with average stacks, making it difficult for them to 3-bet, since this would require them to be nearly all-in. I usually open with larger bets when my range consists of pairs that I plan to call potential shoves with or when I have blockers, that is, cards that are part of the opponent's outs, that I don't plan to call shoves with.
Open shove with lots of chips from early positions
Most people start open shoving when they get to the 10-15 big blinds. However, if I have very aggressive players behind me at the table who are able to exploit my light raises with their stack when I have 16-20bb, I start open shoving with that amount of chips. I know players who would never dream of open shoving with that stack size. Believe me, I don't love the idea either, but I find it much more appealing than raising and then folding a hand to lose 10%+ of my chips with cards that would be profitable in an open shove.
The problem with this play is that you shove weak cards with 16-20bb, but not strong cards, so you will be exploited a lot. What I do is raise-call stronger hands and raise-fold weak hands, and with average hands I just shove. Since you will probably get called by strong pairs or Ax when shoving with 16-20bb, consider raising-folding hands that have no value against this range, like small Ax, for example.
Re-steal with more chips and a wider range of final positions
People now know that they should defend the big blind with a big range against small raises. I do this too, and as much as I've improved, I'm not as good at defending marginal hands out of position after the flop. Because of this, I fold the big blind more often than most regulars. However, when a super aggressive player sees a guy like me sitting in the big blind, they tend to get hyper aggressive. What they don't realize is that most of the time I'm actually defending my blinds, but I choose to shove instead of calling with the marginal hands that are in my range.
If I feel like a player is raising too much and folding too much to reraises, given the range of hands I put him in, I will end up deciding to shove with 20-30bbs, depending on a number of factors, such as the size of the bet, the number of players behind me, and my hand. I tend to shove when I am closer to the blinds and with hands that can beat the calling range that I assume players will use to make the decision, such as big Ax and pairs. This strategy is very similar to open shoving with a stack of 16-20bbs. As my stack gets smaller, I adjust the strategy to shove with mostly hands like Ax and pairs that can be called by villain's worse hands.
The key to this play is not to call the big blind all the time, as is common today. What I do is to induce hyper-aggressive players to try to steal my big blind with a range of big hands, which ends up becoming, for them, a range of hands that cannot be defended, because it is too open and fragile. It is a maneuver that I use when I feel that I am trapped by the size of my stack. With deeper stacks, I call the big blind much more often.
Conclusion
With games being so aggressive these days, some players in small stakes games try to copy the best players they see in action. They try to fight fire with fire, but they invariably do so in an unbalanced manner. This opens them up to counter-aggression, which is what I often try to exploit. In many cases, the player who bets last wins the pot. I use these players to try to put myself in the right position to be just that person.
Author: Carlos Welch
Translated and adapted from the original: Five Ways to Combat Over Aggression in Small Stakes Games
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