The amount of pressure that you can constantly direct onto your opponents can oftentimes be measured in parallel with your overall success in poker. In other words, you need to be aggressive to win, especially in no limit hold’em!
When your opponent bets into you, they force you to be the one who has to make a decision – do you feel you have the better hand or not? If you’re holding a margin hand then it’s not easy to make that decision, which often means you’re forced to fold. So it is almost always better to be the aggressor in a hand, unless of course you relaly have a very strong hand and you are trapping your opponent. The idea of being aggressive is to persuade your rival to guess incorrectly about what you’re holding. Whether you want them to fold or call is dependent on the situation, but what you always want is for him to make a mistake. By constantly betting and applying pressure you encourage your opponents to make errors.
Selecting which hole cards to be aggressive with, and from which position, is a required skill in poker, and if you do it right your aggression will be more effective. If you are selective enough, you can often get away with re-raising your opponent and taking the pot down without ever revealing your hand. This requires the right table image, and an opponent with enough skill not to simply call with very weak hands.
Don’t be a “Calling Station”
So called “calling stations” (players who constantly call) in poker are almost always losing players in the long run, and frequently give up their chips because of their curiosity and lack of skill. You never want to be a calling station in poker, but you do want to realise who they are so you can take money from them in the most valuable way possible. And that is simply value betting your decent hands in average increments, to keep them in the hand rather than pushing them off a hand too early.
The fundamental tenet here is that you want to be the aggressor in the game, but you want to do it against the correct opponents with the correct hands. If your Ace King misses the flop, you should probably still do a continuation bet to keep the pressure on, but after that, you should be using profiling information to decide what to do beyond that.
If your hand is worth calling, it’s probably better to raise!
Final piece of advice – if your hand is worth calling, it’s probably better to raise! If you call, you can only win if you have the best hand. If you raise however, you can win either by having the best hand, or by your opponent folding – that means you double your chances of winning the hand!
