Poker Playing Styles

Poker players develop betting personalities, and depending on which personality type they take on can mean the difference between taking that monster pot, or catching a hook in the mouth, you lousy fish. There are two main styles and four categories of poker playing that players fall into.

Style One: Loose Play

Loose players are those guys that are always throwing away their money, paying to see everything, and seem to have a pretty strong "It's only money" attitude. And that's great when you're donating to a charity, but not if you're trying to win a poker game. Loose players will almost never fold a hand; no matter how good or bad they are, they'll try to play them.

Style Two: Tight Play

Tight poker players are the opposite of loose poker players - obviously. While a loose player will hold onto their cards come hell or high water, a tight player will fold their hands somewhere around 80% of the time. This is because, unless they're confident that their cards have a good chance of winning, they aren't willing to take the risk. This is an ideal way to play poker.

Passive & Aggressive Poker Playing

As well as being tight or loose, poker players can be further categorized as "passive" and "aggressive." This deals with how a player bets on their hands, whether they're stingy (passive) or wild (aggressive) with their chips. It takes a lot to get a passive player to loosen the purse strings, but when they do, you can be sure they've got something good.

Unlike passive players, aggressive poker players will raise on anything. And believe it or not, this makes them dangerous: you never know if they have a good hand or a bad hand, because either way they're shovelling the chips into the pot.

By combining these characteristics with the the two possible styles you come up with the four most common types of poker players: loose-passive, tight-passive, loose-aggressive and tight-aggressive. The ultimate goal is to become a tight-aggressive player.

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