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FRUSTRATING FEATURES OF TIGHT-AGGRESSIVE GAMES:

Players are good. It is easy to find yourself outplayed.

Experience will count in tight-aggressive poker games. You will be studying your opponents, but they will also be studying you, and they might bet better at discerning your actions than you are at discerning theirs.

Little room for error

A single mistake on your part could make the difference between a winning and losing session.

Tight-aggressive poker players wouldn’t be making the kind of fundamental mistakes (such as playing too many marginal hands for too long) that loose players would be making. There will be much less money going into the pot from poker players who have almost no chance of winning. That means it will be harder to recoup losers.

A Common Mistake

Passivity

It would be easy in these types of games to be intimated into folding hands with which you should have styled the course. Hands that would be nearly worthless in loose-passive poker games because so many poker players would be on a draw would be valuable in tight-aggressive games. Suppose you would be holding an ace and queen and the flop were queen, five and four of different suits. If the next two cards were to match one of the suits on the board, the flush possibility might discourage you from betting in loose-passive game with six poker players vying for the pot. Loose poker players would actually play these kinds of draws. But in a tight-aggressive game, no one would stay just because they will be hoping for two matching cards to make a flush. If you were to have a top pair and top kicker in this situation, place a bet.

Strategy:

You must rethink what it means to have a good flop in a tight-aggressive game. The best flop for your cards might not be the best flop for your wallet.

To illustrate this paradox, you should consider a time Sid had an ace and king,in a loose-aggressive game and flop had come up with three aces. Sid had got action on this hand because a loose-aggressive poker player in front of him had thought he could bluff. The other poker players hadn’t believed him because he had always bluffed and had called his bets. Sid had been in last position so all he had to do was quietly call to blend in with the unbelievers.

This kind of play would never have happened in a tight-aggressive game. If Sid had held the ace and king, and the flop had come up three aces, he would have had a worthless hand. No one would have given him any action. To get action in a tight-aggressive poker game, it would have been better if the flop hadn’t contained an ace. A flop of king, seven and three would have generated more action and he would have still been in a good position. Sid would not have had the lock of all the aces, but if someone had bet into him with a king,he would have had the top kicker. An ace could have still fallen later on and it would have been less likely that the seven or the three would have been a threat, which they might have been in a loose-aggressive poker game where people had played any two cards.

Not only would you have to rethink what it would mean to have a good flop, you would also have to rethink what it would mean to have a good hand. You might be capable of getting away with stealing pots by betting marginal cards, and then you could lose with strong cards. The difference would be that your opponents wouldn’t challenge you unless they would have strong cards.

When your opponents will be weak, they will back down. The attitude, ‘I’ll call to keep him honest’ that would pervade loose poker games wouldn’t exist in tight-aggressive poker games. If your opponents would call or raise, you shouldn’t become confident just because your cards were good this hand, and in a prior hand that you had won, your cards had been weaker. Your strong hands might be losers if tight-aggressive poker players would not respect your bets.

Life Analogy – Investment scams

In recent years, the news had been full of investment scams. All scams have had a common element: inducing herd behavior and then running in the opposite direction. What would make something a scam would be the element of dishonesty. Scam artists have said things they have known to be untrue for the purpose of profit.The direction of the stampede would not have mattered so long as the scam artist would have gone the other way.

For instance:

Pump and dump

The now-classic example is Enron. By use of phony accounting, the top executives would have created huge demand for their company’s stock into which they have sold their shares. By the time the public had realized that their shares of Enron had been worthless, the top executives had cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars.

Trash and stash

This would be the same basic idea, as a ‘pump and dump scam,’ but it would be done in reverse. A notable example had occurred on August 25, 2000, when a college student had concocted a phony press release distributed over the Internet, stating that Emulex wasn’t going to meet earning expectations. In less than an hour, the company’s share prices had fallen sixty-two percent, having wiped away 2.5 billion dollars of market capitalization. Of course the scam artist had shorted shares of Emulex prior to his hoax and had covered his short position with cheap shares he had purchased while the sellers had stampeded.While this had been an extreme example of herd behavior brought on by dishonesty, they had illustrated a truth that had applied to honest investment decisions.

The truth was that you would never have made money when you were a part of a stampede. To profit you would have to be standing apart from the crowd.