Why is tight-agressive good and loose passive bad?

[ctv1116]

People always say you should play tight-agressive and a loose-passive table is a good table to sit at. Could someone explain the rationale and theory behind this?

[gonores]

Think about it this way...

The oversimplified way to win money in poker is to win more when you are ahead and lose less when you are behind.

Being tight insures that you are ahead of looser opponents more often than not.

Being aggressive insures that you make more money when you are ahead.

Like I said, this is verry simplified, and there are many more reasons to be tight and aggressive, but this is the main theory behind winning at low limit poker.

[Lexander]

What an interesting question. I personally would recommend studying some good books on Poker, but I will throw at least one answer out.

Poker is a gambling game. That is, you are betting money to win money. And success at a gambling game depends almost entirely on one single factor.

You want to make bets where you are more likely to win money than you are to lose money over the long term.

The classic example is the coin flip. If you can set it up so that somebody is paying you $2 for every Heads while you are paying only $1 for every Tails you are in pretty good shape. If you flipped the coin a million times you can pretty much be assured that you would win about $500,000. You probably would't win exactly that much, but you would be 'in the ballpark'.

The same principle applies in Poker. You are trying to set things up so that you typically win more money than you lose. That involves two basic ideas.

First, you want to pick your spots. This is why you play 'Tight'. Tight play is all about not bothering to make a bet all those times where you are likely to be losing money whenever you do. It turns out that in Poker people have figured out that in most games that means folding most of the time. You are picking your spots.

Loose players do the opposite. They make bets where they are in general losing money. The more players you are facing that are doing this, the more money they are losing. In general, the more money other people are losing the more money you will be able to make.

Aggression is in general about two basic things. In all honesty, an aggressive player is usually thinking about many things all at once, but two ideas in particular are important. First, aggression is about raising the stakes (putting in more bets). The higher the stakes, the more you stand to win. Second, the more players that fold because of your aggression, the more likely you are to win the pot.

Aggressive players are constantly putting in more bets, raising the stakes and attempting to get people to fold their hands. Passive players are just 'going with the flow', simply calling bets and seeing what happens. You don't give yourself a chance to win a big pot this way, and you opponents rarely fold to your passive play.

It is the combination of the two that makes tight-aggression work. Playing tight means that when you do play you are usually doing so with a better hand and a better chance to win than your opponent. Playing aggressive means that you are making your opponent pay you more money when you win (it also means that you sometimes win when you normally wouldn't because your opponents are hesitant to call a lot of raises).

The reverse is true for a loose-passive player. This player is playing many hands that should be folded and isn't doing anything to make it difficult for you at all. When they have the winning hand they aren't making enough money and when they have the losing hand they are paying too much.

By playing tight-aggressive while your opponents are all playing loose-passive you create for yourself the perfect situation. You are sitting around waiting for a situation where you are more likely to win than normal and then you are attacking your opponents to make them pay you more money. Your opponents are all sitting around playing even when they have pretty bad hands and they are paying you for the privilege. Even better for you they aren't raising the stakes whenever they are in a better situation, so you don't lose as much when things go bad.

- Lex

[slavic]

The theory is that to win at gambling you have to have a non-self weighted aproach to the game to insure that you have the best of it.

A self weighted aproach would be something like craps were I play every time betting the pass line and taking the odds. I'm guaranteed to lose over the long run. Well a table full of loose players will lose. In the extreme case lets say they all play every hand to the river, on average they will each win 10% of all hands and they will simply push their money around in the table in a clockwise fashion. The rub on this is that the house will take $100/ hour off the table and all players will lose an average of $10/ hour.

Now let's say you have simply a tight player who will enter only 15% of all pots and will win 7% of all hands. Just by his action of playing tighter alone he should pull a profit of 165BB per 100 hands. Those numbers are based on a situation that will never exist and I doubt a 7% win rate is maintainable with 100% callers but you get the idea.

The aggressive side of the eguation does two things for you, it increases your win rate by giving you multiple ways to win, and it increases the number of overall bets you win. Neither is bad.

The downside of this is it's a boring, and un-nerving way to play the game. Your in few pots and when your in them your pushing narrow advantages, the whole concept is un-natural. Welcome to the forum.

For a full treatment on non-self weighted gambling see "Gambling Theory and Other Topics" by Mason Malmuth

[Webster]

In very simple terms.

loose/passive - you have a machine gun and bullets are flying right and left hitting some targets and missing many - all those bullets cost money and you kill very few enemy.

Tight/aggresive - you are a sharp shooter. you pick and choose your victim with your golden bullet. You shoot very few times but always hit. Many victims, few bullets!

[spamuell]

Check out these two incredible posts by rharless:

The EV of different playing styles

The EV of different playing styles - Part Two

I know this doesn't explain why but you've already had some pretty detailed replies about that - this certainly shows that it is the case.

[LetsRock]

Basically, playing tight-aggressive, you're giving yourself an edge.

By playing many hands, loose players tend to put a lot of bets into pots where they have little chance of winning - they're relying strictly on luck to win. By being passive, they'll rarely collect the most bets possible when they do win, but will contribute the maximum when they lose.

By playing tight, you'll put fewer bets in because you'll only be playing when your cards have a legitimite chance to win (premium cards). By being aggressive, you'll collect more bets on your wins because the loose-passive types will tend to pay you off if they have any chance.

You aren't guaranteed a winning session by playing tight aggressive, but you are givng yourself the best chance to do so and it will create a stage to be a winner over the long haul, which is what it is all about.

[crockpot]

to put it very simply, here are the biggest mistakes that bad poker players make:

- they play hands they should fold
- when they have the best hand, they fail to bet or raise to knock out hands that go on to outdraw them
- when they have the best hand, they fail to bet to collect more money from worse hands that will call

would you want to make these mistakes when you play? notice that this list practically defines a loose-passive style of play.