Playing Against Tight Passive Bonus Whores

If you would have asked me a month ago which aspect of poker would give me the most grief in my return, I probably would have said live games; the reason being that I would not have a lot of opportunity to play in them and would be playing on a very limited bankroll. Apparently I was wrong. I’m readjusting much slower to the swings in poker than I had expected and the tight passive bonus whores at Tony G are the latest to give me fits. I’m not getting killed as I’m even despite last night’s fiasco but I’m not exactly beating the game either. Needless to say I was frustrated by my downswing. Instead of chalking it up to a bad session, I had to torture myself by going through everything to see where I made mistakes and then by looking up strategies for these types of opponents to see if I could choose a better one.

First off, the general strategic advice for playing against tight passive players is to be aggressive pre-flop and on the flop, then to slow way down if they show backbone because they probably have a great hand. This is what I started out trying to do but I got away from it for two reasons that I can surmise. 1) The majority that I’m up against seem to be experienced bonus-whores. What this mean is that despite their tight passive orientation, they aren’t bad players. They recognized that I was being aggressive and adjusted accordingly when I was in hands with them. Thus they limited the amount of damage I could do to them and made it costly to try to steal with weak hands. 2) I got in some tough hands right off the bat like over pairs vs. over pairs and such. I felt like Teddy KGB. I was struggling with my reads. They check call with pocket aces, with flush or straight draws, and with TPTK. I didn’t know what they had. Thus I got frustrated and I started playing more passively. That’s exactly what they wanted me to do.

Next, where was I making mistakes? I think the biggest mistake I was making was in starting hand selection. For a little review, there are a few main factors in choosing starting hands. The first is your relative skill vs. that of the rest of the table. The second is how tight/loose and passive/aggressive the table is playing. The third is folding equity and it is in some ways a combination of the two. Both at Bodog and in live games, I have been playing a loose aggressive style. There is a huge skill advantage separating the majority of my opponents from me. The players tend to be tight enough to not chase with nothing but loose enough to get in kicker battles or to chase without the correct odds. They play the usual strong means weak and weak means strong strategy so they are easy to read. Thus, folding equity is very small in comparison to how much can be made seeing lots of flops cheaply. I brought this strategy to Tony G and failed to adjust when the situation proved differently. The skill advantage is much reduced at Tony G. The players are much tighter and are more passive so you are much less likely to win a big pot. Thus the folding equity is much greater. There is really no reason to see lots of cheap pots because I’m not likely to get paid off when I hit.

So in order to improve I need to do two obvious things. 1) I need to tighten up. I should still play comparatively loose but not nearly as loose as I have been playing. 2) I need to go back to playing aggressively and I need to take notes about who to shut down after the flop against and who I can keep pushing at.

Basically I just need to go back to playing basic tight aggressive poker. Hopefully that will be enough to pull me off the break even line and into the land of profits.