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Adjusting Your Play - The Tight Game

 

One key factor in becoming a good poker player is the ability to adapt your game to each situation and move your game up a couple of gears when needed as well, This is because a certain style that you have adapted may be very profitable against a select number of opponents yet that same style could have you leaving the table with great loss against another set of opponents.

Simply if you can learn to read the players you are against and adapt your own game to counter there styles then you will become a lot more profitable at a lot more tables, but how do you know which style to play?

Obviously you have to sit and observe your players and what they are doing you need to try and identify whether the table is mainly loose open play or tight play you, normally you try to adopt the opposite tactic so if your table is playing loose you yourself should tighten up and wait for a "premium hand" on which to play where as if you are on a tight table you should loosen up your own play a little and raise a bit more with "speculative hand"

Adjusting for the tight game

Many players believe that there is not a lot of money to be made In a tight game of poker and the money is with the loose players however this is not the case as a tight player is just as exploitable as his loose counterparts, all be it in a different way.

Tight players by nature will only play there best hands this means that they will fold a lot, it is this that you can use against them to yield a profit from the game.

It is possible to steal small pots from tight players all day long but be cautious if you are to aggressive in your style a tight player will sit and sit and hit you only when holding a premium hand, potentially costing you a lot of chips. I would advise that in a tight game you only raise with speculative hands so you still have a chance of hitting a flop under a call and I recommend that you still apply pot odds to your raises. It may seem good to steal small pots all day long but if you do not do this with some knowledge behind you eventually you will start loose money with the tight players hitting you big when they do catch a hand.  

However as a word of caution not all tight players will crumble under the slightest raise unless they believe them selves to have the nuts, there was a couple of years a go a new breed of player that was conceived in the online poker world the Tight-aggressive player these players tend to have a good understanding of Position and other aspects of the game that allow them to switch from a tight to a loose game in the same hand these are the players that you need to be wary of as they will monitor how you play and make there move to maximise there own profits

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