Q&A #60: Beating Hyper-Aggressive Limit Games

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Hyper-aggressive limit games can be really frustrating, especially the first few times you play in them. You’re used to people calling your raises and checking to you. In this game, though, people don’t give you no respect. Someone bets, you raise, and it’s reraised and capped by two different people by the time it gets back to you. They have middle pair, flush draws, gutshots, pocket deuces, whatever. They don’t care, they just like raising.

The reason they can be frustrating is that some of your “marginal” hands can feel hard to play. In a normal game, if you’re facing two cold on the turn and all you have is a weak top pair, you can just lay down. But in this game, you just don’t know. Is your top pair good? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Here’s today’s question from Allen,

I’ve been reading your book and site for a while now and it’s amazing stuff! I’ve read SSHE several times. However, I’ve been running into some major problems in some of the limit games I sit in of late. They are much, much more aggressive than the games I’m used to playing in. I’ve having a hard time adjusting my play to deal with them so any pointers on playing in more aggressive games would be great.

For example, I pulled this off the CGTV interactive hand you posted a while back:

“you call, both blinds call and the limpers call. Perfect. The pot is six-handed for two bets each. The flop comes J 8 2 , giving you middle pair. (You have Q 8 .) Everyone checks to turkyjerky, who bets. What should you do?”

The answer is obviously raise due to the pot size (in this example it was 13 bb) and the odds to make a hand. It also increases your winning chances — you want the players behind to fold and facing 2 bets cold there is a much higher chance they will than for one bet.

The problem is when I get into a situation like this it seems I’ll make the raise and the initial better or a player behind me will re-raise or it will get capped by the time it gets back to me.

In this situation how would you deal with a re-raise? There are several guys who I play with that will make this play with a Jx, pocket 6′s or 7′s — hell they could even just have A high. When dealing with players like this how do I adjust? I’m doing great in loose passive games but when the game turns aggressive I just at a loss.

The first rule is to hang on tight.

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