How to Handle Aggressive Players

Here is the scenario. You are playing in a nice friendly poker game. Everybody at the table is smiling and joking and all of you are having a good time.

Two of the players pick up their chips and leave the table. Two new players replace them. They obviously know each other and they immediately try to take over the table by playing an aggressive game of raise, re-raise every hand.

That can be a jarring change. How do you handle such players?

I relish such players. They are easy to beat.

Some players get uncomfortable when the table takes on an aggressive turn. They are intimidated by such play and back off from the raises. This is precisely the wrong approach to take.

The other evening, a couple of super-aggressive players tried to use this tactic to seize the action in a game I was playing at Talking Stick Casino. The instigator of the action was a young blond woman in her late 20s. I had seen her around previously and knew about her reputation for playing aggressive poker.

As soon as she sat down, she wanted to increase the limits of the game. The other players shrugged and said that was okay by them. I said no. The standing rule is that if one player opposes increasing the game limits, it doesn't happen. She was irked but didn't object to my objection.

Instead she and the other player who had sat down next to her went on a raising rampage, capping the raises at four and building up the pots.

I simply bided my time until I got a good hand. Then I allowed them to raise to their heart's content -- adding the fourth raise to cap the betting myself.

I scooped the pot with a straight and added considerable chips to my pile.

The trick is to play only really good hands and stay away from the hands with medium value. When two players who know each other get into a raising war, it generally means that one of them is super-strong. If the game is Omaha High-Low, which we were playing, that person is either strong high or low.

The two super-aggressive players stayed at our table until they lost two more giant pots. Then as mysteriously as they had appeared, they picked up their chips and left.

I smiled and said, 'Now we can get back to playing poker.'

One of the other players, an older woman, said, 'Right on!'

Author: Geno Lawrenzi Jr.

(Geno Lawrenzi Jr. is an international journalist, magazine author and ghostwriter and poker player who lives in Phoenx, AZ. He has published 2,000 articles in 50 magazines and 125 newspapers. If you want to share a gambling story or book idea with him, send an email to glawrenzi@gmail.com ).