You’ve arrived at the flop with a decent hand but what do you do next? Postflop play is the weakest aspect of most poker players’ games. Postflop as preflop knowing who you are playing against and adapting your play to combat them is essential.

Overall there are 4 main types of poker player, tight-loose and passive-aggressive.

In free online poker micro stakes (.02/.05 blinds), each style of player tends to make certain key errors.

In this free online poker games article we focus on postflop play against the Tight Aggressive type opponent.

Tips on how to defeat the Tight Aggressive Player (TAG) Style

In microstakes games, these are generally the most solid opponents you’ll face, but thankfully they’re also pretty rare.

Tight aggressive is the way that you should aim to play as well and by virtue of this fact you should try to avoid getting into pots with other TAGs where possible.

A standard TAG player will be opening reasonable ranges preflop, typically for raises, and they’ll generally be the postflop aggressor as well.

They’ll be cbetting pretty wide but closing down on later streets a fair amount and they are most unlikely to spew off their stacks by check-raising or betting down with nothing.

That said, they also won’t be calling down with their weak pair hands (think second pair and often top pair hands) or draws (without proper odds.

They’ll just be generally getting out of the way OOP (Out of position) when they have nothing and playing a solid style IP (In Position) that’s hard to exploit centered around playing solid hand ranges and betting often for value and to get folds out of other tags and tight-passive players.

They don’t get out of line too much. The way to profit out of these guys (when IP) is to cbet flop wide (you’ll get a lot of folds) and to generally slow down if you’re raised.

When you’re Out Of Position you are limited to check-raising flop and turn wide, though it’s best not to do so with weak hands against TAGs especially in micro stakes as varaince will work against you and lead to a lot of nasty wipe outs.

TAG is the way you should aim and practice to play, it’s solid and hard to exploit, stay solid unless you have a strong reason to do otherwise, choose your moments and you will get a lot of profit from the mistakes of others.

And keep in mind there are degrees of player styles. Some styles share traits with the most closely related group, TAGs with LAG bits, TPs that lean toward LPs and so on, so keep your wits about you and adjust your play per opponents using player style models as a tool to guide observation and decision making.

One thing you have probably realised by now is that learning to spot and use player styles is not an exact science.

You need to practice your game plenty though for some of you it will come faster than others. If you’re new to poker do not risk much or even any cash as you learn.

Kick off by playing micro stakes or free online poker games and slowly work your risk levels up.

For the big edition of this article which covers all the player styles and adds some further postflop tips see the play free poker online blog at NoPayPOKER.

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