You have managed to get to the flop with a good hand but what next? For most of us postflop play is the weakest part of our game. Postflop as preflop knowing who you are playing against and adapting your play to combat them is essential.

You will come up against 4 primary styles of poker player, tight or loose and passive or aggressive. In the free poker and online nanostakes (.02/.05 blinds), each of these player types make a few key mistakes. In this free online poker lesson we’ll look at how to exploit the Loose-Aggressive style player.

The LAG – Loose Aggressive aka the Maniac
These are the guys who are betting and/or raising way too often. 33% of flops).

The key to beating them is knowing that their range in any situation is very wide. What this means is that if you flop second or third pair, calling their bets and raises is often hugely profitable because they’re betting repeatedly with absolutely nothing so often.

They can be hard to play as you need some guts at times to make calls against their quite large bets with a 3rd pair weak kicker, but against LAGs 3rd pair is pretty much the same as top pair so you don’t need to fold.

That doesn’t mean to always call down any pair against these players (because there are varying degrees of maniacs; some players will really be betting and raising 100% of the time while others are betting and raising too often but not extremely so).

One other thing to note is that your draws (and as a result, connected and suited hands preflop) go way up in value because if you get the draw you may frequently get paid off bigtime (this is a concept known as implied odds, but I’ll leave that subject for now and cover it later.).

So ultimately against these players pair hands go up in value and draws go up in value. To decide if he a major crazy maniac or simply very aggressive, pay close attention at the table to get a feel for the player’s range and aim for those profitable thin calls against LAG players.

In general, you should also be waiting for the river to raise these players with your strong hands because they’re going to be betting all 3 streets anyway; you lose lots of value if you raise flop or turn and get them to fold.

Do always remember that there are levels of player types. Some TAGs are almost LAG, some TPs are almost LPs, etc, so you have to adjust your play to your individual opponents, these player types are just a tool to help you do that.

Learning to recognize player types and the degree to which a player fits a type isn’t easy. You need to practice your game plenty though for some of you it will come faster than others. In your early poker days be sure not to risk very much if any money while you learn.

Kick off by playing micro stakes or free online poker games and slowly work your risk levels up. For the main large version of this lesson where all the 4 styles are covered along with some extra postflop methods get over to the free online poker site blog on NoPayPOKER.

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