3 Common Spots Where Poker Players Aren’t Aggressive Enough

Passivity gets a bad connotation in general, and it’s for a good reason.

Passivity means accepting what happens without active response, initiative or resistance.

Do you think we would’ve gotten where we are as a civilization if we had passively accepted our ancient state of living? Absolutely not. We were aggressive about improving our individual condition, and that desire for prosperity accelerated the improvement in general living conditions in the last few hundred years.

But to achieve that, people had to take risks. They had to have initiative. They couldn’t just accept the situations as they were.

The same is true in poker. You have to have initiative and provide resistance to your opponents’ strategies if you want to profit.

With this in mind, in this article I am going to bring to light 3 situations where I consistently see players playing too passively.

I’ve selected these spots based on both data and personal observation, with some of these leaks happening at stakes as high as 1000NL online.

Let’s get started!

Spot #1 – Not Check-Raising Against Small C-Bets Enough

Flop check-raising is a cornerstone defense strategy, especially when it comes to facing small c-bets.

The only real weapon you have against people that consistently and aggressively c-bet using small sizes is to check-raise a ton. This strategy punishes the thin value-bets and aggressive bluffing that the small size allows for.

Here’s a quick look at how you should be check-raising against a small c-bet on a disconnected board like K84 rainbow:

You should be aiming to check-raise about 14% of the time here. And I specifically highlighted this T7s hand to showcase the kinds of hands that most people are missing from their raising ranges.

To reach this check-raising frequency you need to check-raise with a bunch of hands that are loosely connected to the board via backdoor straight draws and/or backdoor flush draws (like Ac 6c, Th 7h, Jd 7d, Jd Tc etc.) , as well as some of your gutshots, especially ones with a backdoor flush draw.

Now, I am not only arguing for you to start doing this because it’s GTO-approved, but rather because I’ve seen how strong players fail to defend loosely enough after they c-bet small.

This happens because, usually speaking, these small c-bets happen on fairly dry and/or disconnected boards. This forces them to c-bet and call with very speculative hands in order to prevent you from being able to exploit them by denying their equity too frequently.

Moreover, what often happens is that they don’t play a very well-balanced c-betting strategy themselves and they end up betting larger with value hands and thus end up having too many weak hands in the small size. This is not necessarily a mistake on their part, it’s actually quite defensible in many situations, but it is an aspect that you can take advantage of.

Now, there is an even better spot to fire these check-raises against small bets, and that is when the board is more connected and wetter. In those spots, where c-betting larger is often correct, the small size is actually much weaker and they will end up over-folding even more. Think of a board like Jd 8d 4s. A small c-bet there is almost always a hand with a capped value. You can check-raise and over-realize with your bluffs.

If you look closely here, you can see that the solver will mix a ton of strong hands into that 33% pot size (AA, KK, QQ, AJ, KJ, JJ, 88, etc.). That will simply not happen nearly enough in practice, and your opponent will end up with a lot more hands like Qs 6s, 7s 6s, Ks 9c, etc. that will end up folding against a check-raise. Do not let him realize equity like this. Punish him instead.

Spot #2 – Not Probe-Betting River Thin Enough

Now, it’s not all about bluffing you see. You can also be too passive with regards to extracting value.

Consider the following scenario. You defended the Big Blind against a Button open-raise with 8s 5s. The flop came Jd 8d 4s. You checked, he bet 75% pot, you called. The turn was the 4c. You both checked. The river came the 6s. 

You should NOT check here.

Now the reason why you shouldn’t check here is because what happens next is that your opponent will create a polarized betting range that will put your 8s 5s into a pure bluff-catching scenario. You will be playing a pure guessing game: is he over-bluffing or under-bluffing?

You have another option here: go for thin value and prevent yourself from facing a big bet.

Recognize that him checking back on the turn greatly diminishes the strength of his range since overpairs and better would continue barreling.

This means that you are holding a hand that is pretty strong, but not strong enough to put a big bet in. You can however bet small.

This way you accomplish two goals:

1. You extract the value – always something we want to do
2. You force him to create a proper raising range on the river – always hard to do

Most players fail to raise correctly on the river, which brings me to the final spot of this article.

Spot #3 – Not Raising River Block-Bets Thinly Enough

This is a mistake I see even at 1000NL online. The average player doesn’t go as thin for value as he should against block-bets.

Let’s quickly take a look at what the solver would do against that block-bet:

Even a hand as weak as JT should be raising here at a meaningful frequency. I don’t remember ever being raised with such a hand. In fact, I often see players just calling with a hand like QJ too.

What does this mean tactically? It means that you have free rein to start betting thinner for value, starting to add hands like 77 and Kd 6d. The whole reason why those hands didn’t want to bet was because they were getting put into a 0 EV scenario too often by the opponent’s aggressive, balanced raising. When that is taken out of the equation, value betting very thin becomes significantly more attractive than checking and hoping you make the right decision after.

Wrapping Up

Aggression wins. It is better to try and fail than to never try and never fail.

Will you make more mistakes by having an aggressive mindset? Yes. But what that also means is that, as long as you have a healthy feedback loop in place, you will learn faster and thus you will earn faster.

Take what’s yours and climb up the stakes.

Till next time, good luck, grinders!

To learn more about where you can use aggression to your advantage, read: 3 Times You Should Bet Big on the Turn (And 3 Times You Shouldn’t).