There is perhaps one overriding factor behind why many players simply fail to make money at poker. Before I go into that then I want to start talking about what I call the evolution of a poker player. This is the process that players go through when they first start to play the game from a complete novice. Let us look at that complete novice first of all in terms of hand selection. Quite clearly then these players struggle to identify the different types of poker hands and more importantly how each can make or lose money. So the bottom line is that they play too many hands and are the classic loose-passive types.

Then if some players decide to work hard enough on their games they then start to acquire knowledge and part of that knowledge is to do with hand selection and especially hand selection based on position. So the next step is reached where players recognise that they then need to play far fewer hands than they were doing. This quantum leaps their understanding of the game and also their results as well. These players then stop being loose-passive and become either tight-passive or tight-aggressive. However the ones who keep working on their game then start to discover how much more aggressive the really big winners seem to be.

So if they have had some success in their usual style of play or they have been reading theory or advice from loose-aggressive players then suddenly their normal tight-aggressive play seems boring and not enough. There is one thing that I absolutely guarantee that you will do at some stage of your poker life. This is that you will either switch to being a LAG or temporarily experiment with it at some stage. However there is more to being a good loose-aggressive player than meets the eye. Most players are simply not cut out to play the style successfully.

Most of the players who play a loose-aggressive style do far worse than when they were playing tight-aggressive! So if you are lucky then you will eventually pull through this stage and hopefully realise that you had the best way of playing at the second stage of your career. You may not have been a very good tight-aggressive player and your post flop skill may have left an awful lot to be desired but at least you were in the right ball park and playing the correct way. We can use the famous bell curve distribution here on whether or not a LAG style would suit you.

If you have ever seen the bell curve in action then you will know what I mean (if you haven’t then Google it). The bell curve is simply a measure of dispersion of results which nearly always centres around a central mass. The overwhelming number of players when using the bell curve to assess LAG ability will fall into several categories. These will be either that they will play the style very badly, just badly, mediocre or reasonably well. The fact of the matter is that very few players will play the style better than they would if they simply played tight-aggressive or play the style excessively well. This is simply because a LAG style is far more difficult to coach and to execute and it is also more difficult to use when multi-tabling……the answer for most people is to simply play far fewer hands.

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