Player Identification

Poker Strategy / Matthew Pitt / 31 October 2011 / Leave a Comment

Passive or Agressive?

There are five main areas to look at so you can use to help you decide whether they are likely to be passive or aggressive.

The modern game of online poker is one that seems to be dominated by those who use poker tracking software, heads-up displays and other statistic providing avenues but what happens if one day these become outlawed by online poker sites or the software fails? How will you identify which players are good, which are bad, who is tight and who is passive? You will have to do it the old fashioned way and observe your opponent's a skill that many of today's players lack.

Many, myself included, often become too reliant on additional software so it pays to play unaided from time to time, to keep your observational skills sharp, just in case your HUD or whatever is not working. There are five main areas to look at so you can use to help you decide whether they are likely to be passive or aggressive. After all, being passive or aggressive are the two major traits you should be using to make your decisions against opponents and the foundations to your attempts to put them on a hand.

The most obvious is to check their stack sizes because passive players are most likely to be sitting with less than a full stack. On a standard table with a 100 big blind maximum buy-in there is no excuse, unless the player is a professional shortstacker, to be sat with less than the maximum buy-in. If you have seen a player lose a pot and not instantly reload give them chance to do so but if there is a player sat there with $43.29 at a $100 max table then he is most likely to be playing with one bullet in his gun and therefore probably playing quite passive.

Limping into a pot is a sure fire sign of someone with passive tendencies. Can you remember the last time you open-limped into a pot or saw a limper in front of you when you were seated on the button and you did not raise? No I did not think so! Limping is a very passive move and players who do this preflop generally continue to play with a high degree of passivity after the flop. Along with limping keep an eye out for players who min-raise both preflop and post-flop. Although some tricky and aggressive players will min-raise, or "click it back," to keep you on your toes, passive players will often min-raise with a very wide range of hands and then check-call or check-fold there way to the river unless they hit the flop or their miracle draw.

Try and find your opponents in other games to see if there is a pattern to their appearance. If a player is seated at eight tables and has 100 big blind stacks or more in each, has been open-raising and even three-betting then you can bet your bottom dollar that he is an aggressive player. This does not necessarily mean he is good, remember that, but he is certainly aggressive. Conversely, a player on one or two tables who is limping away with an odd amount of chips is a good bet for being put into the passive camp.

Finally, look for players who are three-betting, that is re-raising an opponent who has opened the betting with a raise. A player who is habitually three-betting you, especially in position, is going to be on the aggressive side of things but remember passive players will also three-bet you too but with lesser frequency. However, they usually three-bet a non-standard amount, either three-betting far too small or unusually large when they have a monster hand such as aces or kings.

Once you have identified if a player is aggressive or passive you then need to figure out if they are tight or loose and start to put them on a range of hands. But that my friends is an entirely different article altogether!

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