Action Dan Harrington - Bullying The Bully

By “Action” Dan Harrington

IT ISN’T EASY PLAYING AGAINST A SUPER AGGRESSIVE PLAYER. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I enjoy playing against a player that’s weak-passive, into a lot of pots, and just gives me the pots all the time. That’s the kind of player I like playing against. Against aggressive players, I have to play in a way that I’m not necessarily comfortable playing. But a lot of it is just a matter of will. Your will has to be stronger than their will. You have to force them to conform to what’s happening at the table, rather than having them force you to conform.

The best way to fight aggression is with aggression of your own—as long as you’re in the right position. You want the aggressive player to be in front of you. If you have the aggressive player behind you, well, you’re out of luck, because he’ll have position on you most of the time and it’s going to be tough to make moves.

But let’s assume he’s in front of you. When he opens up in middle position, you can adjust your play based on the fact that he doesn’t necessarily have as good a hand as a more conservative player who just opened up in middle position. If you have a hand like K-Q, you probably wouldn’t play that against a raise from a conservative player. You have to have a stronger hand than what your opponent has in order to play from that position, and K-Q doesn’t quite fit the bill. But against an aggressive player, who could be playing garbage, K-Q becomes a good starting hand.

You can choose a couple of ways of playing it. You can call and see if you can use your position to beat him after the flop—but because he’s an aggressive player, he might be able to maneuver and do things against you. So there’s a simple solution to that: Instead of calling, you take a chance and make a decent re-raise, like three times his raise or four times his raise, with the knowledge that (a) you rate to have a better hand, and (b) the aggressive player is not used to having a player re-raise him. Believe it or not, as aggressive as they are, they don’t want to play big pots. They want to play small- to medium-sized pots, manipulate the pots, and be able to outmaneuver you. This way, you’re telling him, You ain’t playing a small pot this time, you’re playing a big pot, and now you’re going to have to call or come back over the top of me.

Now, some of the aggressive players, if you do this too much to them, they’re going to say to themselves, he’s fooling around with me, and they’re going to make a stand. They are either going to call you, and then do something after the flop, pretend they have a hand; or they’re going to raise right away, and then you have to make up your mind whether to call or not.

The only consolation I can give you is, the aggressive player doesn’t want to get into this. So, if you think he’s a better player than you, that’s what you want to do, you want to make him uncomfortable. You do that a few times to him, and believe me, he’ll stop dead in his tracks. Aggressive players just don’t want to fool around with someone that does that to them.

There’s also a third option, besides calling or putting in a substantial raise, and that’s to put in a small raise. If you do this, the aggressive player will typically re-raise you, and since he probably has a weaker hand than normal for a re-raise, you can now carry it to the next level and re-raise him. Of course, you’re running into the risk that, this time around, he does have the good hand. Remember, just because an aggressive player raises all the time doesn’t mean when you get into a raising match with him he can’t have aces. He can have aces or kings, and you’re just out of luck.

Again, playing this aggressively isn’t really my style, and I’m not comfortable with it. But as long as I know the other guy is going to be uncomfortable, then that’s fine—I’m willing to suffer through it to force him to suffer through it.

Dan Harrington won the World Series of Poker Main Event in 1995, and pulled off the astonishing feat of reaching the final table in both 2003 and 2004. His books, Harrington On Hold ’Em Volume I and Volume II, can be ordered through Two Plus Two Publishing.