Playing against a very aggressive opponent.

Against an opponent who raises every pot he is in and bets very strongly on most streets.

Assuming he acts after us

Should we keep to the standard 3x bb preflop or should we raise maybe 5-10 BB?

This way his range is narrowed prefolp and we get to fold more concelable hands.

If we have position, should we routinely reraise him as long as there are few if any other limpers in the pot. This again is intended to cool his action, narrow his range and allow us to play post flop with more confudence.

Obviously we cannot make this play all the time as it would then give him huge implied odds. So if its a wise thing to do.. how often should it be done?

This is how I would play it if I was playing live.

I think most players would prefer to be on his left. I would prefer to be next to him on the right myself.

Now the question. Do you want to get him to stop his actions or use him to try to get some monster pots?

Me personally would not raise preflop to not give away my hand strength. This depends on how others are acting towards the aggressive player. Are they tightening up or loosening up? If they are loosening up I might re raise with aces or kings.

I will then go to the flop for hand analysis. But it takes laying down some big hands to play it my way.

But I love being in this position live. It allows me to let him suck people in on the flop with a bet and when I have a dominating hand, that player just makes the pots that much juicier. Problem with my style is I do end up folding a lot of high pairs including k's and a's or two pairs on the flop depending on how loose the others loosen up against the over aggressive player.

There is someone in my local game who is like this, and I'm at the point now where I can pretty consistently beat him. I used to try to raise preflop, but I have since developed a new strategy: Limp with good hands, narrow your range. You will lose a bunch of small pots and then far more than make up for it with one monster hand once you hit something.

My advice

in these situations is to ride out the storm so to speak. If you are fortunate to get a huge hand like AA and KK during this stupid all in tiraid then you will be fortunate to double up most of the time. Otherwise just let him donk off his chips which is inevitably what will happen or even better maybe you will get moved to another table.

I agree, reraising aggressive opponent is the best strategy to deal with them.
If you make a reraise with a good hand ( like AQ) against the aggressive opponent and he only calls, you know you have the better hand.
The problem is: it's very hard to read the hand of your opponent.

David Pisch said:

I agree, reraising aggressive opponent is the best strategy to deal with them.
If you make a reraise with a good hand ( like AQ) against the aggressive opponent and he only calls, you know you have the better hand.
The problem is: it's very hard to read the hand of your opponent.

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I'd advise against this strategy. Even bad players who raise a lot will get big hands every now and then. If you reraise them frequently, you'll lose a lot on big hands and only win small or medium pots.

I agree also.If u reraise u can find yourself gettin hit of the top with another reaise by the aggresser.Limping is what i would do and that keeps the odds in your favor to get the monster hand.

As others have said above, I'm not keen on increasing my pf raise size due to the LAG, especially if I've tightened my range due to the LAG - I don't think this will get action on the hands you want to have action on.

I like silver's limping strategy if you're acting OOP to the LAG in FR.

I also like 3betting these guys as you suggest - but I'm much more biased to value 3bet rather than light 3bet in this situation - for the reasons you gave. One additional reason - they'll tend to call with some very speculative hands, and if the board is dry or you hit it hard, you can many times take the lead postflop.

Any thoughts on 6max vs. FR? In FR, I'll tend to tighten up a bit and not have much of a problem, since my FR game is relatively tight anyhow.

In 6max, though, it forces me out of my comfort zone to tighten up that much - kind of defeats the reason I play 6max. Obviously, re-raising premium hands against a 30/25 is appropriate, or getting tricky and limping OOP can work wonders, but I don't like to wait that long in a 6max game.

The things I've been thinking about in 6max for this situation are:

• Somebody playing 30/25 is playing a lot of speculative hands - so hitting a top pair on the board is generally good - I hate playing passively in these hands, but I end up doing a lot of calling down in this situation, because I don't want to be re-raised out of the pot unless I see a definite sign of weakness. I really hate being this passive, but I've gotten pushed off of TPGK several times when trying to be the aggressor.
• If a LAG shows down a weak holding, or gets pushed off a pot, I think they tend to tighten up as a result, especially postflop. Playing back at a LAG who just got pushed off of two pots in the last two orbits seems like the right thing to do.
• If the LAG keeps up pace for more than 3 orbits and nobody pushes him out of a pot or forces him/her to sd a mediocre holding, I go find another table.

Do those sound reasonable?

With a really good hand,I think you have to 3-bet him to make sure you make it heads up. One mistake I`ve seen made is that you sometimes forget there are other people playing at the table too and you focus too much on beating just one guy. By allowing a multi-player flop with a big pair, you`re allowing someone a shot to nail that flop with his lesser hand. I sat with a very aggressive guy directly to my left at Harrah`s the other night and re-raised him twice with big pairs and he folded in a heartbeat both times. But I don`t think compromising your starting hand selection is wise either. It`s a really tough situation that i know I don`t handle well and need work on.