Texas hold'em poker is a game of balance. You have to pick and choose times when you will act aggressively and times when you act tight. Choosing the right circumstances for each of these actions is critical.

You may be thinking you should decide on how to play the hand simply according to the pocket cards your dealt. The truth is there are more factors to consider, and if you only play your hands according to what your starting hand is your play will be predictable. You may do well for a while playing this way, but as soon as you encounter a good texas hold'em player you will soon be taken advantage of and repeatedly so.

The way to combat this is to switch your play up. Don't always call or raise the same amounts or the same relative amounts. Mix it up. Sometimes just call preflop on the pocket cards of high starting hand strength, and other times raise with low pocket pairs to keep your opponents from having too much confidence in guessing what your pocket cards might be in any given situation. This is what you want. If your opponents feel like your play is too erratic to wager a guess then you have a good chance of stealing some pots. In the same general concept by alternating between aggressive and tight play you can maximize this strategy.

So the only thing is really when should you play aggressively and when should you play tight. First let me say you shouldn't aim to play 50% of the time aggressively and 50% of the time tight. You should play more like 90% tight. The reason for this is the more hands you play aggressively the more times you are at risk of losing a large portion of your chips, but more importantly it loses its potency the more you do it. By this I mean if you play aggressively too often then opponents will stop letting you steal pots and will want to call to "teach you a lesson", and its less believable the more you do it. The chances a player keeps getting dealt pocket cards of great starting hand strength are not high, and even novice players know this so you must use aggression sparingly. This is true even if your pocket cards are of great starting hand strength you still have to keep you aggression limited so that you can achieve maximum effectiveness.

There is a school of thought that over aggression can be a good thing. Again it has to be used carefully, but if you purposely make overly aggressive bets a few hands in a row in hopes that you will be dealt pocket cards of good starting hand strength when someone chooses to call you on it. Often times in these situations a pocket pair can be very good. You can fire right back and eliminate a player whom you put on tilt just by making some overtly abusive bets. Keep in mind good players will sit back and wait to get pocket cards of high starting hand strength to bust you with so you can only use this type of tactic at the start of the poker tournament or when you get moved to a new table. This is a tactic that should be used extremely carefully as it can quickly backfire and send you out of the poker tournament early.

Now you may start to think well it seems aggression is the only way to get ahead. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is in the selectiveness of your play that you gain the advantage. Limiting yourself to pocket cards of starting hand strengths that you feel you can win with. In doing so you will conserve chips on starting hands that will probably not pan out so that when your pocket cards starting hand strength is high you have a larger chip stack to work with.

You may also think that playing tight means folding most hands. Though it doesn't in a very basic way lead to this it means more than just folding. If your dealt a pocket pair of kings and the flop contains an ace; tight play would dictate just folding the hand away. This is of course unless you get a read on your opponent that makes you think he doesn't have an ace in his hand. All situations have many factors so it is not wise to make generalizations.

Tight play can also mean rather than raising on your open-ended straight draw or four cards of a flush just calling, and waiting to see if it hits. If it doesn't hit you will have saved a great deal of chips. Often times by just calling you can catch opponents on a bluff and they will keep trying to make larger and larger bets to get you to fold. By just calling you can trap them into the role of aggressor and so when your flush or straight hits you can just make a reraise after the river to extract you final amount.

Texas hold'em poker is not a game of one type of play, and one is not better than the other. Aggressive players will tell you the only way to win at texas hold'em poker is through betting opponents out of hands, and tight players will tell you the only way to win at texas hold'em poker is through patiently waiting for pocket cards of high starting hand strength. The truth is they are both correct, but it is not wise to use only one method. The truth is both methods when used interchangeably achieve their maximum potential.