One of the most common questions that crops up on poker forums around the world is from beginners asking how they should play Texas Holdem. The given answers do vary a little but the resounding choice for most is to play Tight-Aggressive, or TAG as it will be referred to from herein.
TAGs play fewer hands because they are waiting for more premium holdings than their looser counterparts but when they do enter a pot they go at it all guns blazing and do everything in their power to win the hand. The main strengths of playing TAG are two-fold, firstly it is very simple to learn and play and because a TAG will only be playing decent hands, they will have less difficult decisions to make once the community cards are dealt.
Secondly, playing TAG is quite safe as is is difficult to exploit. A good loose-aggressive, LAG, player will be able to outplay a everyone barring a first-class TAG but playing there are very few good LAGs at the micro and small stakes games making TAG the way to go.
One of the biggest mistakes made by those who have just started to play poker online is to play too many hands and play them passively. They have watched high-stakes games taking place or televised poker that is heavily edited and attempt to play a LAG style but fail badly. If they had learned to play a good, solid TAG game first, one that would have taught them the merits of position, hand selection and aggression they would have been able to gradually make the transition to LAG player over time instead of donating their bankroll off in maginal spots.
Some may say the TAG style is boring and compared to a LAG one it is but as a TAG you will endure less variance, less stress at the table and find yourself getting your money in as a good favourite more often than not.
