Concentrate on defence before you learn to attack
You will have heard of the old saying about “attack being the best form of defence” in poker. This is a true but also a very misleading saying. Often it is better to attack than to simply passively defend and as Napoleon used to say “passivity leads to defeat”. But you cannot go blindly lashing out all over the place and to be first able to attack well then you must be able to defend. All successful attacks are based around solid defences; otherwise there is no strong springboard from which to launch the attack.
These principles are found in all fields including football. This is why coaches find it easier to coach defensive tactics than offensive and is also why it is becoming increasingly difficult for superior teams to record huge winning margins unlike in days gone by. This is exactly the same in poker because before you can start launching attacks all over the place then you need to be able to defend well.
So just what is good defence in poker? Well for want of a better word, it is simply to do with folding. When you fold then you are cutting your losses and this is a defensive play in poker. A fold is not geared to winning money but saving money which still adds to your bottom line at the end of the year. Your average poker player simply does not fold enough and so has a weak defence that isn’t watertight. You only have to look at the pre-flop hand statistics from a poker tracker program to show this.
It really doesn’t matter in poker if you are making brilliant plays all the time if you are making huge errors. It does not matter if you launch a successful multi-barrel bluff; these are tactics that are only successful as part of a well rounded game. If you think about this for a second, any fool can bluff in poker. You could teach a novice the rules of the game and if they were aggressive enough then they would win a very high number of pots.
But blind aggression is not a skill in the same way that passive play isn’t. An aggressive poker player is placing more money into the pot which isn’t always a good idea if your opponents are better than you are. So in poker you must first learn to defend and this means folding more than you otherwise feel comfortable doing. If you raise from the cut-off in limit hold’em with A-9 and you are three bet by the button and the flop comes K-10-4 and you lead out on the flop and get raised then fold.
Staying around for one more bet is not good defence. If your opponent has a king or a ten then you are drawing to only three outs and you may even be drawing almost dead. So get your defence right in poker before you even think about attacking your opponents relentlessly.