TAG hand ranges

Categorising someone as a true TAG (tight-aggressive) player generally means you will have played a lot of hands with them – enough to get a good feel for their hand ranges. Players who have a wide gap between the number of hands they play and the number they raise within a cash game are not TAGs – they are some variant of a weak-tight player or fish. True tight-aggressive players play a fairly selective range of hands, very dependent on position, but they will play these hands with reasonable aggression. They will generally enter the pot with a strong holding and very often come in for a raise. This is a fundamental point in understanding how to combat them.

When a TAG player enters the pot, you should have a pretty good idea of his range from most positions. Calling a TAG player out of position (from the blinds) is generally a mistake, as you are unable to exploit an overall weak range as much as other player types. Calling in position is absolutely fine, but your default in heads-up pots from the blinds should be to three-bet or fold.

Bear in mind that good TAG players are aware of position, so be wary of three-betting their early-position raises with hands that are strong but you are not happy getting your whole stack in with (something like T-T or A-J suited). TAGs normally have decent steal frequencies from late position and the small blind in blind battles, so three-betting here is fine to exploit this. It’s probably best not to go after them too much as your strategy will be found out, but raising their late-position raises around 20% of the time will generally yield a good return.

Exploiting TAG fears

While TAG players generally enter pots with strong holdings, they are not as happy playing big pots with marginal and weak hands as other player types. One of the ways of exploiting TAG players is to float the flop and steal on a later street. TAGs will rarely double-barrel bluff and almost never triple-barrel bluff. Out of position you can use floating and bluff-raising turns on scary boards as effective weapons, because it’s in their nature as tight players not to get too involved when boards get ugly and players get aggressive.