Firing multiple barrels in no limit Texas hold em
As your sophistication increases in no-limit Texas Hold em then you will be aware of just how important aggression is in this form of poker. So when you become aware of the importance of aggression then one very important factor comes into play. Aggression needs to be managed and used responsibly because aggressive poker means that you are placing more money at risk. Aggression means betting, raising and re-raising and betting several streets if you get called.
So the natural follow on to this is for certain players is to take these principles to an extreme and blindly bet and raise. If you have ever struggled against an aggressive player or an overly aggressive player then you are likely a player who has strong biases towards tight play or your game is not as strong as you would like to believe. So mismanaged aggression is a serious problem for players who are not skilled enough to know when to be aggressive and when not to be!
You will have no doubt have heard of the term selective aggression either by reading poker books or looking at poker websites. But yet what this means is often lost on many players. Let us look at firing multiple barrels in no-limit Texas holdem as an example. If you raise pre-flop and get called by a player who has position on you in a heads up scenario and you fire a c-bet which gets called and then you fire further bets on the turn and river then you had better have a good reason for doing so.
Against a tougher and better class of opponent then you will be facing a serious problem. These opponents will be better bankrolled and so will be able to call you down lighter than perhaps other players may do. Also if you are doing this blind then you may be trying to bluff a known calling station for all you know. So blind aggression is not necessarily good poker play and in the wrong circumstances then it can be disastrous. This is for one simple reason, this is because you are risking and always are risking far more money than you stood to gain at the outset.
If you raise to steal the blinds in a NL200 game and you raise to $7 then you risk $7 to win $3. If the big blind calls you then there is $15 in the pot. If you bet the flop and make it $10 and the big blind folds then your total risk has been $17 to make $8. At every stage of the hand you are facing a situation where the amount that your stack increases should you win the pot is far smaller than the amount that you lose if your multiple barrel bluff fails. What this means from a gambling proposition is that as the aggressor then you are constantly taking odds on in betting terms. This means that to do this that your strike rate of pots won must be very high and to attain that level requires not just skill but complete knowledge of the situation and that cannot be achieved betting blind.