Understanding Aggression

A couple things right off the bat
1. You don't need >2pair to win
2. Two more cards come after the flop. One pair and high-card hands can improve.

The answer to your questions lies in hand-reading. You consider all the action so far, you look at the board, and you define a range of hands that your opponent could reasonably hold. If you can do that, it becomes very clear when to bet, and when not to bet.

Get in that habit, every street of every hand, ask the question: What is my opponent's range? What's the most EV action?

Another suggestion, stop sweating things that are supposed to happen. If you have two pair betting into a range that contains top pair, flush draws, and sets....sometimes the guy is gonna have a set. You need to just shrug that off and say "well, that was one of the possibilities.". If you're posting threads asking "How can I avoid the traps?" then it's a mindset problem. Not a poker problem.

Looking at it as gross odds is a bit misleading, because not all pre-flop hands are going to see the flop unless you're playing a bomb pot. The odds of anyone having 2p on a T62 is much lower than the odds of someone having 2p on a KQ9 board in a raised pot. With a top 35% range, the odds of 1 player hitting 2p on T62 are 0%, while on a KQ9 it's almost 7% and obviously the latter board has ton more hands that straights or pair + SD type of hands.

I don't worry so much about "getting trapped". So what if someone occasionally check calls with the nuts? You're just going to lose those hands and that's ok. The benefit of them trying to "trap" you is that you frequently get the option to get a free card. They are letting you decide how big the pot should be. That's a powerful tool when used properly.

A few of the key things I work on:

* Consciously identifying what hands I want free cards with. I think a mistake I used to make way too frequently was just auto-betting, then I'd meet resistance and be sitting there with a good hand or a good draw that performed great in a medium-sized pot, but now is in a pickle with no good options. I saw a few articles from Uri Peleg who takes an approach of considering how big of pot your exact hand "wants" to play. I've never bothered paying for anything from him, but on the surface I think it's a helpful way of thinking. The main mistake passive players make is they allow the aggressive player to dictate the size of the pot. So take actions that steer the pot to a size appropriate for your hand.

* Realizing that not everyone is me. I used to call way too often, convincing myself that people who haven't bluffed all day suddenly decided to bluff me. They didn't. They aren't adjusting. They sat there thinking "I'm going to wait for a monster hand and double up against this donkey" And they finally got their hand. So don't pay them. When a player you have been pushing around suddenly gets aggressive, more often than not they hit their hand. Make the nitty fold. Often, the best part about taking the aggressive action is that Vs will tell you if they are strong. When they tell you - believe them until you have good reason not to.

* Have a plan. When you bet the flop as a bluff, know whether you are going to double or triple barrel with this hand on certain types of runouts. If you bet this flop and get called - what kind of hands are you against? Are they going to be immovable hands, or hands that you can push off? What hands are you trying to get to fold? That will dictate both the size and the number of streets you try betting.

* Size your bluffs appropriately. One of the more transformational things for me has been an idea from HH - the best bluffs are those that get called twice and get a fold on the river. Rather than blasting away trying to get a FD to fold vs Vs who are never folding a FD, make a bet that you expect V to call with a lot of hands that will surrender on the river. Try to get called by 2nd pair or TPWK. Then size your river bluff to target the hands that will reasonably fold and lose the minimum to the hands that are probably snapping off a jam. I used to be guilty of "caveman poker", just bashing people over the head with big bets until they gave up. Most of my effort now is geared toward trying to optimize my bet sizes and recognize when to go with a surgical bluff and when to pull out the big club.

Low stakes opponents tend to have an inflection point after which they only continue with strong hands. So oftentimes you want to bluff aggressively right up to that point, then shut down with everything but your value hands. Most often this means betting big on the turn a lot to steal the pot, but shutting down if you're called because then they tend to "have it, " so you're just giving away money if you bet again on the river. At higher stakes they're more likely to overfold river and less likely to overfold turn as much. These are generalizations and you need to make reads on individuals.

There are also tricks to get your opponents to give away the strength of their hand. One such trick is to bet small on the flop. Oftentimes this will induce a raise with the top of your opponent's range. If they only call they're usually capped and that's a green light to bomb away on the turn.

Now obviously the above is a major simplification and there is more nuance than that. For example most opponents more reliably raise their strong hands into a small bet on dynamic, draw-heavy boards, whereas they might still slow-play more often on dry flops.

Other opponents just love to trap even when you bet small. Against those types you don't want to bet as aggressively with bluffs, but instead exploit them by realizing your equity and getting to showdown cheaply in spots where they should have won bigger pots.

Anyway this is a broad topic but those tips are a good start.

In many ways that's just a hazard of the strategy, but I've found that in many of these situations during the after-action review that in many cases I was probably betting much larger than necessary to bluff the hands that were bluffable.

In game, did you consider a set as a part of Vs range and decide to bluff anyway because you believed there was enough bluffable hands to offset it? Or was it just caveman poker, I'm in a situation let me try to bash my way out?

The former is unavoidable and it could have been a good bluff that is just going to run into a stone wall 10% of the time. You can go home, count the combos and determine if the bluff was good enough to be EV+ given your assumptions. If you are just plowing ahead and don't expect sets in their range, then you want to look to recalibrate and figure out what clues you might have missed or what assumptions were wrong.

Basically just hand read, be aware enough to identify when a stealing spot comes up, and also be on the ball enough to act in these spots.

Here's an extremely minor spot a ran into the other day, and even though I identified it, for some reason I was on auto-pilot and didn't act on it (which still irks me a ~week later in a meaningless pot).

A couple of limps. I complete the SB with 76dd.

4 or 5 ways to A98cc flop. I have the stoopid and perhaps dirty end of an OESD, and I check. It checks around.

Kr on the turn.

Right away I identify this as a stealing spot. No ones is checking an Ace+ on a drawy flop as they as scared shitless about being outdrawn. LP players might even stab with 9x/8x. The only people that could be slowplaying are EP players looking to check/raise, but that's just me and the BB. The K is very unlikely to have made someone two pear (K9/K8, really, ok, maybe soooted?). I can most definitely attempt to steal this pot and meanwhile have equity too.

But I'm tired and on auto-pilot and just check. As soon as I check I realize I've missed my opportunity. Turns out someone else had a better draw than me and ends up winning the pot with T high, but I could have easily stolen this pot with a double barrel on the turn/river and it was obvious it was there for the taking.

Basically, just don't go blindly aggro betting into the void. Pay attention and keep your eyes peeled for spots where pots are legit up for grabs, and then make sure you follow thru with a plan that makes sense once you identify those spots. But wait for the spots, don't force it, imo.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Oftentimes the good bluffing opportunities are spots where you can identify that only a very narrow portion of their range is likely to be able to continue vs your bluff. Statistically it's unlikely they will have those hands, but sometimes you just run into the top of their range. You might be bluffing in a spot where you need to get 50% folds to profit, and your opponent might be folding 70% of their range. So in the long run your bluff will be profitable. However when you get called they're snap calling with something very strong like a set. That doesn't feel great, but it doesn't necessarily mean your bluff was bad in the long run.

Another thing you said here caught my attention. You said when you get called and are beat, "It’s never value being beat by better value, it’s me trying to bulldoze with nothing because I can usually get a fold."

That's a clear sign that you're not value betting thin enough, that is if you're never value-owning yourself. Ignoring the possibility of a check raise, if your opponent will either call or fold vs your river bet you should be value betting any time your hand will be winning more than 50% of the time when called. It's a common leak to check back with hands that should be value betting out of fear that you may be beat. You can (and should) be value betting in situations where you will sometimes be beat, but usually when you're called your hand is good.

Just to build on this, plus the thread title:

Looking at the thread title and the OP, I think the clearest, most helpful thing I could add would be this:

Aggression is not just about bluffing.

The fundamentally most important reason why we should be aggressive is because we want our opponents to call our value bets with worse, not because we want them to fold to our aggression. Bluffing is only important when our opponents are folding more than we would like.

On a strategical level, when you're playing a bunch of loose-passives, there's nothing wrong with always shutting down when you have total air. You make it back up by increasing your value betting with more hands, and occasionally semi-bluffing in position in spots where you sometimes (but not always) take a free card later in the hand instead of double barreling.