You are at the flop with a solid hand, now what? Postflop play is the weakest aspect of most poker players' games. Postflop as preflop knowing who you are playing against and adapting your play to combat them is essential.

Overall there are 4 main types of poker player, tight-loose and passive-aggressive. In the free poker and online nanostakes (.02/.05 blinds), each of these player types make a few key mistakes. In this free online poker lesson we'll look at how to exploit the Loose-Aggressive style player.

The LAG - Loose Aggressive aka the Maniac
These are the guys who are betting and/or raising way too often. 33% of flops long-term).

The trick to playing these guys is to realize that their range in any given spot is extremely wide. What this means is that if you flop second or third pair, calling their bets and raises is often hugely profitable because they're betting repeatedly with absolutely nothing so often.

They're somewhat difficult to play against because it takes a lot of guts - calling 3 streets (each a relatively large bet, usually) with third pair weak kicker is not particularly easy, but you have to realize that against some of these guys third pair is basically the same as top pair and so you just shouldn't fold.

But with that said do not universally call any pair against an LAG as there are degrees of maniac and while the true LAG bets and raises 100% of the time some do not.

Yet another thing to note is that your draws (and therefore, suited and connected hands preflop) rocket in value since if you hit your draw you will often get paid off bigtime (this is a concept known as implied odds, but I won't elaborate on this until a later article).

Pair hands go up in value and draws go up in value as a rule against LAGs. Pay attention at the tables to get a good feel for a player's range (is he a true spewing maniac, or is he just hyper-aggressive) and try to make these profitable “thin” (not super easy) calldowns against these players.

In general, you should also be waiting for the river to raise these players with your strong hands because they're going to be betting all 3 streets anyway; you lose lots of value if you raise flop or turn and get them to fold.

And keep in mind there are degrees of player styles. Some styles share traits with the most closely related group, TAGs with LAG bits, TPs that lean toward LPs and so on, so keep your wits about you and adjust your play per opponents using player style models as a tool to guide observation and decision making.

Learning to recognize player types and the degree to which a player fits a type isn't easy. Yes, sorry to say, plenty of practice is required though if you really focus on this and keep good game notes it will come faster for you. If you're new to poker do not risk much or even any cash as you learn.

Start of with the lowest stakes games or with free online poker games and work up from there. For the big edition of this article which covers all the player styles and adds some further postflop tips see the free online poker site blog at NoPayPOKER.