You won’t always find a bully on your poker table when you’re playing poker, but when it does happen you need to be able to react appropriately. A lot of young poker players pride their poker games around being aggressive. Whether you’re playing poker online or in a casino you’ll run into table bullies. The best medicine for beating a table bully is sitting tight and picking your spots against the player.

What a lot of poker players seem to not understand is that you can win a lot of small pots and it won’t add up to very much. You need to win the big pots that you play in generally in order to walk away from the session up money. If you sit patiently when there is a table bully on your table and pick your spots wisely then you’ll often win the big pots you get into with the player.

One thing that table bullies don’t like is when another player starts calling their bets or re-raising their bets. Of course you need to be really careful when you’re debating about re-raising a bet from an aggressive minded player, but at the same time you can’t leave it out of the equation. As long as you aren’t continually popping up the pot on the player just because of the fact you have him pegged as a fish you’ll be fine. Often table bullies will fold to a re-raise unless they have an awesome hand or the nut draw. A table bully has one style to their game in most cases and that is simply stealing small pots all day long.

If you can manage to steal a couple hands off of the table bully early in your session then you should find that the rest of your session will be a bit better. Often when you take a table bully for a couple hands they will begin thinking twice about betting hands when you’re in them. This will allow you to start seeing some more flops without having to commit a lot of chips into the pot.

One thing you don’t want to do is completely bluff an aggressive table bully because there is that potential that they could re-raise you all-in. If you’re going to make a stand against the bully on your table you need to make sure you have a great hand or at least be calling with a nut draw. Don’t start calling down hands when you have top pair against the table bully very often unless you have a great read that you’re winning that hand. Although table bullies play a lot of hands they can also be holding good hands a lot of the time and burn you if you call down with marginal hands that you would never call down against another opponent.

Beating a table bully isn’t all that hard and you should find that you don’t have any problems doing it if you follow the tips above. The main thing is to remain patient. I’ve seen many players show no patience against a table bully and it has cost them a lot of money. Pick your spots and wait until you have the player in a dominating position before committing your chip stack.