Learn to Play Poker – Position
Once you learn the basics of playing the game of Texas hold’em, one of the first strategies that you will need to comprehend in the game concerns your position in any given hand. After you’ve played a few hands you’ll realize that your relative position at the table changes every hand. That’s because the dealer button moves one position clockwise around the table in order to have a fair distribution of players at the table paying blinds.
Think about position in poker as a direct correlation to the information you have at the table. The more information you have, the better you can adjust in regards to your strategic decision. Having to act early in a hand is harder to play than getting to act later or last because you simply do not know what is going to happen after your turn.
Most hands in poker involve position as a key variable, so let’s look at how a poker table is divided into position. Firstly there is early position which which include the blinds and star just after the dealer button. These are the most challenging to play because you have most or all players to act behind you, without any inclination as to how strong their hands are at this point.
The next three spots clockwise are considered middle position. From here you have seen the action of a just a few players but at least that’s something, because there are less players to act behind you. In late position, or the next 3 seats, most or all of the players have acted behind you and that means you now have a much better idea as to how strong your situation is and you can adjust to what has already transpired at the table.
Now if you notice here the blinds are actually acting last, but that is only on the first round of action. In all subsequent rounds in holdem hands the blinds act first and the dealer button acts last. Since the button has that advantage after the flop, stealing the blinds is a common preflop play, because most good players realize they will be at a disadvantage after the flop. In that sense, the dealer button is the best spot position-wise to be playing a hand juegos de poker.
Since you can envision the positional layout of a table now, let’s look at a hand scenario that changes drastically in regards to position. Let’s say you have T7s (ten and a seven of the same suit) in early position at a cash table and you decide to put in a raise of 3 times the big blind to $3.00. Sure, that’s a little aggressive but totally acceptable. However the player next to you raises it up to $5, then another player raises it yet again to $10 before it comes back to you. What kind of information do you have now? Obviously, you do not have the best hand here and furthermore that player next to you, who originally re-raised you, still has to act after you to decide what to do. He could conceivably reraise yet again, or even go all in. He could fold too, but the point is – you don’t know what will happen behind you, so you don’t know how much this hand is really going to cost you to see a flop. Seeing expensive flops with hands like these is a good recipe for going broke in short order.
On the other hand let’s say you have that same hand at the cutoff (the cut off seat is the seat just before the dealer button position) and there were 4 limpers before you. Now you figure everyone has medium or weak hands that need help on the flop. You could reraise, but with this type of hand you could also get in cheap by limping, and hope to flop a monster hand. These ARE the type of poker en linea hands that can win huge pots so it’s a reasonable strategy to limp, because you can afford to do that many times and still make the play profitable by winning those few big pots when you actually do hit a winner. Also by having multiple opponents in this situation you are far more likely to have action with strong hands.
But in reality, most flops are going to miss you and in consideration of that, the idea is for you to get in cheap and get out the same way. So as you can see, position changed this same hand dramatically. As you get a better feel for playing position effectively, you will realize that playing weak hands from early position is rather much a losing proposition, at least long term.
Position is so important in Hold’em that hands can be won based on that advantage alone, having nothing to do with the cards. If you want to learn more I have a completely free 14 episode video series explaining such strategic concepts in poker.