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Your Most Trusted Weapon
One of the most important poker tips that you will ever read in poker literature is to play your position. It never ceases to amaze me how so many players blatantly flout this area of the game. There are numerous reasons why you should play more hands in position and fewer hands out of position and we will get to those in time.
The legendary Doyle Brunson once famously said that if he could have table position all night long then he could beat any no-limit hold'em game in the world without even looking at his cards. This one statement not only highlights the value of table position but it also highlights just how position can be the best weapon that you can have at the poker table.
Let us now look at how table position or the lack of it can affect not just how we play our hands but also how much money we can extract from a particular pot. In this example you have top pair with a decent kicker in a hand where your opponent has flopped a set. You have A-J and your opponent has 3-3 and the board is A-7-3 rainbow.
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The hand is heads up and you are out of position. Here you are totally betting blind when you lead out for a bet when out of position. If you bet and your opponent calls then you have no real information at this stage that your opponent has a strong hand. If you check the turn and your opponent bets then you cannot know if they are betting with a hand or whether they are simply betting because you have checked.
If you bet the turn then if they call again then you are still unsure as to where you stand. But the key factor here is when you check, because you are out of position then your opponent can dictate how much money goes into the pot. Even if you check for pot control then your opponent can deny you this by betting.
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However with table position on your side then you can decide to miss out an entire betting round altogether and this can prevent you from losing an awful lot of chips. If your opponent check-raises you with their set then you can simply fold your hand to this massive show of strength.
When your opponent check-raises then you have seen two pieces of post flop information! You have seen your opponent check and then raise where as in the previous example you have seen nothing. You can also use your table position in other ways as well and I will explain the concept of floating here.
Let us say that you raise from the cut-off with a marginal hand like Q-9 and the button calls you and both blinds fold. The button calls with the 7-6s and the flop comes 10s-5c-2d. Your make a continuation bet in this pot and your opponent calls you. The turn card is the 3c and you check and your opponent bets with the worst hand and forces you to fold.
In this situation it is a combination of you having no hand and getting called pre-flop and on the flop that has led to you making a cautious check. But look at how much worse this position looks when you are out of position and you are having to bet blind into a pot that is escalating.
Your opponent has basically used their superior table position to intimidate you into checking and when you checked you were basically conceding the pot to a good player. You did exactly what your opponent wanted you to do when they called your flop bet. They used the combination of the fact that you were likely to be stealing when you raised from that position and the fact that the flop is unlikely to have hit you.
This one example highlights just how hand strength is diminished when you do not have position on your side and how weaker hands increase in strength when you have position. In the above example, we could take an extreme case of one player in early position having A-K and the other player with position having 3-2.
Now before we continue I am certainly not advocating that you should call early position raises with 3-2 so please do not put this onto your list of poker tips. What I am doing here is merely quoting an extreme example of how hand strength can be severely disrupted by either having or not having position. The flop comes 10-7-4 and the raiser bets.
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This should be a standard fold for the junk hand but look what happens if they decide to get mischievous and call. If the A-K misses the turn then they are going to have a dilemma here. They are now essentially bluffing and if they bet again then they are doing so into an escalating pot with no idea of what their opponent is holding. But look what happens if they are called again and fail to improve on the river.
If they desire to win this pot then they are going to have to launch an even bigger bluff on the river and this takes an awful lot of nerve when you are sitting there with no hand. In general, you need to play certain hands from certain positions. While you would ideally like to play every hand having table position on your side, reality dictates that this will not be possible.
So you will be forced to play hands out of position. Because bad table position can never be eliminated, you can offset your negative position by simply folding more hands when out of position.
Playing fewer hands out of position will mean that you are placed in less difficult situations and you will simply save money by folding more hands than you play. So if you take one poker tip to heart then it is to always pat attention to your table position.
This article was written by Carl "The Dean" Sampson who has been a professional online poker player, poker theorist and writer for eight years. Prior to that he was a blackjack player and has written three books on poker and casino games
