As you start playing poker, you will often hear more experienced players talk about the importance of having position in a hand. If you’re like me, when you first start out, you won’t truly get what the big deal is. Hopefully, after this article, you will and do it without the expense of learning it the hard way.

What Is Position?

There are 2 types of position – absolute and relative. Absolute position refers to where you sit relative to the dealer button for that hand. The closer you are to the right of the button (or if you are the button yourself), the better your absolute position is said to be.

Relative position refers to where you sit relative to certain players. That may mean sitting to the immediate right of a raiser for a particular hand, or sitting to the left of a highly aggressive player or perhaps a bad player.

Absolute Position

Absolute position is the easier of the 2 types of position to understand. Being the dealer, normally called being “on the button”, is the best position to have. The reason it is the best position is because you will have the right to act last on the flop, turn, and river. That right to last action brings several advantages:

1) You get to see how much your opponents like their hands before you have to decide whether to bet, fold, or call. For instance, say you had T9o on the button and the flop is T 6 3. If nobody bet before it was your turn to act, you could be pretty sure that your top pair was good and bet accordingly. If there was a bet, a raise, and a re-raise before your turn to act, you could safely fold. Position helps you get more value from your hands when you are ahead and avoid putting money in the pot when you aren’t sure you have the best of it.

2) You get a more solid sense of the real pot odds you’re being offered. Speculative hands like suited connectors, small pairs, suited small aces, and the like prefer to play against a big field of opponents. They need the extra bets multiple opponents put into the pot to pay for themselves since they don’t improve to a winner all that often. When you are in position, you know exactly how many players are going to be in the pot, and for how many bets it will cost you to call. If you get dealt 67 suited and 4-5 players have come into the pot before you, you can call knowing you will make enough money when the hand hits to pay for all the times you will miss. If only 1 or 2 players call before you, you can fold, knowing that even if you hit you are unlikely to make enough to justify the call. Position gives you the ability to play a wider range of hands profitably.

3) You get a greater opportunity to steal pots. If a bunch of people limp (just call the big blind pre-flop) in front of you, you can raise with almost any 2 cards and very often win the pot. If, after the flop, the betting checks around to you, a bet can often take the pot down right there, even if you have nothing. The fact that everyone checked lets you know that they generally don’t have a strong hand, and so you can represent a strong hand and win.

4) Position will often let you have a free card when you need one. If the betting checks around to you, you can choose whether to bet or let a free card come off. In no limit, you can use position to check behind on 1 street to control the size of the final pot, or to see a free showdown when you aren’t sure about the relative strength of your hand.

So absolute position lets you make better decisions about how to play your hand because you have more information to help you make each decision. You will make more money with your winning hands and lose less with your losing hands, and that will translate directly into more profit.

Relative Position

Relative position is a somewhat trickier concept than absolute position. There are 2 kinds of relative position that are worth considering.

The first is position relative to a raiser. You will get a small advantage being on the immediate right of the pre-flop raiser. The reason is that when you hit a strong hand, you can check with a reasonable amount of certainty that the original raiser will bet. Anyone who calls that bet will be trapped when the action finally gets back to you and you raise. Having relative position on the raiser will allow you to let the raiser effectively bet your hand for you, building a much bigger pot than if you had just bet out yourself and had the raiser raise, driving out other players.

The second is position relative to a certain player. Money at a poker table has a tendency to flow around the table clockwise. This should make sense, given the emphasis we’re putting on position. You have a greater ability to trap extra bets out of people sitting to your right than you do to extract bets from people on your left. You want to use that to your advantage and try to sit at a table with the worst players on your immediate right. Having a loose, passive calling station on your immediate right can make for a profitable night of poker. In a similar vein, you want to sit to the left of loose, aggressive players. If you are against a player who is raising and re-raising every pot, sitting to his left will let you react better to his aggression – dumping your speculative hands before they cost you money and re-raising your stronger hands to isolate against the aggressive player. Against tight players (players who play very few hands), especially tight players who are also passive (don’t raise much, rarely bluff) you want to sit on their right since you can often drive them out of a hand with a well timed raise and get more value out of your weaker holdings.

Making good use of relative position will help you build bigger pots when you have a hand, take the edge off the advantage hyper-aggressive often enjoy, and help you make money off the bad players at the table.

Conclusion

Position, in both its forms, is the most important concept in winning poker. Playing out of position forces you to guess where you stand too often, and guessing leads to costly mistakes. To avoid guessing, you have to play a much smaller selection of hands- playing only the strongest starting hands to compensate for the disadvantage of acting without good information. Playing in position lets you play with more certainty, exploiting small edges, avoiding traps, and getting the maximum value from the hands you play. As a result you can play more hands and play them profitably.

Sam @ Power Poker Course.




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