The Importance of Position in Playing Poker

For beginner strategies, much emphasis is placed on knowing the best starting hands and yet one other important advantage is just as frequently overlooked. Some amateur players go years without utilizing this important tool. It’s not really about the cards, betting, or even reading your fellow players and yet it can improve your ability to use all three. What is this amazing secret to immediately improving your poker game? It’s your seat. Or more specifically, it’s your position at the table.

To newbies, this concept may be somewhat confusing. After all, regardless of where you sit you have the same odds of drawing good or bad cards and the same options to bet, raise, call or fold. How then could playing position possibly matter? The truth of course is that to observant players it can matter a lot.

The early position is obviously the least advantageous position. You must start the betting, and all of the other players will be able to observe and analyze your decisions. If you bet aggressively early, you are forced to continue on this way or admit to a weak hand and fold, and unlike the late position you do not know if calling will get you through to the flop. If you are in the early position, unfortunately there’s not much you can do about it, but you should be taking advantage of your opponents when they are in it, the same way they will take advantage of and manipulate you.

The middle position is true to its name in that it offers very little in the way of advantages or disadvantages. While you will be able to see and react to the first players’ decisions, you will also be judged in kind by the players betting after you.

Virtually all seasoned players believe that the best position you can have in a hand is the late position. As the late position player, you get to see everyone else’s bets first. This has two-fold advantages. For one, if you have a average hand you can gauge your ability to get your opponents to fold on a raise, thus stealing the blinds. If you have a strong hand, you can allow other players to bet and pump the pot for you instead of betting yourself and causing them to fold. Alternately, if you have a weak hand, you may be able to limp through to the flop if all other players call. Later in the hand, this also gives you a good idea of where your opponents stand prior to making your own bets and allows you to raise accordingly.

You should take advantage of your late position every time it comes around in the same way you would take advantage of a good starting hand.