Position Is Critical To Winning Poker
Lou Krieger
Position is critical to winning poker. It’s so important that some starting hands you’d raise with when you’re last to act should be thrown away if you’re in early position.
Suppose you’re dealt a pocket pair of fives, or a hand like A-9 or A-T. They’re better than average hands, and if you’re in late position, the action you take will probably be based on what your opponents have done. If everyone folds and the two players forced to make blind bets to start the action are your only potential opponents, you probably have a better hand than the random hands they were dealt. If you’re following a prescription for winning poker by playing selectively and aggressively, this is the time to be aggressive and raise. Even if the blinds don’t fold, you figure to have the best of it and it’s always a good thing when your opponents call your raise with lesser hands.
But what should you do if the pot was raised before it is your turn to act? Typical players require at least a pair of nines, or A-J before raising. If you call with a lesser hand not only are you the underdog right now, but the cost to enter the pot is double what it was before your opponent’s raise.
If you’re playing no-limit, the cost might be a lot more than that. Most no-limit players will make a “standard” raise of three to four times the big blind. Once someone has raised four times the big blind before it’s your turn to act, you need to elevate your starting standards to compensate for the higher cost of competing, or you need to be sure you have sizable implied odds to win a big pot if you call and get lucky.
When you are playing no-limit hold’em, one raise generally commits you to a bet on the flop, and perhaps another on the turn.
The cost of playing a hand has even more significance in tournaments than in cash games. In a cash game, each and every hand is unique and is unrelated to others you might play. If you go broke you can reach into your wallet, buy some more chips, and just like that you’re back in the game. But in a tournament, losing money on a risky hand impacts the way you play future hands, and might mitigate your ability to make moves because you don’t have enough chips to scare anyone out of the pot.
A short-stacked bluff won’t frighten anybody. And just when you really need to steal the blinds to survive for another round, you’ll lack a bluffer’s best friend-an imposing array of weaponry-and your opponents will probably call just because calling represents an inexpensive opportunity to rid themselves of another opponent.
Money saved is just as valuable as money won in any poker game, and throwing away a vulnerable hand figures to save significant amounts of money-and tournament equity-in the long run.
Poker is a game of incomplete information to be sure, and the information you receive when acting last or in late position is usually a lot better than flying blind because you haven’t had the benefit of knowing what course ofaction any of your opponents have chosen.
When you act early in the betting order, you’re forced to consider the strength of your own hand in a vacuum. But poker is not a game of absolute values; it’s a game of relative values. And when you have no idea about your opponents’ holdings, you cannot possibly relate the quality of your hand to the purported strength of his, and that’s a major disadvantage.
Filed under: Poker News