Position is an important part of poker strategy, and your ability to utilise position when sitting at the table can determine how much you make or lose. The cutoff and button are typically seen as the best seats at the table. Since each acts last on every betting round, they will have more information than all the other players seated at the table.
Pre-flop betting phase
If you start to consider your pre-flop betting as a part of your poker strategy, involving very specific roles that each position plays at the table, considering how your position influences your chances to win the hand post-flop and how you should make adjustments to your pre-flop betting range depending on the positions of the players sitting on your left, then poker will open its gates for you, allowing a flow of free money, steadily increasing straight into your pockets.
Those players acting first are considered to be in ‘early position’, and those acting last in ‘late position’. Middle and late players benefit from having early and late players in front of them, because they can ‘read’ them – meaning they observe their tells and use the odds to make more informed decisions.
One of late position’s great advantages as played by beginners lies in the fact that players seated to its left – in that wonderful cutoff and button seat, no less – will know more about how the game is going when they act than earlier players will. This gives them a huge incentive to raise with anything and everything from weak to middle strength, which by itself means they’re more likely to win.
Post-flop betting phase
In the post-flop betting phase of play, you’re entering a very important zone of the poker game – but one that requires time and deliberation. Are you strong? What’s your position? What size is your bet/raise? How are your opponents behaving? None of this comes automatically. You’ll have to practise if you want to be competent or profitable with it. Especially here, you’re looking at your opponent in the post-flop betting phase, because part of your advantage is to determine what decisions they might make that you can exploit for your own advantage.
Players in the middle position have structural information not available to the early and late positions, as they have seen how early opponents acted before deciding what to do. As a result, it is generally considered best not to call in middle position, as you have an idea of how your earlier opponents act on their hands before deciding how to move. Players in this situation have significant advantages over early and late positions, which can translate into a substantial increase in winning accumulations.
Middle-position players have another way of using position to bluff more frequently, by making light ‘value’ bets that will keep opponents puzzled about the strength of their hands, but balanced with calls when strong hands are made. The idea is to avoid being ‘trapped’ by an opponent who tries to take some of his share.
Limits
There are varying constraints, depending on which limit you are playing and these constraints have a direct effect on how you play the game. The decisions that limit players have to make with an extraordinarily restricted amount of information make the decisions they make immensely more difficult to manage, therefore they have to be especially vigilant and play tight.
Late position is the most profitable one, the cutoff and the button. It has a great advantage in that they can see what people in front of them are doing ,and steals the blind players money. This might raise them to be the most successful person in the game.
If he plays in position, he has as much information as he can have about his opponents’ cards. He knows how good they are, he knows how they react to the flop, whether they check which can imply weakness, he knows the size of their bets, and so forth. A player who plays out of position is groping in the dark, with one hand tied behind his back.
Betting intervals
A poker strategy encompasses a set of decisions, choices or actions that contributes to a poker game by boosting the player’s competitive edge, increasing winning chances and mitigating potential losses. A poker strategy stems from the game-theoretic open-information/chance nature of a poker game and its attendant complexity. There are mixed-strategy choices, games of deception, and probabilistic dimensions.
Late position at the button and cutoff is a huge advantage for post-flop play and steal attempts. But stack retention is just one part of tournament poker, and you need to be aggressive early to get big enough stacks for a deep run.
Seats 1 through to 5 on a 6-max table are early position; weak but good to see what hands other players are calling and raising from pre-flop before you get to reopen the bet. From this position you want to be light 3-betting with strong speculative hands and a gut feeling/idea of your opponent’s style of play.
