Position in Texas Holdem

Position in Texas Holdem is a powerful weapon. At any time your opponent can force you to make a decision to bet all of your chips. That is why being able to see what they do first is a major advantage, especially when playing against aggressive players.

As a result you should alter your hand selection slightly depending on your position at the table. You may want to fold hands like KJ off suit and small pocket pairs from early position since there are a lot of players who still have to act after you, and add some hands like AJ offsuit and AT suited in late position when you have the positional advantage.

Good poker players know about the importance of position at the table and how it is one of the fundamental poker winning strategies. It’s important that you are able to identify who the component players are at the table because positionally aware players will try and use position to their advantage and players who are still level one thinkers will overcompensate and open up their game too much in late position. Obviously you want to spot the fish at the table straight away, but you can still exploit the tendencies of competent players if you are thinking one step ahead of them.

Raising in late position is something which occurs even more so in 6-max cash games which tend to be more aggressive in nature. If a player is raising in the CO and BTN all the time, it’s impossible for them to always have a hand, so a counter strategy is to 3bet them as a bluff on occasion even when you don’t have a hand. Obviously, it’s good to do this when you have a reasonable starting hand, but the preflop strategy is to steal the dead money in the pot before the flop.

Position is such an important aspect in Holdem that you basically want to always be folding in the blinds where you will always be involved in hands out of position. Unless you have a hand which is easily playable post flop just fold the hand in the small and big blind. Obviously you still want to play premium hands like QQ+/AK in the blinds. You can also play any pocket pair, suited connectors and one gap connectors in big multi way pots in the blinds even though you are out of position. These type of hands play well in big multi-way pots, because if you hit the flop hard there is a good chance you will get paid off.

One way to determine whether or not you are playing position well is to analyse how much money you are winning/losing in every position at the table using poker software like HEM/PT. Keep in mind that you are giving up 16bb/100 playing in the small blind and 32bb/100 in the big blind without even playing a hand. If you are losing a lot of money in the blinds then you are probably playing too many hands out of position. The most profitable positions should be the late positions where you have the advantage of acting last.

In addition to play position well and exploiting positionally aware players, you also want to make sure you sit down in a good seat on a juicy table. Believe it or not there is such a thing as a bad seat on a juicy table. By “good seat” I mean you want position on aggressive players by sitting to their left so you always have to act after them. If an aggressive player has position on you, they can make the game very difficult to play in especially if they are a good aggressive player. You will always be scared of them raising with when you only have medium strength hands. By sitting to their left, and with passive players to your left, you will have a license to print money.

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