YOUR POSITION

Would be an extremely important factor in Holdem poker since it would be a fixed position game. When you would be in an early position (close to the blind) you would have no way of knowing how large the pot would be at the end of a betting round, and how many poker players would be contesting it.

To compensate for this disadvantage, you would need to play stronger cards than you could from later positions. You would have to play starting cards appropriate for your position.

In an early position in poker, you would be forced throughout the hand to make decisions with the least amount of information. For instance, if before the flop you were to call the blind with a drawing hand, you could be faced with a raise from one ore more players with premium pairs. Since you would not know what raises you would be faced with, you should not play cards from an early position that would be too weak to justify calling a raise.

Compared to seven card stud poker, the importance of position in Holdem poker has been one of the key differences between the games. In Stud, the position would change throughout the hand. The critical factor in determining a playable stud hand would not be position, but rather, how ‘live’ is the hand.

If your first three cards in seven card stud poker were an ace and pair of jacks and you were to looked at the board and see the other two jacks and one other ace, you would have a dead hand. The Jacks with an ace-kicker may have looked pretty, but your action should have been to fold.

However, in Holdem poker, only three cards would initially appear on the board and they would be your cards. To know when your hand were ‘dead’ would be more difficult in Holdem poker because fewer cards would be exposed. To judge if your Holdem hand were ‘live’ you should observe the bets from the other poker players. Therefore, position would matter, and since your position would remain fixed throughout the hand, you would know ahead of time the betting order for the entire hand. You should associate the value of strength categories of starting poker hands with your position as measure from the bigs blinds.

Position Recommendations for Starting Hands

Position Seat Relative to Button Playable Hands

Early-position (seats 1-3) premium hands

Mid-position (seats 4-6) premium and strong hands

Late-position (seats 6-9) premium strong and drawing hands

What the position chart would tell you is that the later your position, the more kinds of hands would be potentially playable. Drawing hands would increase in value with later positions, because more information (number of players, potential pot size) would be available. Te chart would not mean you should have always played a drawing hand from a late position. It would mean that if other decision factors were favorable-factors that were only known from having a late poker position a drawing hand is playable.

Opponent’s playing styles

During the hands that you would not enter, you should observe the playing style of each player and of the group as a whole. Would a certain poker player only bet when he would have good cards or would he bet with anything? Would a poker player have bought-in for a small amount of money and carefully guarded it, or would she buy new chips from the dealer frequently?For the table as a whole, would showdowns be frequent or rare?

A big mistake beginning poker players would make is playing only their cards and not considering how other people have been playing theirs. Your opponents’ actions would be a source of information that would have to be used. Over the course of a hand, some of these factors would become more important than others. Early in the hand, your position, the initial strength of your cards and the potential number of opposing poker players would be the most important factors. Later in the hand, pot odds and the playing poker styles of the remaining players would be more important. What will follow will be a detailed discussion of these five factors.

THE FIVE DECISION FACTORS

The decisions you would make during the course of a hand would always take the following five factors into consideration:

Your cards-

Betting in poker would mean you would wager that, as showdown, your hand would be ranked the highest. Unless you had believed that to be a likely possibility, you should not have bet. Statistically, in a ten-handed game, you would only have the highest hand ten percent of the time. Knowing when it would be your time to have the best hand would of course be the difficulty.

When you were to have a strong hand, you should bet aggressively and compel the other poker players to chase you. It would be rarely correct to slow-play, that is, not bet a strong hand. If you do not have a strong hand, you should fold. In poker, money saved would be the same as money won, and staying out of the ninety percent of the poker hands you would be destined to lose would be as important as being in the hands you would win.

Next >>