The Power of Position on NL Hold’em

WSOP 2009 by pokerguru on June 22, 2009

One thing that you hear preached over and over again in no limit poker is that position is power. Every strategy that you can think of allows you to play more hands in position that you can early in the betting because of this very reason. To fully take advantage of your position, you need to know why it is so important.

Information is and always has been one of the major keys to success when you are playing No Limit. By picking up subtle tells, you can exploit a weaker opponent and take down hands that you have no right even playing in. Being in late position is much the same weapon. You can force the action against players who are on marginal hands and put them on a decision. This play works more than you think because of the sheer fact that you always have position on them.

Look at the scenario of the table folding around to the button and he merely doubles the blinds to get some action in the hand. Both players call because they more or less have the odds to do so. A flop of AK7 hits the board. SB is holding 710 and BB is holding K2. SB checks and the BB bets out a half pot sized bet. The button player comes right over the top and triples the bet. The SB folds and the action is on the BB. What do you do?

You are sitting on middle pair with absolutely no kicker. The action pretty much commits you to a large portion of your stack, but this player has been acting aggressively in that position all night long. It doesn’t matter, you still have to let the hand go because even if you do call him, you know he is going to make a huge bet on the turn. He may very well be sitting on a weak A and you are crushed in the hand. Regardless, he is the one forcing the action here and your hand strength is too weak to make this risky play.

The other very powerful aspect of being in late position is that you can play those weaker hands at just about any time. You are going to be getting odds for any draw and in actuality, the more people that are in the hand, the lower you want your cards to be. It may sound a little crazy, but you are much better off sitting on QJs on the button with 6 other players already in than you are AQ.

Think about the logic on this. If you have a bunch of players that are limping in from early position, you are probably looking at a bunch of weak A’s and middle pocket pairs. Uneducated players will go into almost any hand from any position with an A. Now here you are sitting on middle suited connectors. In most cases, your cards are going to be live and you are drawing to both a straight and a flush. All of high cards are probably out in the hands that are being played and you have a much better chance of hitting than anyone else in the pot.

When you are in position, you need to loosen up your game and play a much wider variety of hands when everyone is limping in or there was only a small raise in front of you. It isn’t going to cost you much to do this and when you hit, the payoffs will tend to be very large. You are going to need to hit about 1 out of every 9 or 10 of these to break even. After that, it is all profit.