Positional Poker Part 3

by David Williams | Nov 19 2008

When you play the majority of your poker hands in position, you are giving yourself the best chance to control the outcome of the hand.

While there are countless advantages to playing in position, for the final chapter in our series of articles, I have picked three advantages to focus on.

River decisions with a good (not great) hand are much easier if you have position.

The decisions you have on the river usually seem more complete then they actually are.

Deciding what to do with your medium strength hands on the river is always the key to more chips won, fewer chips lost, or missed value-bet opportunities.

When you have position on the river, and you have a hand like 6-2 when the board reads K-Q-6-2-9, you have a situation where the hand you hold can be folded, raised, or value bet, depending on the play of the hand, and depending on your opponents’ action on the river.

Position in this hand allows you to have the most information possible before making your decision on what to do. If your opponent bets, you can smooth call if you think there’s a good chance your hand is good. If the bet looks like he’s begging to be called, and you run through the rest of the hand in your head, maybe a fold is your best option. If your opponent checks, then you now have the option to check behind and keep the pot small, or you can make a value bet looking for a call from a hand like A-K that your opponent couldn’t bet in that situation. The fact that you are in position allows you to determine how the rest of the hand plays out.

It's easier to isolate a bad player when you have position on him.

There is one player at your table that you have seen repeatedly rebuy. He has raised it up with 7-2 offsuit because he said he saw Hellmuth do it on TV. He is in nearly every pot, and you have figured out his game. You are licking your lips.

He is the first in the pot to raise it up, when you look down at pocket 9’s. While 9-9 isn’t normally a hand you like to raise with in a cash game, you know that whether you hit this hand on the flop or not, there are many scenarios where you can outplay this “donkey” after the flop, so you look to isolate him whenever possible.

If you were out of position, then you’d be at the mercy of everyone else in the hand. However, because you have position on this player, you can raise and scare everyone else out of the pot, leaving you one-on-one with the bad player. This is a move that is a direct result of having position on the bad player.

It is easier to threaten all of your opponent’s chips without actually committing your own chips.

If you have an opponent’s chip stack covered, and you have position on him, then he needs to constantly be worried about what move he makes, because of the way it might influence your action in the hand.

A perfect example of this would be floating. If your opponent bets the flop, and you smooth call, then the action he takes on the turn has to take into account whether or not you have the chips to put his tournament life at risk. If you have more chips than your opponent, then he almost has to check the turn if he has no hand, because a bluff in this spot could put too many of his chips at risk against a player that has the ability put him all in.

Position in poker can sometime mean more than the cards. You have the power to use the position to manipulate and maneuver in spots where out of position you’d be out of options. Use position to control the outcome of pots, and eventually, you will be able to control the outcome of tournaments.

Try it out yourself in Bodog’s online poker room.