No Limit Texas Hold'em Position The Name of the Game
No limit Texas Hold’em is a positional game. While starting hands, stack sizes and so forth are certainly important factors that inform the play of a hand, your position relative to the dealer button dominates all other considerations. How important is position in no limit Hold’em? Important enough that Doyle Brunson once famously declared that he could beat a no limit game without ever looking at his hole cards if he was allowed the dealer button for every hand. Of course, that’s Doyle Brunson. Most of us mere mortals are not going to walk over any poker game—much less one as nuanced as no limit Hold’em—if we have no idea what hand we’re holding. But his point is well taken. In no limit hold ’em, position is everything.
This usually comes a surprise to new players. They make have some inkling that position is important, but they only rarely can appreciate the magnitude of it’s importance. After all, why should it matter all that much? You can flop a big hand just as easily from early position as you can in late position, can’t you?
Well yes—you can. But that’s only part of the story. The fact is that the player in late position will frequently enjoy the following advantages.
- When everyone misses the flop he will frequently be in the best position to win the pot with a bluff.
- He will often have the opportunity to put in a small bet (or raise) on the flop, and then ‘take a free card’ by checking through on the turn
- He will often be able to make a smallish bet on the turn and then check down on the river.
And this only scratches the surface of the list of tactical advantages that a late position player has over an early position player. The larger point here is that the later position player will often the ‘price setter’ in the hand, which is to say he will frequently have the luxury of deciding how much it’s going to cost the field to advance to the next round of betting. This is especially true when nobody flops a very big hand—which, as you know, is most of the time.
What does this mean to you? Well, as it turns out we could probably write a dissertation on the implications that position has on the play of a hand. But for our purposes here we’ll restrict ourselves to looking at what position means to preflop play. Because having position on your opponents is so critical in no limit the range of hands that you can play in early position in a no limit game is nowhere near—and I do mean nowhere near—the range you can play in late position. In early position you will often find yourself with no control over how much it’s going to cost to get through the hand, which means you need to play extraordinarily tight before the flop. If you’re playing a game with tight, solid players, then restricting yourself to AA-TT, AKs, AQs, AJs and maybe KQs shouldn’t cost you much (if anything) in the way of expected earn (you may want to mix in some of the smaller pocket pairs if there isn’t a lot of preflop raising). If you’re on the button, however, the picture completely changes. Small suited (and sometimes unsuited) connectors, all pocket pairs, kings with a suited kicker (and maybe even queens with a suited kicker)…. all of these hands will have a time and place in which they should be played. If a number of players have already called, and there isn’t a raise, then you can get very creative with the kinds of hands you play.
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