NLHE Theory + Practice: Week 6 - Position!

General Update

Hai guys. Slight change to the way we run this discussion this time around. I'm going to concentrate on a more narrow section of the book from now on and see how it goes. That is to say that instead of focussing on a 20-30 page section thatdeals with maybe 2 or 3 quite separate issues, I'm going to restrict the discussion to one more confined topic and discuss HHs just from this. We will try to move through the book by creating a thread more regulalry when we have covered each topic, and just to say that week 11 is out, for example, in no way means you shouldn't still contribute to week 10 if you have something relevant to say or ask about it. This way I think we can single out the areas of poker the author talks about more accurately and you guys will know where to look should you need to add to or look up a discussion on a specific topic.

Position

"I thought in position was when you get to act first because you get to steal the pot before anyone else does" - My ex flat-mate and not so avid poker player friend. Can you guess how this guy liked to play?

This week's section is focussed simply on position: aboslute vs relative, the dangers of playing hands oop, the differecne in calling/raising ranges you should have due to being positionally aware etc. The section runs from page 91 to the final thoughts on page 97.

So what's the author getting at here with his breif account of playing in and out of position? Well he's trying to show a couple of basic principles that come up on specific situations like position saving you money when you have a strong hand that you can tell quickly is way behind an opponents range in a multiway pot without having to put in a penny. Position is just awesome in general though and is great for way way more reason than are mentioned in this section.

1. Being in position makes getting maximum value a hell of a lot easier.

Fairly basic, this one. Say you really want to raise your opponent's bet on the turn with your monster hand because there just arenf't enough streets to get the money in just by betting or calling. So we're oop and we go for a c/r with our monster, oops he checked back, now what. Well we lose a street of value every time he has a hand he'd be c/c if it was him that was oop and not us. So when we're in position we don't need to check and risk missing that crucial pot building street of value yet still always have the option to raise our opponent should he bet the turn.

2. Being oop makes it very difficult to play back at people profitable with any reasonable frequency.

So we have a reg opening 40% of his BU when we're in the BB. We get dealt a hand like KJo, something that we can't 3 bet for value but does well enough vs his opening range that we don't want it to be part of our 3 bet bluffing range. This is usually a pretty easy defend, provided we don't suck ass post flop in comparisin to villain. Also since most beginers suck pretty badly oop, don't go flatting a really wide range even vs steals until you're more confident imo. Anyways, so thew flop comes down Q42r and we know he's c betting this board with prety close to his whole range and a ton of air. We can c/r if he's not thinking about our hand/range but since we rep nothing we can't expect to get folds that much and might get played back at some. We can float and lead the turn - agaion not repping that much but maybe a bit more than we do by c/r (depends on villain) We can float and check the turn and bet river if it checks through, but again this is awkward as since he's Ip he gets the option of pot controlling marginal SD value type hands and snapping up river bets with them. So yeah it's just a whole lot more +EV to float this board IP and we just have way less options to play back at villain profitably oop even though we know his range is weak.

What does these mean? It is way more profitbale to flat opens preflop aswell as open ourselves preflop when we have position. A hand like T8s may turn us a profit vs a poor opponent whe we are IP yet make us a small loss when we call from the blinds (are oop)

If people wanna post hands and thoughts to do with those 2 points that's cool. If anyone's got more reasons why oop is bad and IP is awesome then list them by all means.

absolute position is obviously pretty basic and something that even the most newbie players are starting to adjust to. like spoon said in his blind defense post, theres 9/8 nits with 25% attempt to steal. I feel like it is one thing to play tight ep and loose lp, but you really need to break down why you do these things. We play tight early because the earlier it is, the more likely it is that we are going to be out of position for the hand, and the loss of position is so huge that we need to compensate by having a much stronger range. And obviously, the opposite is true, the later our absolute position preflop, the more likely it is that we are going to be the last to act after the flop.

Also a reason we can raise wider in later positions is because by the time it gets to you, the majority of the people in the game will have had a chance to make a statement about their hand, either by a. raising (strong), b. limping (meh) c. folding (crap), so by the time it gets to us we know that we are working with a lot more information than if we were utg.

this is just my .02

i am still wrapping my head around relative position and need to do a better job understanding and applying it to my game. i would appreciate if you could provide a hand carrot that shows something cause i do not really know what to look for in my PT3

i like the emphasis on explaining relative position because it's something i've always understood but never really implemented. basically we risk losing heaps of value on our monsters and we play numerous streets OOP with our middle strength hands. another important think imo is relative position to the psycho spewmonkey that we all drool over. you know the guy who opens for 20x complusively and plays like shit on all streets. its often good to have relative position vs this guy (ie sitting on his right)because we get to see how the whole table reacts to him before we decide how we are going to. this makes our middle strength hands (say, top pair, good kicker on the flop) far less vulnerable than if we acted immediately after our psycho in a multiway pot, because we know our TPTK is good versus fish's range alone, but if we act straight after him in a multiway pot, we have to be good versus everyone else in the pots stack-off range too. hope that wasn't too disorganised and scattered to make any sense of.

I agree -- the information on relative position was really useful. I never knew about relative position until I read this chapter a few months ago, and I'm still not very good at implementing it. However, I have recently started trying to consider relative position when I'm thinking about limping behind or calling raises with speculative hands, because I realized I end up OOP relatively too often in multiway pots.

rpm -- What is better when playing against the "psycho spewmonkey" (nice phrase!): having him immediately to your left so you can have relative position against him in multiway pots, or having him immediately to your right so you frequently isolate him and end up heads-up? My personal opinion is that it is way more profitable to have absolute position on him to exploit him HU.

Originally Posted by NightGizmo

rpm -- What is better when playing against the "psycho spewmonkey" (nice phrase!): having him immediately to your left so you can have relative position against him in multiway pots, or having him immediately to your right so you frequently isolate him and end up heads-up? My personal opinion is that it is way more profitable to have absolute position on him to exploit him HU.

Mike Caro talked about this (I think). One benefit of having a maniac on your left is that in HU pots you can check to induce bluffs whereas on your right you may have to check back/hope he barrels.


But HU pot > Multiway Pot most of the time - like we always want stations to our right since the standard thing is to iso and exploit HU, so I'd probably still prefer a maniac on my right.

i guess it depends on what he actually does to make him a spewmonkey. i remember one guy i played at 25nl who was open shoving flops with any pair, any draw, and sometimes just some high cards. against this guy i definitely prefer relative position, because i can check/call his shove with hands as weak as middle pair. if i act straight after him in a 5way pot, i have to grow some balls, or murder some brain cells to call his open shove with middle pair and 3 people to act after me, because its just free money for them if one has woken up with a hand, whereas if i am to villain's immediate right, i get relative position because i effectively act last AFTER the guy who we all know is betting. so if he does his open shove flop thing and it folds to me, i know my middle pair is good versus his range. i can't be so sure when it has to be good versus his range and three dudes' ranges behind me.