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.