Position in poker

The button moves one seat to the left after every hand, so everyone gets every seat. At a six-handed table it is your button once every 6 hands.

Two things in that table surprise people, and both are worth more than the names.

The button is not last before the flop. The blinds act after it, because they have already put money in and are owed the chance to respond. The button is last on the flop, the turn and the river, which is three streets out of four and all of the ones where the pot is big.

The blinds act last before the flop and first after it. They pay for one and then hand back the other. That trade is the whole reason the blinds are the seats where money is lost.

It is not mysterious and it is not about aggression. It is that you get more information for the same money, every round, for the whole hand.

You see their decision before you make yours. From the button, three players have already told you something before the flop, and after it everyone still in the hand acts before you do, on every street. From the first seat you are guessing, and everyone behind you gets to react to your guess.

You choose whether there is a bet at all. Checked to you, you can bet. Bet into, you can fold cheaply. In early position you make that decision first and then find out whether it was a good one.

You control what the pot costs. Last to act, you decide the size of the pot on every street after the flop. First to act, someone else decides it for you. That is bet sizing, and position is what lets you use it.

And bluffs work when the other player has already given up. From last position you know they have. From first position you are hoping.

None of that is measurable as equity, which is exactly why beginners underrate it. Equity is a property of the cards, and position is a property of the information, and only one of the two shows up in a percentage on screen.

This is the practical version, and it comes straight from the starting-hand chart, whose bands are arranged by position for this reason.

The playable set roughly triples between the first seat and the last. J9s is a fold under the gun and a routine open on the button. So is A9o, so is 87s, so is most of what sits in the middle of the chart. If you play the same hands from every seat, you are either far too tight on the button or far too loose under the gun, and it is almost always the second one.

There is a bonus you get for free. If everyone at the table plays those bands, the action folds around to the button about four times in ten. When it does, you are last to act with only two players left to get through, and quite often you win the blinds without a flop. That is not a trick, it is just what happens to whoever is sitting in the good seat.

Playing early is not only about acting first. It is that more people can still turn up with a better hand.

You are about two and a half times more likely to run into a big hand from the first seat than from the button. Same cards, same table, different number of people who can beat you. That is the second reason the early range is a third of the size, and it has nothing to do with information at all. The bottom row is exact, at 40 of the 1,326 possible hands; the other two come from dealing the table out a couple of million times, because the cards you can see are cards they cannot have.

You post before you see cards, once an orbit, whatever you are dealt. Then you act last before the flop and first on every street after it. They are the worst seats at the table and you cannot skip them, so the useful question is only how cheaply you get through them.

The big blind is the one place you correctly play a wide range out of position. You already have money in the pot, so you are being offered a better price to continue than any other seat gets. That price is pot odds, and it is a real discount. Take it when it is genuinely cheap. It is still the worst seat, and the discount does not turn a bad hand into a good one.

The small blind is the trap. It has money in like the big blind and none of the compensation, because it acts first on every street after the flop. Being half-in is the reason people call there, and it is a reason to fold, not a reason to play.

Playing a hand because it looks good, from wherever you happen to be sitting. This is the whole error and everything else is a version of it. Look at the seat before you look at the cards.

Calling from the blinds because you are already partly in. The chips you posted are not yours any more. They are in the pot, and they will not be less spent if you fold.

Forgetting about position after the flop. Once the hand starts, what matters is whether you act before or after the player doing the betting. If they are on your left, every street costs you the same guess again.