Seating Position - Texas Hold'Em Strategy

How does my position affect my strategy? At online casinos a button usually determines what order in which the players act. The player with the button is considered the dealer and acts last on all rounds.

Before the flop, on a full table, the positions are usually divided as follows:

The later you act, the more information you will have about the other players. If you are last to act, you will have the great advantage of seeing how each or your opponents acts on the current round of betting. You will, for example, know how many players there will be in the hand and how they how acted so far (folding, calling, or raising). This is often referred to as having "positional advantage" over the other players. In late position, you can afford to see the flop with weaker hands, obviously.

You can use this information to make better strategy decisions, for example whether to call or fold. If you have a relatively weak hand that you aren't sure about if you should call with or not, you can often make a correct decision by watching how the other players have acted. Naturally, you need a strong hand to call if there has been a raise and several calls before you. If the other players have shown weakness by folding before you, you can play some mediocre hands that you normally wouldn't play.

If you instead had been in an early position (far away from the button) you would have had access to less information, and therefore been forced to be more careful when deciding which hands to play. The rule of thumb is that you can play more hands from a good (late) position than from a bad one. In other words, you must be very careful if you are first to act because you don't know if the other players will raise (or even re-raise) after you have acted.

Position In Short Handed Games Position becomes even more important in short handed games. If you are playing in a short handed game you can think of your position as if it was a full game and everybody before you have folded. In fact, in a short handed game you should usually always raise the blinds if nobody has entered the pot before you. Calling in this situation is not good, if your hand is worth calling with you should consider raising instead. This is the same strategy as you use when you are sitting in a late position in a full game and everybody folds before you. By raising, you attack the blinds and could win the pot uncontested.

Click here for our Texas Hold'em Seating Position Strategy Chart.

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