How to play before the flop

What is your position at the table?

Position is in fact another way of representing how many players are left to act after you. From a logical point of view this is important, because the more players that act after you, the higher the probability that one of them has a better hand.

Therefore, the more opponents to act after you means, the earlier your position is and the better your own hand has to be.

Starting from the dealer, you count the seats anti-clockwise

To determine your own position, you start at the current dealer (Button) and count the seats between you and him in an anti-clockwise direction.

THE FOUR POSITION GROUPS

As you probably already noticed, there are four different position groups:

• 2 late positions
  The dealer himself and the player to his right form the late position.
• 3 middle positions
  The following three players form the middle position.
• 3 early positions
  The next three are in the early position as they have to act early in each betting round.
• 2 blind positions
  The two players who pay the blinds make up their own group. The player to the left of the dealer is the small blind, followed by the big blind.

What if a player leaves the table? When this happens, the first early position simply drops out, so there are only two early positions instead of three. If another player leaves the table, only one early position remains.

Last Updated on Friday, 01 July 2011 22:00