Understanding Position in Texas Holdem

I was trying to find a good video on position, but I couldn’t find one that didn’t make position harder to understand, so I’ll explain it myself.

Position in Texas holdem refers to where you are sitting on the table with respect to the dealer button.  As the deal button moves around the table clock-wise, your positions changes.  For example, in a standard 9 seated PokerStars, cash game the positions would be as follows:

1) Small Blind (SB)
2) Big Blind (BB)
3) Under The Gun (UTG)
4) Under The Gun +1 (UTG+1)
5) Middle Position (MP)
6) Middle Position +1 (MP+1)
7) Middle Position +2 (MP+2)
8) The Cut Off (C.O.)
9)The Button (Button)

If you ever find yourself in a 10 seated game you would simply add a new position called (MP+3).  Now the idea behind position is simple.  The more people there are waiting to act after you, the more likely they will have a better hand than you.  Therefore, when you are the first to act (UTG), you must only play really strong hands from that position to combat the possibility that someone behind you may have a stronger hand.  As you move towards MP, the C.O., and eventually the Button,  it become less likely that someone behind you will have a better hand, simply because each time your position changes there is one less person behind you.

We learn to take advantage of this situation by playing with really strong hands when we are in early position (UTG or UTG+1), and then incrementally add weaker hands as you move into late position (C.O. & Button).  To give you an example, from UTG, I calculated that I  play only 5.4% of all combinations of starting hands.  However, by the time I get to the button, that percentages grows to 41.2%

Here at the Tokyo Poker Society, we have starting hands charts for each and every position.  We will help you develop you own hand range from each position and show you how to calculate the percentage of total hands.  

All too often, poker players simply lump position in to three giant groups, Early, Middle, and Late, but we feel that that is far to vague, and would much rather define it by each individual position, allowing us to surgically choose our Pre-Flop starting hand percentages.