Position at the Poker Table

Position at the Poker Table

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One of the key strategic elements of poker is the position at the poker table. The later you have to act in a hand, the better your position is, as you have more information than the players sitting before you. The best position is therefore held by the player who is seated at the dealer button (who acts last after the flop), the worst position is the small blind (who acts first after the flop).
Beginners in particular only inadequately take position into account and usually only play their cards (instead of taking their opponents, their stack and your position into consideration). Analysis of millions of poker hands played proves: the closer you sit to the dealer button, the higher the profit per hand is (respectively, the lower the loss per hand is). We provide these empirically based results in this poker strategy on profits per position in more detail.

Description of the positions at a ten-player poker table

In Texas Hold’em there are four rough categorizations of the position at the table. Since the dealer is the most important position and as the button move clockwise to the left each round, the positions are named relative to the position of the dealer button.

Blinds (SB, BB)The two players who must pay the forced bets (blinds) are called the blinds. The first player left of the dealer button is called small blind (SB), the player left of the SB is called big blind (BB). These are the worst positions because they must act first after the flop has been dealt.
Early Position (EP)
The first three positions after the blinds are called early position. The seats are named UTG (player left of BB) UTG +1 (player left of UTG) and UTG +2 (player left of UTG +1). Preflop (before the flop is dealt), UTG is the worst position: The player “Under the Gun” (=UTG) is the first player to act in a newly dealt hand.
Middle position (MP)
The three players who have an approximately equal number of players acting before and acting after them are sitting in middle position (MP, MP1 and MP2).

Late Position (LP)
The best two positions at the table are the late positions. These two players only act after all the previous players have decided on their actions. The position of the player with the dealer button is abbreviated with BTN. The player to his right, which will act as the second-last, is referred to as Cut Off (CO).

Graphical representation of the positions on a ten-player poker table

For a better understanding, we have illustrated the positions at the poker table graphically:

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