Lesson#2         Playing different positions at the table

This seconds lesson is another very important aspect of playing winning poker. Learning to play position wisely takes your game to the next level.

Position is simply where you are sitting in relation to the dealer's button. In holdem and many other poker games, your position at the table is a big factor. The strength of your position comes from the fact that the betting goes in a clockwise fashion. In a favorable position you get to see how many other players react to their hands and whether they fold, bet, or call before you do. The poker phrase, "Position is power" comes from this simple idea.

There are many names associated with position to identify where players are sitting in relation to the dealer's button. Each particular position has its own strengths or weaknesses.

*The small blind has the worst position after the flop and must invest half a bet.
*The big blind invests an entire bet and similarly has a poor position.
*The player under the gun has the worst position preflop and a junk position afterwards.
*The button has the best position during any betting round.

If you do not understand any of the terms used above, visit our discussion on "Poker Terms".

Basically, assuming a full table with 10 players, the first 3 players to the left of the dealer are early position. The next 4 players are middle position. The last 3 players to act are in late position.

The importance of your position depends on many factors. For example, in no limit hold em, position is much more important than in limit hold'em. It is always better to be in an late position though, so it is important to identify what hands are generally playable in all positions.

For example, lets say you're under the gun. You have Queen-Ten, unsuited and decide to limp into the pot. The player to bet after you raises, and everyone but you folds.. Now you're in a jam. Chances are good that this player has a better hand than you. If they have any ace, king, or pocket pair, they are statistically better than you. You'd suspect that someone who raised has at least a hand like that. Now you can either call again and go into the flop as an underdog or you can fold and just give up a bet. What's worse is that if you call, you will be acting before this player for the rest of the hand. On the other hand, let's say you're on the button. You have Queen-Ten, unsuited and everybody folds to you. One option would be to fold and let the blinds fight it out. Another would be the just call and see what happens on the flop. Many players here would raise because you could steal the blinds and even if you didn't, you'd act after them for the remainder of the hand. Raising is only a viable option because of your favorable position.

Another notable factor is that position goes hand in hand with knowing the players directly around you. For example, an aggressive, blind-stealing player to the immediate right of a tight player usually results in the tight player's blinds getting stolen. For a discussion about the players to your left and right and how their style of play is affected by position, go to our page on opponents styles and position.

Being in late position with a good hand has major strengths over being early with a good hand. Early position raisers are assumed to have a good hand and it tends to scare players away. Early preflop raises can force the other players to call two bets at once (or more in the case of pot limit or no limit hold 'em) when there is nearly nothing in the pot worth fighting for. In late position, there may be players who have already called one bet. Those players only have to call one bet (in limit) with a little something already in the pot. So players in late position with a good hand have the ability to manipulate the pot size, which will make future bets easier to call in the upcoming betting rounds.

Lesson #3           Bank Roll management

Another aspect of poker, which most of the educational book seem to forget about, is bank roll management.
This one factor, can greatly influence whether you are a winning or losing player. This lesson also gives you a break from learning actual playing strategies, to give Lessons #1 and #2 time to sink in.

I have created this section to teach poker bank roll management. This is one of the most important factors in becoming a profitable player.

Your "Poker Bank Roll" is the money that you play poker with.

You should create a poker bank roll, and keep this completely seperate from all your other money.
You should decide how much money you can comfortabley afford to put aside to play poker with. Use this poker money for poker only, and never use money from other accounts to play.

This serves two purposes:
*You never lose money that you can not afford to lose.
*You can easily track your profit/loss for the beneft of record keeping, and also see how much you are improving over time.

How you manage this money, will define whether you are a profitable player, or make a loss in the long run.

If you decide to take poker serious, and plan on making profit from it, you should read these rules and stick to them.

As you become a more experienced player, you should realise that your aim is to make long term profit.

You can be an excellent player, but even excellent player also have bad days. Some days the cards just seem to work against you, or you catch a string of "bad beats", where a player makes an outragious call against you and gets lucky on the river card and outdraws you to win.

To aviod great financial loss, the answer is quite simple. Do not invest all of your poker bank roll at any one time. If you do, and you lose through being extremely unlucky, you still only have yourself to blame.

The bankroll strategy that I use works very well. See below for my bankroll strategy.

Once you have decided how much you want to put aside for poker, keep it seperate from all money. Online this is easy, as you can deposit this amount direct to your online account at the poker room. For live games you can open a seperate bank account for your bank roll, or keep this money in a secure safe.

Now you have a bankroll total, you need to decide how much of this money you are prepared to play with at any one time.
I always stick to the rule that YOU SHOULD NOT INVEST MORE THAN 10% of you bankroll at any one time.
This applies to all tournament buy-in`s and cash tables sit down totals.

Sticking to this rule defends you against those days when everything seems to go wrong (we all have them). At the most you can only lose this 10% of your bank-roll.

As you become more successful your total bank-roll increases, which in turn increases your 10% stake for you to play with at any one time.
Your increased 10% stake allowance allows you too move up the levels of tournament buy-ins increasing your profit when you win. This has the knock-on effect of boosting your bank-roll, and thus boosting your 10% stake allowance further.

When you have bad days, you will take losses to your bank roll total. This will reduce your 10% stake allowance, resulting in your buy-in level of play to be reduced too.
Do not let pride get in the way of your financial success. If your bank-roll drops, do not be ashamed of entering cheaper tournaments or tables, until you have built your bank-roll back up.

Below are some examples of bank-roll management put into practise.

When starting from scratch online, I find $100 more than sufficient to start a decent bank-roll. Due to the low stake games available online, you have the ability to easily build this up to a decent level. Combined with the number of very poor player playing online at the low stakes, you should be able to boost this bank-roll comfortably.

If you find $100 (about £50 UK sterling) too high an amount to invest purely for a poker bank-roll, then you are not really financially secure enough to be playing poker. Remember, the first rule is to only play with money you can afford too lose.

When I start a poker bank roll of $100, I find the best way to increase my total is playing "Sit and Go tournaments" (SnG). These tournaments have buy-in costs from as little as $1, up to $200+.

Sticking to my 10% rule, that means the most expensive SnG I can enter is for a buy-in cost of $10.
I would target a 10-seater SnG which pays out to the top 3 players. (See my SnG strategy on this forum, under "Poker Discussions").

As a 10-seat $10 SnG will have a prize pool total of $100, you only need to come 3rd to win $20 (doubling your money). Should you win, you claim $50 prize. As a percentage that means a 1st place win would boost your initial bank-roll by 50%, bringing you total to $150. Now your 10% allowance for your next game would be $15.

See below list, to get a better idea of the flow of money when following this system. I will show the effect of winning and losing.

Bank-roll total=$100............10%=$10
Enter $10 SnG.....................Win 1st place=$50
Move up a level

Bank-roll total=$140............10%=$14
Enter $10 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$130............10%=$13
Enter $10 SnG.....................Win 3rd place = $20

Bank-roll total=$140.............10%=$14
Enter $10 SnG.....................Win 2nd place = $30

Bank-roll total=$160.............10%=$16
Move up a level
Enter $15 SnG.....................Win 2nd place = $45

Bank-roll total=$195.............10%=$19.50
Enter $15 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$180.............10%=$18
Enter $15 SnG.....................Win 3nd place = $30

Bank-roll total=$200.............10%=$20
Move up a level
Enter $20 SnG.....................Win 3nd place = $40

Bank-roll total=$220..............10%=$22
Enter $20 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$200..............10%=$20
Enter $20 SnG.....................Lose

Final bank-roll after 10 games shown above would be $200.

1 first place finish,
2 second place finishes,
3 third place finishes, and
4 Losses.

These are realistic results at this level of play, especially if you follow my strategies. In just ten games, you have doubled your money/bank-roll.

Now assume things start to go wrong...........

Bank-roll total=$200.............10%=$20
Enter $20 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$180.............10%=$18
Move down a level
Enter $15 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$165.............10%=$16
Enter $15 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$150.............10%=$15
Enter $15 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$135.............10%=$13.50
Enter $10 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$125.............10%=$12.50
Enter $10 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$115.............10%=$11.50
Enter $10 SnG.....................Lose

Bank-roll total=$105.............10%=$10.50
Enter $10 SnG.....................Lose

Final Bank-roll = $95

As you can see, it would take 8 consecutive losses, to drop you below you original bank-roll of $100.

If you have the ability to lose 8 consecutive 10 seat SnG`s at this buy-in level, you are doing something wrong. Read my strategies and guides in this forum to increase your skill level.
Just by sticking to my SnG strategy on this forum should be more than enough to beat players of this skill/buy-in level.

As you can see by the above examples, my bank-roll strategy can boost your bank-roll quickly when you win, and minimise you loses when you get caught in a losing streak.

See below how to apply this strategy to Cash tables/Ring-games.

Cash table.....bank-roll management.

I also stick to my rule of not putting more than 10% of my bank-roll at risk, at any one time. The gives me a good guideline as to the tables I should join.

When sitting down at a cash table, ideally you want to sit down with 100 times the big blind.
This gives you enough money/chips to be able to play a tight game, and wait for the best starting hands, without the risk of the blind bets damaging the size of your stack.
With 100 times the big blind, you can fold 200 hands on a full 10-seat table before your stack is reduced by 30%. Considering that as a tight player, you should be playing around 15% of the hands you are dealt, having to wait 200 consecutive hands means you are having a very very bad day.

An example of cash table bankroll management........ if my bank-roll total is $100, my 10% rule allows me to play with $10 on the table at any one time.
With only $10 to stake on a cash table would mean I should sit at a table with a big blind value of 10c (i.e. 5c/10c table).
These stakes are very low, and would attract a lot of very bad players. This may sound like a good situation, however, at these stakes bad players will call you all the time. If bad players are repeatedly calling you all the time, occasionally or even frequently you will suffer "bad beat" and will lose when they get very lucky.

To eliminate these bad beats, and the "gamblers" chasing the miracle cards, I normally play at higher stakes than this. People tend to play a more sensible game when losing actually makes some impact on there bank-roll.

Sensible cash games online, normally start from the 25c/50c (blinds) tables.
Following my above rules, means that you should ideally sit down at a 25c/50c table with around $50.
To sit at a table with $50, your bank-roll should be at least $500 (the 10% rule).

As you can see from the above, to play at a sensible cash table, you need a bigger bank-roll than playing in SnG`s or MTT`s. There are also more skilled players who grind out the cash tables day after day.

This is why I advise newer players to stick to SnG`s and MTT`s, not only for experience, but also to build the bank-roll to accomodate you to enter sensible cash tables.

My comments on the minimum stake cash tables, and the poor "gambler" players, also applies to play money tables. I would never advise anyone to try and gain experience playing on "play" money tables.
Play-money tables are free to play, but if you lose your entire Play-money bank-roll, you can refill it with the click of the mouse. Players do not take games seriously when there is absolutely no consequences to losing.
This results in players not playing sensibly, and all you will learn from them are bad playing habits.

Players act very differently when its there real cash on the table.