The whole purpose of playing many hands in position

Lately I have been seeing a lot of people asking questions about position and hand ranges and playing low ball, I know zach posted in the lowball thread that and no offense to anyone but most of us who are asking about it don't understand the intentions and strategy behind it. I'm going to take it one step further than zach and explain why we want to play many hands in position.

Positional Advantage- which you might think oh geez, this guy is an effing genius something I don't already know, but in all ceriusness (cool way to spell seriousness) position is really a huge advantage no matter who you play.

Monster Hands disguised/balancing ranges- By playing many hands in position, for example say we raise 47 sooted from the Button and flop comes 3 5 6, our hand is really disguised, since nobody expects us to really have anything on this type of flop. When someone sees you show up with 47 at showdown, they immediatly give your raises less credit no matter how good the player is, so you are going to get paid off more often with your bigger hands, AA, KK etc. I mean this even goes true for me, when I see someone at showdown with a "junky" hand I start giving their raises less credit.

playing deep- when we are deep, we want to be playing a lot of hands against someone who is aso deep in position, I'm going to kind of contradict myself but we don't want to be playing any two, we want hands that play well and easy postflop and have good implied odds, by that I mean we don't want to be calling with a hand like a9off in position because its so hard to play it even in position but say with 89suited i will be more inclined to call, those are the type of hands with monster disguised flops we take stacks from bad players who over play their one pair hands.

stealing blinds- we don't want to be stealing blinds from anyone just because we see it done in a vid, this is why table selecting is so important. For example against someone TAG (there is a difference between tag and nit) raising with a hand like K9off is bad, you might be thinking now why? well the aggressive players will give you a hard time where playing top pair hands becomes hard, because of the reverse implied odds and we really don't know where we stand in some hands so any play becomes -EV or generally borderline. Where as raising saying 67 sooted into TAG players is better because like I mentioned earlier its well disguised and easier to play. Stealing blinds is a small % of our profit so you don't always have to raise from button is what I'm saying against good players.

Now lets talk about passive players in the blinds, into them raising with K9 is ok, why? well because they are so passive that you can value town say when you hit your K and if they try to fight back its usually because they have a hand because they are so passive, then this raise doesnt become so bad.

So what I'm saying is we need a reason to play hands in position and need good post flop skills to be able to apply these strategies instead of doing it just because Negranu tells you too. Perhaps this could be a good serious article but right now I'm just typing this up real quick, but I will probably comeback and edit or have someone help me with it because this is a good topic in my opinion. thoughts and opinions more than welcome, thanks.

Bob, great post, and it's definitely worth turning into an article.

FWIW, I think you're actually addressing more than one thing here - it may be worthwhile to segregate them.

First, why play many hands in position?

• Positional advantage
• Balancing ranges

Second, what do we want to consider when deciding whether to play a specific hand in position?

• For hands that have strong implied odds (SC's, low/med pp's), you prefer going up against a player whose stack justifies the implied odds (i.e., no point in doing this against a short stack).
• For hands where you're stealing with ATC, don't do this against TAG's but passives are okay.

If you or others were to expand from this standpoint (i.e., are there other reasons to play many hands in position? what other considerations should we take into account when deciding whether to play a specific hand in position?), I think you'll end up with a great article.

In another thread/place/time (this topic that you're addressing is by itself important and deserves attention), suggest that we look at postflop play. I think we're all a little obsessed with preflop play, as evidenced by the many "would you play this hand from this position" threads throughout the forum. As you point out, these pf decisions all potentially require postflop decisions, and if you're having problems postflop, the pf can really bite you...

Right thanks for the comment, I definitely am going to talk to someone and turn this into a more detailed article perhaps, but I suck at writing because I go with abbreviations, run on sentences etc etc lol, but I will definitely work on getting this organized and detailed sometime. And like you mentioned in your last sentence, many low staked players raise preflop without really having a plan for postflop and end up spewing/folding too often post flop without understanding why we raised preflop in first place. And to be honest it tilts me to hell seeing these low ball threads because in reality we all know its because of negranu because many people have seen him do it on tv, and don't realize he knows how to play postflop, he has a plan for post flop and has reads, where as many players are just raising just because he does it or someone else says to do it without knowing wtf to do postflop. Anyways, I need to get some sleep and will get back to this soon.

Great stuff.

Even though I read a bunch of poker books telling me how important it is to have position, only now after playing for a couple years am I really starting to put it into practice.

Not only does it make your decisions easier (thusly, you will make fewer mistakes), but it allows you to get more value out of those non-monster hands.

Yeah position is really the key. It allows you to control the pot size to, wich is something really important, you don't want to play a big pot with only a top pair.

well put it this way. if no one calls/raises ple flop and you are on the button or the small blind, and have a pretty good hand, play it or raise. 78 suited would be a good example. this probably is not a hand you would want to play if you were in early position and did not know what your opponents would do, but when its down to 2 or 3 people, that is a good hand, and a hand you can win with. that is why playing in position is so important.

This is an awesome post. IMO, position is huge in poker. My range UTG is only premium hands, whereas in position, I'll sometimes play a hand as poor as 56s, maybe even some weird 35s type hand, depending what kind of gear I'm in, how many chips I have, the blinds, etc.