Know Position
Position, Position, Position! The position will help decide if you should raise, call, or fold. Your post can leave you stumbling blindly through a hand or make you surprisingly educated about what’s happening around the table. The easiest way to think of a poker table is by position relative to the dealer button and then group those seats into sets. See: Image 1
Early position Seats in the early position are the ones that are first, second, third, and fourth from the dealer button. The problem with these seats is that you have no idea what cards the people behind you have, and worse, many people are behind you. When you’re forced to act in an early position, you’ll continually be working early for every betting round. For this reason alone, you should act only when you have premium cards (and fold everything else). Jack-Queen might look like a sweetheart here, but over the long run, it’ll rip you to pieces when you play it from an early position.
Middle position The fifth, sixth, and seventh seats are known as the middle position, and here things start to get interesting. Because you’re sitting farther back in the order, you can run a little wilder. Play cards that are a bit worse — then when you do manage to hit a hand, the people in front of you may try to bet, and you can return with some neighborly favor like a raise.
Late position The eighth, ninth, and (if there is one) tenth seats (lots of online tables have only nine seats) are late positions. These are the rumble seats on the poker jalopy and are way fun. Because you’ve already seen all the action in front of you, you can make decisions like making calls purely on pot
odds, raising with not-so-great hands when no one else has played, or folding marginal hands when it’s clear there’s going to be bloodshed in front of you. Even if those bratty little people sitting in the blinds decide to raise you pre-flop (because they act after you), you’ll be all over them like ugly on an ape after the flop because you get to work last repeatedly. In a
poker game, money tends to flow around the table clockwise. The reason for this is due almost exclusively to the concept of position, and especially late position. The last people to act bring in the most because people either fold to the late-position bets or call the late-position raises and lose.