Position Strategy in Texas Hold'em

Now that you now about the various positions (early, mid and late), how do you add this to your game? For starters, you always need to be constantly aware of your position when playing poker. This is a very easy concept to forget, but you'll often be too concerned playing your hand that you will forget about how position is going to affect your current hand.

Say you are playing a game of $2/4 limit hold'em and you look down at your hold cards and see a hand like T9s (that's Ten and Nine of the same suit). You are UTG (under the gun, first to act) and wonder if you should play this hand or not. Most beginner players look at a starting hand chart and see whether or not they should play, but the real answer is that you need to incorporate a starting hand chart along with position.

In this example, a hand like T9s plays well when there are many players in the pot, because it's a drawing hand that relies on pot odds rather than beating people out of a hand. Because of this, you'll realize that T9s does well you can safely call behind action, rather than bet out and create action yourself. For this reason, T9s is a hand that plays well in late position, because you can safely play this hand or toss it away because you can see all the action before it comes to you. However, since you are UTG and in early position, you should now realize that this hand is unsafe to play in EP and thus needs to be folded pre-flop.

As a general rule of thumb, just remember that early position requires you to play stronger hands, while late position gives you the option of playing drawing hands.