Let’s Talk Position

Talk to any poker player who is even slightly beyond the beginning level and they will be able to tell you that position matters.  They can tell you that position should affect your hand selection.  They can tell you that it is an advantage to be in position, closer to the button.  What most players surprisingly can’t tell you, though, is why.  Why does position affect your hand selection?  Why do you play tighter up front and looser in back? Most poker players have some vague idea that it has to do with the advantage that being in position gives you but they can’t clearly articulate what that advantage is or why it has such a deep affect on your play.  Being able to articulate clearly what drives your choices at the table is a big step to becoming a great player.
So why do you play tighter in early position and looser in late position?  Why is it that you might only enter 5% of the pots under the gun but if everyone folds to your button you could correctly play every hand?  Think about that gulf…in a ten handed game under the gun you might play 5% of the hands you are dealt and just 6 spots later you might play 100% of the hands you are dealt when you are first action.  That is a fantastically large difference.  So why is that difference in position creating such a large gulf in hand selection?  Because position deeply affects your ability to make better decisions than your opponents in the hand.
I have said it before many times and I will say it again here (I am not shy about repeating myself): Poker is a game of decision making under conditions of uncertainty.  This means that you have to make the best decisions you can when you have very incomplete information. You know what your cards are but not your opponents’.  Well, this is a difficult problem to crack.  But it is even worse when you are out of position in the hand.  And here is where we get our answer as to why we play so much tighter up front: If we are trying to crack this problem of making decisions with incomplete information then we would like to avoid purposely entering pots where we know the nut will be very hard to crack.
Here is the deal:  The plays that we make at the table should be designed to make our decisions easier not harder.  So let’s consider the decision making problem when we are out of position.  What we know for sure going forward in the hand is that we not only have to decide first whether to enter the pot but on future streets, the flop, the turn and the river, we are very likely to have to act first as well.  That means we have to act without knowing what the other plays in the hand will do, without really knowing anything about how they feel about their hand or how they will react to your bet or check.  When we are under the gun we have to act with the least amount of information of anyone in the hand. Now, when we are on the button it is a whole different world.  Now on every decision during the hand we get to act last, we get the most information at the table. We get to see how much our opponents bet or we get to see them check.  When they check or bet we get to watch them do it, picking up on important body language that might tell us whether or not they like their hand. That is a big ass advantage.
Now to the point of all this:  If you know for sure going into a hand that you are likely to be at a huge decision making disadvantage, having to act with the least amount of information of anyone at the table for the hand, do you really want to be involved?  If you know your opponents are going to have a big leg up on you, wouldn’t you kind of want to avoid being involved?  Wouldn’t you want to at least know the one thing you can know for that hand:  that you are highly likely to be starting with the best hand.  I don’t know about you but if I know I am going to have to offer first in a negotiation (and that is what a poker hand is) then I am going to make sure I have a damn strong position.  In poker that means that my hand is going to be very strong because if I have to act first on every decision then I want to have my opponents crushed.
But if you get to offer last, you don’t need as strong a position.  In fact you don’t need much of a position at all because you are likely to be able to out negotiate your opponents regardless of your hand when you get to go after them.  It is easier, when we have all that information to work with, to both maximize our return when we do make the best hand but also to maximize the probability that a bluff will be successful.  So we win more with the best hand and win more often with the worst hand when we can see our opponents act in front of us.  Under those circumstance I want to be involved.
So if we are supposed to be making our decisions easier with our moves at the table one way to accomplish that is to avoid even entering a pot when we know our decisions will be hard and to purposely try to get involved in pots when we know our decisions will be easy.  This fact is so compelling that it can create a 95% gulf in playability between under the gun and the button.  So you want to know why there is such a huge difference in the number of pots you enter up front vs on the button?  There it is: there is that big a gulf in the decision making problem in the two positions and that difference reflects in your selectiveness in the hands you choose to enter.