Playing From Early Position

Playing hands from early position in poker is a good way to mix up your play, and that can prevent players getting a read on you and give you an aggressive table image. Keep in mind though, that when playing lower limits especially, this type of play can be very expensive with the low stakes players entering lots of pots so you’ll often have players raising behind you.

Now I’m not talking about raising with premium hands, which is something you should be doing anyway. I’m talking about other possible plays from early position. Some players do this with connectors, small pairs and suited aces or even suited kings. That’s quite a lot of different hands you could be playing from early position and is definitely going to expand your hand range in the opinion of your adversaries. To do this however you’ll need to be ready to play quite a lot of big and dangerous pots, because the more often you play for early position, the more your opponents will play back at you.

That means your opponents will be reraising you with quality hands, or even their own bluffs and justifiably so. In addition, at a full table you have eight or nine opponents to act following you, and that’s as many as 18 other cards that can blend for something better than yours. More often than not that will be the case and you will be creating many multi-player pots if they permit you to stay in. So why do poker players raise from early position then?

There is a purpose that good players do this, at least infrequently, and its not only to mix up their plays – that’s virtually a given. The real reason is to hit a flop in with a hidden hand, so that other opponents will make expensive errors against you because they entirely misread your hand and over-committed chips or cash to the pot. Usually when this happens it’s a monstrous pot!

What needs to be comprehended is that most early position hands will cost you money, that is where good pot management comes into it – you need to keep those pots small, and make the ones when you do hit big. The pros recognize that in any given sitting their winnings often come from just a few of the hands played. But those few wins can be so large they make up for all the other hands, so it can really pay off in the long run.

Sometimes things are not going to work out so perfectly, but more often than not, playing smartly from early position will allow you to have more and more profitable games or tournaments.