When To Play From Early Position

When you choose to play more repeatedly from early position in no limit holdem, it can present more obstacles to your opponents in distinguishing the nature of player you really are. However, it is frequently more pricey to do so, because of the intrinsic risks with having the maximum amount of players to act after you.

Now we are not talking about raising with quality hands, which you should be doing anyway. No, there are other possibilities 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.

This means players will be reraising you with strong hands, or bluffing back at you and quite correctly too. Also, at a full table you have nine or ten other platyers to act after you, and that could mean up to 20 unknown cards which could make hands better than your own. Usually that will be the case and you will be creating many multi-player confrontations if they don’t raise you out. So why might you want to 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!

You see, even though the majority of early position hands will cost you money, the scheme is to keep all those losing hands in small pots, not big ones. The professionals comprehend that in any given session their winnings often come from just a a tiny number of of the hands played. But when you do hit, those few wins can be so significant they make up for all the other hands and more.

Sometimes things do not 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.