“Cuz all the good players say so..”
That’s not a bad reason. But there are better ones. The simplest answer is that poker is a game of incomplete information which means any information you can get is valuable.
Your opponent acting first is information, therefore position is valuable.
If you ignore the effects of position and don’t adapt your thinking and your play for it, then even fish will get an inadvertent edge on you in some spots and your place at the table will be less profitable than it should be.
To the right is an interesting example of a perfectly good seat not working as well as it could because it’s being used in the wrong position. I know, right? It’s a powerful metaphor.
Anyway.. With experience, most of us pick up the value of position sub-consciously.
What I mean is, we’re aware of how much more difficult out-of-position decisions are as we’re making them — you know the times when you get that burning feeling of “fuuuck, this feels vulnerable.. *sigh*, I check”. That’s what I’m talking about. Instead of just dealing with those tough decisions as they arise, we should consider why they’re so much more difficult than others — position.
Position by itself
Of course, by itself, the extra information that you get from being in position isn’t necessarily valuable — you have to know what to do with it. And that’s where good hand reading, good player reading and good judgment come in. They can change position from something incidentally useful to a seriously effective weapon.
If your personal level of general poker awesomeness is high, you can use position to make sleek moves, like a fox, on speed, that plays poker, unleashing well-timed aggression — making bets that are good, not because your cards are best, but because 2 unknown cards and a bet are too much to take for your opponent’s hand, which they’ve just told you is weak by checking.
When you’re in position…
1. It’s easier to bluff.
If the player(s) in front of you show weakness by checking, it makes betting to steal the pot a whole lot easier. If you try to steal from out of position, you’re making a bet into a much more dangerous situation since you have no idea what’s going to happen behind you.
There could be a monster, or they could’ve missed, or they could call you lightly just to see what you do on the turn because they think you’re stealing — it’s much more of a gamble.
2. You get more value from your made hands.
Letting people hang themselves by betting into you when you have the nuts is a strategy that virtually everyone understands instinctively as soon as they start playing.
When you have a strong hand in position, you have the option of calling or raising someone’s bet to control whether the next card gets drawn or not and/or control the size of the pot. Basically, you’re the one at the steering wheel, directing the hand.
You can also make big, suspicious-looking value bets from position which will get paid off because you’re more likely to be bluffing.
When you’re out of position with a strong hand, your only options are to check or bet. If you check, they can check behind and take a free card and you lose value that way. If you bet, it looks strong and you might just force them out.
3. It’s easier to fold strong losing hands.
If you feel like your opponent is showing some serious genuine strength, it’s much easier to fold made hands that are beaten when you’re in position.
From out of position, it’s much harder to know whether the strength being shown is genuine because they’re more likely to be bluffing. It’s kind of similar but the opposite to #2.
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After any significant hand, think about how differently it would’ve played if you were out of position. It’s nearly always better to be in position except maybe when you flop the nuts against an aggressive player — where you might earn an extra bet or two by checking to them.
Just look out for how position affects all of the things mentioned above and let experience handle the rest.
So then…
The reason why position is so important is very simple — you have the best of both worlds when you have it. You have more information with which to make your decisions and you have much more control over the cards and the size of the pot.
More information + more control = less risk = important.
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