One of the first things a new player should learn about is the importance of position plays. It's all part of coming up with successful game plans. A player who doesn't understand what winning poker is about might not understand what kind of a part correct positioning plays in poker. A player who understands winning poker, knows he's going to have to take his position in account everytime he's making a play (or decided against).
Generally, being in position is better for you. Actually, it's almost always "better if it's better you're in position", meaning that when it's better for you to be out of position, you don't really want to be in that situation, but you'll just have to in order to survive. Like I said, though, generally you want to be in position. But saying this doesn't really explain why, so let's get into reasoning:
Benefits of Being in Position
In case you didn't know what being in position means, basically, your opponent will have to make his decision first. You'll make yours after him. This is why being on dealer button is the best position (again, generally!) - you'll always be the last one to act. So, you're in position against your opponent when he's got to act first, before you.
And that's the most obvious benefit. You get more time to make a decision, but most importantly, your opponent will have to do something before you, so you're going to get at least some help out of that. Him being the first one to act shuts out some of his possible actions, and whatever he does will tell you something. Extra help, regardless of what it was. And if you were out of position, this advantage would go your opponent and you get nothing.
Building up your image comes through making good decisions consciously when you're in or out of position. So when you make a lot of check raises on the flop, your opponent will think twice before betting to you when he's in position. If you like to check the flop behind, your opponent will think twice before just checking to you if he wants any value out of his hand. Anyway, you'll be able to control your opponent's better when you're in position.
Nobody wants to give their opponents free cards because they lose so much value, and this is a really big problem when you're out of position. You have to know whether your opponent is going to check or bet once you check to him. Players who tend to check behind with mid-strength hands are not the ones you should check to. And we can list these kinds of things forever... if you bet to him, you need to know whether he likes to call or raise with strong hands, with medium hands, with weak hands and air. The fact that you don't know anything about what he's going to do, except for what information you gathered together pre-flop, makes playing out of position a real challenge. Whereas in position you already know his first move on the flop.
OOP benefits
By the way, OOP is a poker term for "out of position" and I'll use that term in this article from now on. So, what kind of benefits can we gather together from being OOP? Simply said; stuff that we want to get done before our opponents get a chance to do. I think generally you're in a somewhat trouble when you *must* do something before your opponents. Usually, these situations occur in tournaments when you just have to go all-in without having anything, and you know that your opponent doesn't have anything more than you. It's necessary for you to go all-in in order to get whatever money is in the pot and this way survive at least a bit longer.
For example if you put your opponent on a straight draw, a flush draw or both and he doesn't hit on the river, you've got air, it's very important to act first and just go all-in if you want to "steal" the pot. You could make an argument for being in position and this way to see if he checks or bets, and you would know if he's got something, but what if your opponent knows you haven't got a thing, either, and just decides to push you out himself.
Playing OOP might become extremely valuable when you play against an opponent who's overplaying in position. He basically plays very spewey poker and loses his sense of value in poker. These kind of opponents are simply your dream opponents to play against when you're OOP. Checking to them earns you a chance to check-raise quite often, and smaller bets get raises easier. You'll just have to be very aggressive against him and let him "spew" his money away. You'll meet these opponents quite a lot when you play $1/$2 and $2/$4 games (NL or PL, Texas Holdem or Omaha). Those players are just starting to learn how in position is better and they're just ridiculously overplaying questionable hands in questionable spots.
These strategies, like every strategy in poker, is totally player dependant. You'll have to study your opponents habits, betting patterns, and based on this you'll be able to figure out what kind of hands you can play OOP or in position. In following article, I'll continue discussing position in poker and I'm trying to give more examples on how to decide what kind of hands you can play OOP... and how.
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