Position and falling off balconies

I recently discovered a key point about No Limit Hold 'Em, and I'm going to share it with my loyal readers. Ready? Here it is.

In No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, position is very, very important.

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Yes, I know. Everyone knows position is important. That's Poker 101. Everyone knows it, but not everyone feels it. To understand the difference between knowing and feeling, imagine yourself on the balcony of a third-story apartment. You lean over the railing and look down to the sidewalk below. Now you stretch a bit farther out, and for the briefest moment your feet slip.

What emotion are you feeling at this point? Almost certainly fear. Why fear? Is it because you once read a book telling you that falling from high places was dangerous? Have you ever actually fallen off a third-story balcony onto a sidewalk? No. You instinctively feel the danger. The situation is obviously dangerous, and you don't need anyone to tell you so.

Back to position. Do you know it, or do you feel it? Until recently, I was a knower, not a feeler. I knew that starting hand requirements were higher for earlier positions, but I honestly wasn't entirely sure why. I did my best to resist the urge to limp in with QTo under the gun, but folding lovely hands like that felt like such a letdown (and that was certainly a feeling!).

I wish I could say I had an epiphany of some kind in my poker game that suddenly caused me to feel the importance of position. Nope, no such luck. Instead, I just fell off the balcony a few hundred times.

But even slow learners can be taught. Nowadays, when I'm in early position and see ATo at a tough table, my first emotion isn't excitement, but dread. Dread of splattering once again on the sidewalk. And now that I feel that dread deep down inside myself, I think I'm qualified to make you feel the same way. Here we go.

First, stop thinking of a poker table as a big circle with everyone sitting around it. The roundness of the table is an optical illusion that tricks beginners into ignoring position. Instead, unroll it into a long, narrow table. The guy in the small blind is at the front of the line. The guy with the dealer button is last in line.

Now I want you to imagine that we're changing the rules of the game. No money is involved. Every player starts with a score of one point.

At the beginning of each round, each player receives a piece of paper with a number written on it. Nobody knows your number except you. The numbers range between 1 and 20. Number 1 is the worst number. Number 20 is best. Number 2 beats Number 1, Number 3 beats Number 2, and so on. Number 20 is actually just a rumor; the rules say it exists, but I don't know of anyone who's ever actually held it. I saw Number 19 once on television. I did get Number 18 once, four years ago, and I've gotten Number 17 several times. The low numbers are really common; fifty percent of the time, you get Number 1. (For math weenies, the probability of a given number X is approximately 0.5 to the Xth power.)

There's one way to win this game: be the last player left. For each round of the game, people get a new piece of paper with a new, random number written on it, and the players either opt in or opt out for that round. All the players who opted in for the round show their numbers to each other. The player with the highest number wins the round and is awarded a point. The other players each lose a point. If they are left with zero points, they're knocked out for the rest of the game, and they lose.

What if people tie? Excellent question. For numbers higher than 5, ties lose and all players who have opted in lose a point. All other ties win and all players with the tying number receive a point.

If you're following the rules so far, you understand that it's bad to opt in to a round where your number is not the highest, especially when you're down to your last point. Opting out is boring, but it's safe, and you can theoretically get all the way to second place simply by opting out. Moreover, there's no such thing as a guaranteed win when multiple players opt in; even if you had Number 20, you'd lose if you went up against another player who had it, too.

So let's imagine you're first in a line of ten players in the first round of the game (meaning you have only one point). You haven't looked at your number yet. Do you opt in or opt out?

Even though you don't know what your number is, your instinct might be telling you to opt out. There are nine other players acting after you. If even one of them opts in with you and has a higher number, you lose the game entirely. (Note that unlike poker, this game doesn't increase your potential reward when more players opt in; at most you win one point during a round.) Chances are you'd be making the right decision to opt out without even looking at your number.

Now suppose you're last in line, and everyone ahead of you has opted out. Can you safely opt in? Of course you can; there's nobody after you. In fact, you'd always opt in to get the free point, even if you were holding Number 1. Once again, the number you're holding is irrelevant.

But what if instead the next-to-last guy did opt in. Now you're facing competition if you join him and opt in, too. If you did so, would you win? What number do you think he has? Or, to put it another way, was he taking a big risk by opting in? Not really; the only risk he was taking was that a single player (you) would opt in with a higher number than his. It's certainly possible that he's holding an amazing number like 19 or 20, but it's also quite possible that he'd opt in with 1 or 2, for the very same reasons that the last player would always opt in if he were unopposed (remember that in a low-number tie such as 1 vs. 1, both players win). So you should look at your piece of paper and opt in even if you have only a medium-strength number. In fact, given the fact that you have only a single late-position opponent, it would be somewhat rational (though pretty reckless) to opt in regardless of the number you have.

At this point we've established that opting in at the front of the line is always risky, but opting in at the end of the line is sometimes risk-free (in fact, it reduces future risk because you receive another point that protects you from elimination). Both cases are true regardless of the number you're holding. At the front of the line you're facing as many as nine opponents, but at the end of the line you know exactly how many you're facing.

Are you starting to feel why it's better to be at the end of the line? If not, then let me tell you the final rule I forgot to mention: if you lose, you are thrown off a third-story balcony. (Yes, this game is harsh, but it's educational so it's for a good cause.)

If it's still not hitting home, don't feel bad. I had originally imagined this article being only a couple paragraphs long and not nearly as intricate as it turned out to be. My goal was to describe a simplified game that emphasized position even more than Hold 'Em does, but still roughly resembled the actual pattern of Hold 'Em play. As it turned out, this imaginary game is simple, but it's hard to describe concisely.

But if you do now feel the beginnings of a new instinct about early vs. late position, congratulations! Next time you play poker, try applying that feeling to your game. In early position (sorry, I mean at the front of the line), formerly strong hands will show themselves as the chip-draining traps that they are. At the end of the line, you'll begin to recognize situations where your hand becomes a powerful weapon, regardless of the actual cards you're holding. And the same day you save a third of your stack by folding AJo under the gun only to see the hand develop into an all-in war between KK and QQ that you completely misread as a blind resteal, you'll also take down a pot on an ace-high flop with your 72o on the button against a middle-position guy who's convinced your ace's kicker is stronger than his. Both hands will intoxicate you, and that's a feeling you don't need to be taught.