Playing to Win in Late Position Pre-flop
Playing to Win in Late Position Pre-flop
Playing to Win in Late Position Pre-flop
Late position is defined as being on the button, being one to the right of the button in the cutoff or being two to the right of the button in the hijack seat . Being in late position provides the distinct advantage of acting last or nearly last in subsequent rounds of betting giving you the opportunity to gain information regarding the strength of your opponents' hands before you decide what to do with yours.
Your position, if you are observant, provides you with the luxury of limiting your mistakes and inducing more mistakes from opponents remaining in the hand. In late position before the flop and the action comes around to you and you are at a full 9 player ring table, there may or may not have been limpers or raisers. At this point you know very little except the tendencies of the players at the table. Do they tend to be loose, tight, passive, aggressive. But there is another thing you know and that is the tendencies of the players yet to act behind you all the way through to the big blind. Before you make a play, any play, think about these players as well.
You needn't know everything there is to know about your opponents. That is impossible. Pre-flop you are really only interested in knowing tendencies in order to put an opponent on a range of hands that you may or may not want to engage. Tendencies play an important role in determining just what range to put your opponents on. If they tend to see the flop with any two cards with a call the range of hands you put them on is quite wide. If they tend to only want to see the flop with monsters or very strong hands then their range shrinks significantly.
Being able to compare your opponents' range of hands they are willing to open with to your hand range provides a powerful advantage. Let's say you are in the hijack seat and all the players before you have folded. The action is on you and you find yourself with a middle pair, say 99. This is a hand you probably would call a single raise with in late position but you are the first to act and there are only four players left to act, the cutoff, button and the two blinds. The button and cutoff are solid, generally tight players and will probably fold to a raise if they don't hold a strong hand. The small blind is a loose but passive player and has not defended a blind in the past four opportunities. The big blind is a loose, aggressive player who will defend his blinds with almost any two cards. Your 99 is almost certainly the best hand, favored over the four random hands behind you. The correct move here is to raise. There are a number of really good reasons for this move:
You may be able to buy the button by causing both the cutoff and the button to get out of the way and fold leaving only the blinds. You now act last in subsequent betting rounds.
You may force a fold from the four remaining players and win the blinds. Stealing the blinds means, at the very least, that you play the next circuit around the table for free or, if there are antes, for only the cost of the antes.
Stealing the blinds adds to your hourly profit rate or your profit as determined by big bets earned per 100 hands (bb/100). When you consider that on average a good player playing limit hold 'em will earn between 1 and 3 big bets per hour then winning any size pot clearly adds to your ability to make a profit at the table.
In late position a raise cannot be interpreted in terms of purpose. Is it a raise for value, to gain information, to eliminate opponents, to bluff or semi-bluff? From late position the purpose of your raise it well disguised. It may just be a position move but opponents cannot be sure unless you play like a donkey and try to steal blinds at every opportunity.
If you raise from late position, you are setting up your opponents for future plays unless you do it so regularly that your opponents begin to not give you credit for a hand and start calling you down every time you make a move. If you are deceptive, on the other hand, then sometimes you'll raise with the 99 or TJo or other speculative hands while other times you will hold monsters AA, KK, QQ, AKs, AKo and the like. Many loose players with a modest hand will call you through the showdown thinking that you are just making a late position move. You will win a lot of money.
Playing from late position when you are the first to act is one thing. Playing from late position when there have been a couple of limpers and a raiser is quite another. A raise from early position is an announcement effectively saying, I have a very strong hand and it would be best to stay out of my way. If the raise comes from middle position the raiser is indicating a hand that may be strong but may also be a strong drawing hand like suited connectors. It is also entirely possible that someone in very early position merely limped with a monster like AA and is just waiting to reraise when the action returns to him.
Here is the basic rule of thumb I follow when in late position and there have been limpers and raisers in front of me: the more people that have entered a multi-way pot, the stronger my hand must be to get involved. If there is one player in front of me and I hold a hand I might have called with such as the 99 I will raise 3x the original raise to eliminate and isolate. More than one player in front of me I play defensively by calling with speculative hands or raising to hit a big hand and fold if I miss the flop.
The discipline needed to act defensively comes from the ability to not think in terms of money invested in the pot that needs defending, that thinking just costs you money, rather it comes from making the right decisions on the current play. If you are in a multi-way pot pre-flop and you get nothing on the flop (70% of the time) the correct action is to check or fold. Only continue on if you have a significant piece of the flop, for example, if you began with 8h7h and the flop comes 6h9s3h you now have an up and down straight draw (8 outs) and a flush draw (9 outs) along with 3 8's and 3 7's that could improve your hand (another 6 outs but these outs must be discounted because neither one provides you with top pair so I would assign only 2 outs in this situation). You have a total of 19 outs that may help your hand but, in the final analysis, I discount outs over 11 by 50% so I would only count 15 outs. Your speculative draw with two cards to come is now a 2:1 against to make a winning hand by the river. On a different flop, say AcKs9d, you have missed the flop completely and should just get out of the way when the action comes to you.
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