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Beginner's Poker Course Part 3: Our Position In The Preflop Betting Round

To learn the game from the ground up, maybe we should start at the beginning—the beginning of the hand, even. That, of course, is preflop.

In the last article, we explained that Expected Value matters for every decision, and this certainly applies to preflop.

A lot can happen from preflop onward. A simple definition for EV we gave was: "The average single value you expect to get, given multiple potential outcomes." That's what I mean here by 'a lot can happen'.

In No Limit, there are billions and trillions of things that can happen from the first betting round onward. Try to average out all those EVs in your head to come to a single number for each action you can take preflop. An impossible task for us humans.

Not to discourage you, but rather to encourage you: 25 years ago, we had no way of knowing the EVs for certain preflop actions at all. Players relied solely on their intuition. This was also the time when players like Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu were just beginning to break through in the poker world.

Experience can go a long way in helping you develop a strong intuition for the value of the actions you take, even preflop! But buckling down and studying can truly be the driving force that makes you 'poker sharp,' like a shark's fin cutting through fish-filled water.

You may have become curious by now about me mentioning '25 years ago' earlier. 'So what about now?' is then a very viable question to ask. Of course, I'm talking about computers and AI. Nowadays, there are algorithms and programs powerful enough to explore all these situations and calculate these EVs. How these EVs are calculated is not important right now, but we will certainly get back to that, probably in another article.

The important part to remember is that yes, you can get better at sharpening your intuition through raw playing experience; but on top of that, nowadays, we have supreme study tools that can sharpen our game at a rapid pace. Tools that even 10 years ago, most pros could only have dreamed of.

We will certainly return to exploring these tools more later on. For now, let's circle back to the topic we promised to address. And that was preflop play and position.

Open-Raising Preflop

We talked about, well, warned, if you will, that the EVs of preflop actions are the hardest and most complicated to calculate because they encompass the most scenarios that can unfold from those points onward. We've also mentioned that there are tools available in today's poker landscape that can actually help us learn these.

Throughout the rest of this article, we will provide glimpses of what these charts show us and go through some of the basics of preflop play, including open-raising (and why to do so) and position. Then, in the next article, we will offer a more theoretical understanding of how these charts were formed and what the programs or algorithms really did to derive the EVs and strategies displayed in them.

So for now, let's just enjoy the strategies these preflop charts are showing us, and gain further understanding of correct play by identifying our first patterns in them.

6 Positions in Poker

As you know by now, there are 6 positions in 6-max games, positions that matter. We have the small blind (SB) and the big blind (BB), the button, of course, and three others. We will refer to them as such from now on:

• UTG
• HJ
• CO
• BTN
• SB
• BB

These positions are logically ordered by the preflop betting action. Let's go ahead and take a first look at a chart that displays the correct strategy for preflop UTG:

What do the little 'o's and 's's mean in the chart next to the 'non-paired' starting hands?

Raising or Folding Preflop

The chart shows a strategy that either raises or folds. There is no calling done for the UTG here, and when he raises, he is always raising 2 times the big blind, also called '2x' or 'min-raise'. The reason why we don't see calls here is really twofold:

To be fair, the makers also excluded calling from the algorithm's options to limit the number of scenarios that could unfold. Even computers have a hard time with the trillions and quadrillions of situations that can arise in poker, so anything that can help simplify things, the programmers will take that opportunity.

Excluding 'call' from its options was the obvious choice because they 'knew' beforehand (from earlier studies and/or general knowledge) that it also strategically makes sense to never call in this specific situation.

However, if we look further on the page from which this chart comes, we will see that the AI exclusively raises to 2BB (min-raises), never more than that. Why is that? Well, it's the same thing again: it is a way for the makers to simplify things and make the state space for the model to explore smaller.

But min-raising from that position is also just a good strategy; it is certainly better than to only raise 4x or fold. But it would be totally fine to raise a bit bigger here, like 2.5x the blind. You could mix it up too, like sometimes raise 2 times the blind, and other times 2.5 times. We would call that last one a 'mixed strategy'; and when it comes to 'mixing' your bet and raise sizes, we refer to it as 'splitting' (our sizes).

But no, GTOWizard chose to let the AI model not get that complicated. Other than min-raising generally being a solid strategy there, the real purpose and benefits of this can be seen as twofold: it would be easier for the model to converge because it wouldn't have to explore so many situations, and second, it will be easier for us to learn the right strategy! Double win.

Learning Simple Strategies in Poker

Especially at the beginning of your learning journey in poker, it is generally best to focus on learning simple strategies that you can actually apply in-game. That means not splitting our bet and raise sizes too much, if at all, and focusing on a simple strategy that is sound enough to win.

So let's say we follow the preflop charts that the AI of GTOWizard has calculated for us, which feature simple strategies that only involve folding or raising. These strategies are actually memorizable. But just to forewarn here, this trait really goes out of the window once we reach the flop and beyond. But don't worry, there are heuristics that can guide us to sound decisions for postflop play. We will cover many of these in future articles of this beginner's course, some of which will be specifically dedicated to certain postflop betting rounds and play.

And so we only min-raise and fold from UTG, all good and well. Let's now look at one position further, which is the hijaak (HJ):

Be aware that this is the strategy for the HJ if UTG has folded, and that it (drastically) changes if UTG would openraise instead.

We can immediately see here that we are raising more hands here. Now, why is that?

Raising Preflop to Steal the Blinds

It seems we left a bit of a hole in our story earlier, and now might be a good time to patch it up for you. It's about why we're strategically never calling here in these preflop situations from early positions like UTG and HJ.

Well, if you take a look at the picture above, you can see UTG is trying, or at least planning, to push over a whole line of people in front of him. Now, why would he want to do that? Why would he be so aggressive? And why is UTG so aggressive, only raising with a hand he wants to play and never calling?

It's really about stealing the blinds, mostly, I'd say. You see, with most hands in our UTG opening range (the one in the chart), we don't actually want anyone to put more money in the pot after us. Sure, with pocket aces and pocket kings, we want action, but with the rest? We'd rather just steal the posted blind money. So you might say this is really a solid goal we're aiming for, and a really good reason to raise instead of call. Even if everyone folds after we call from UTG, we would still have to go see a flop and play out the hand with the BB, because he has no incentive to fold; he can see a free flop now.

We can then say that, for every position, especially the early ones (we will later see that calling is a viable option from the small blind if everyone has folded before us), raising with every hand we want to play is indeed the right strategy. On top of being able to simply steal the blinds—and that shouldn't be seen as 'small money'—it also simplifies our strategy; recall that there is 'value' in that too for us humans (we're simply not intelligent enough for mega-complex strategies).

Please take a look at the cutoff's (CO) strategy:

The Better Our Position, the More We Raise

We now see a clear pattern emerge: the fewer people are left to act in front of us, the more we open-raise. We 'broaden our range' as our position improves.

Remembering the concept of EV: more hands become positive EV, or 'EV plus', the closer we get to that button, and here is its open-raising range:

We can see that BTN is opening a whopping 42% of hands here! A stark difference from the 17.6% that UTG opens. That is our first clue to how much position matters in poker.

What to Take Away from This Article

The real lesson of this article is that from the earlier positions preflop, we either raise or fold; we are trying to steal the blinds there, which is the preferable outcome for the vast majority of the hands we play. Since calling with pocket aces and raising with the rest would make us too predictable to observing opponents, we opt to either raise or fold with every hand we choose to play.

On top of that, we observed that the number of hands we open-raise differs drastically by position at our table. This has to do with the number of people left to act after us. The more people we need to 'push' out of the pot to try and steal those blinds, the stronger our hand should be.

And remember the concept of EV! The charts show us the hands that we can profitably raise preflop, when everyone before us has folded (or we're UTG). These are the hands where the action 'raise' has a positive EV number attached to it (or 0).

All the hands that have negative EV, we clearly fold. The hands that have exactly 0 EV, the algorithm ultimately chose to sometimes fold and sometimes raise (a mixed strategy).

In a future article within this beginner's course, we will dive into how those mixed strategies came to be, and how the algorithm arrived at the charts' strategies more generally.

We will also uncover a concept called 'GTO' (Game Theory Optimal). It is not for nothing that this website is called 'GTOWarrior', and that the number 1 poker AI tool in the world is called 'GTOWizard'.

Curious? We will explore GTO in the next article.