HomeWe have already discussed in this series how your relative position at the poker table should affect your decision making. In this latest article, we take a look at how you should be thinking before the flop when you are in middle position.
Hand Hand Selection from Middle Position
When you are playing a hand from middle position, you have an instant advantage of those players sitting to your right in early position. They have to act before you, and have no information to work with on what the other players at the table might have in their hands. By contrast, you get to see what action they take before making a decision about what you do yourself. Middle position is not the best place to be, as those in later position have an even bigger advantage, but you do at least have a bit more to go on.
In middle position, you can open up the range of hands you can enter the pot with and be a little more adventurous than when you are sat in the early positions. Limping in is still not a strategy you should use too often, unless you have specific reasons to do so, but there are more hands you can think about raising with and plenty of hands you can consider calling a raise with. Remember, though, there are still going to be players to act after you who may have strong hands – so you do still need to be reasonably selective.
Assuming nobody from early position has put in a raise before you act, any of the hands that we mentioned you should raise with from early position should also be raised from middle position. In addition, you should also be raising with some of the lower pairs – from 6-6 upwards – and also with A-J, K-Q and Q-J. You can also consider raising with decent suited connectors such as J-10, or a reasonably strong suited ace such as A-10. If there has been a raise before you, then you need to keep that in mind, in theory at least, someone from early position will only be raising with a very strong hand. You should certainly be re-raising with a really strong pair such as A-A or K-K, but a lot of the hands mentioned above suddenly don’t look so strong and you should think about just flat calling or even folding and waiting for a better opportunity.
Please check back next week for the penultimate article in this series, on hand selection from late position.
