What's so great about the button?

At a full table, one in nine or ten hands you will find the dealer button in front of you. This is the little round icon representing the deal, which defines ‘position’ relative to it – early position is directly to the left of the blinds, mid position the seats after those, and late position the button and the cutoff (directly to the button’s right). As a beginner, still struggling to understand why A4 wasn’t such a great hand, and then later, having answered the first question, attempting to play ‘premium’ hands only whenever and wherever they cropped up, position seemed to be one of those things which had only a passing relevance to the game. Any hand can win, right? And good starting hands stay good most of the time, right?

Other players seemed to make a fuss over their hands in good position, for example, waiting to take a toilet break until their premium positions had been played, or remarking on how someone’s raise was a “button raise.” I remember wondering what all the fuss was about, coming from playing low limit fixed hold’em, where the power of position does not make such a large impact as in pot limit and no-limit games. Jump to playing no-limit tournaments a couple of years later and I find many moves dictated solely by position, especially when blinds get big relative to chip stack and ‘waiting for good hands in any position’ is not a viable strategy. Any strategy guide includes lots of ruminating on late vs. early position play, and when you end up playing a field who’ve all read the book, as it were, a whole extra level of complexity is added. When everyone has an eye on position, do the rules still hold?

As for those rules: generally, play should be tighter the further from the button you are seated, with a loosening of starting hand requirements etc. the closer you come to it. This is most simply because the earlier you are to act on every betting round, the less information you have to go on when making your decisions. If you’ve seen a flop in the big blind with five other players still in, you’ve got them all acting behind you every time – they benefit from knowing your action while you have only your own hand to go on. Part of the skill of reading opponents (and most of this skill when translated to online play) is analysis of betting, frequency and patterns: which hands are played in what position, and how strongly. When playing out of position your decisions go towards making your opponents’, while it’s more advantageous the other way around.

For this reason, certain actions in certain positions tend to raise a red flag. For example, a limp from a tight player under the gun or in early position can mean great strength – a big hand looking for a late position raise in order to re-raise and get it heads up or take it down. Or, an early limp from a loose player might generate a lot of follower limpers looking to see a cheap flop, and the late position raise could scoop up these weak calls along with the blinds. It all depends on the type of player sat in each seat, but these sorts of situations come up over and over again, and they are all to do with exploiting good (or bad) position.

But back to the button itself. It is now such common knowledge that in no-limit tournaments position is power, that it is almost inevitable that the button will raise, if it folds round to them. And quite right too – but the blinds can and do fight back, suspecting that a marginal hand might be trying to pick up their blind bet. I was watching someone play a $300 comp online and it was getting towards the bubble. He was dealt AQ offsuit on the button, and it folded round to him (the don’t-want-to-bubble tightness was setting in). He said, “I’m going to raise a tiny bit, and one of the blinds will try to take it away from me. Then I’ll move in and they’ll fold.” That is exactly what happened. The blinds had about as many chips as the button, and it was an understandable re-raise with any two cards. AQ doesn’t really want to be all-in - against 10 J, for example, it’s not a giant favourite – but there were enough chips in front of both players for the hand to play out exactly as he wanted. No all-in racing, just a suspicious button raise which won him a pot which was three times as big without showdown. If his hand had been much stronger (AA or KK, for example) he may have flat called the re-raise and hoped to get the blind to try again, but here he was happy to take the pot as it was.

This exact play would have worked with a worse hand too – any hand at all, in fact – and that’s the most interesting thing about no-limit hold’em: the oftentimes irrelevance of your actual holding when it comes to playing opponents who all know the little positional tricks. The story of how the rules turn into guidelines turn into a grey area in which action is dependent on situation and the other players goes on and on.

In the later stages of tournaments, with few chips, say around six big blinds, you’re most likely concerned with picking the first available spot to move in and take the blinds or double up to a playable stack. The bigger stacks in later position than you, if you move all-in in front of them, will probably have noticed your dwindling chips, too, and again they can make the decision (after you’ve taken all further decisions out of your own hands) whether or not to call and pick you off. With the benefit of position, a healthier stack can contemplate your chips and size you up in comfort for level of desperation, range of hands it would be acceptable to call with etc. while you just have to sit there and wait. Although the blinds are just as likely to call your short stacked all-in on the button, there are (obviously) fewer people to get through and if your biggest-chipped most probable callers are directly to your left, then so be it.

In cash games, similar advantages are gained on the button. In fixed limit, for example, you will be acting last so will know exactly whether the odds to a call for a draw are correct, or if there are a large number of players in the pot, whether you can effectively get them all to call a raise, sandwiching reluctant callers in the middle. In pot limit or no-limit, a button raise will often get a pot heads up eliminating a few serial limpers, or even be enough to push them all off. Because everyone tends to know that the strength of a hand needed to call or raise decreases with proximity to the button, a button raise with a real hand can be more profitable than an early one – you may well encourage a dominated hand to come in (AQ to AK, for example).

In short, the button is your friend, and it is good to use it in a variety of ways. It doesn’t matter whether your opponents are conscious of position or not – if you are it can only help your game. The benefits of using position, good or bad, to your advantage rank right up there with any other skill in poker, and being conscious of it as a determining factor for action is a good first step.