Ball of Confusion

I'm almost half-way though The Elder Experiment and very little of the results make any sense so far. I should refrain from any comments until the experiment is over, but I assumed some kind of general pattern would be emergingby now. Instead it seems that the amount I am winning or losing from different positions is almost random.

The only thing that makes sense is that after 450 hands from every position, I have lost a lot of play money from the blinds. With $2000/$1000 blinds, I lose an average of $702 each time I am in the big blind and $582 from the small. These numbers make sense to me. One should, over time, lose money in the blinds.

The button - the position which is supposed to be the most profitable- is the only position outside of the blinds in which I am currently losing money! How does that make sense? The only answer I can come up with is that fault is with me and not with the stars; that I am over playing my hands from the button or that I am calling too much with weak cards. That is one good result of such pseudo-scientific experiments - they might expose weakness in your game that you can try to remedy.

Still, I can't see much in the results so far to convince me that position is as important as everyone says it is. I think I will make as much with AA from under-the-gun as I will from the button.

I remain a cynic.

The Elder Experiment

Back in September I promised to do an experiment that would measure my success playing hands from different positions. I never finished that experiment but I have recently started something similar. Here's how it works: I'm simply going to play the best poker I can on-line, and measure how much I win or lose from the different positions.

The first experiment I did (Tight is right)was based on 1,000 hands - which I think is really too small a sample. In no-limit hold'em, you can win or lose so much in a single hand that it can really skew your results and a very large sample is needed to average things out. So this time instead of 1,000 hands total, I'm going to play 1,000 hands from each position. As you can imagine this is going to take awhile, so please be patient. So far I have played 125 hands from each position, and the results are so strange (for example my results on the button are terrible, while my best results have come from the second-to-act position and the small blind) that I can't draw any conclusions at all, except maybe position doesn't really matter that much. Let's see what it looks like after the full 1,000.

In attempt to get results that might be similar to a "real money" game, I am playing "high-stakes" play money. That is 2,000/1,000 blinds with a maximum $200,000 that can be brought to the table. My thinking is that anyone who has built up their fantasy bankrolls high enough to play at these levels should be fairly good.

Why the "Elder" experiment? Bill Elder is a pro who is very vocal about the power of position, so I named it after him.

The Power of Position - A New Experiment.

I knew when I started a poker blog that sooner or later I would have to address the issue of position. According to every poker book I've ever read, position - where you are sitting at the table in relation to the blinds - is vital. Some players even say its just as important as the cards themselves.

While I wish I could write with authority on the subject of position, I'm afraid I don't really understand why position is all that important. Sometimes when I'm playing poker and I've just won a big hand in a showdown, another player will say something like, "You must have been so happy to get pocket kings in the big blind! That's an awesome hand to play out of the big blind." I smile and nod sagely, but I'm thinking pocket kings are great in any position you dipshit, what does the big blind have to do with it?

I've never quite seen what all the fuss is about with position. As you may have guessed from the fact that I devoted four straight posts to the subject of continuation betting, I'm fairly comfortable with the notion of acting first - that is out of position. I believe in the old poker saying that it takes a better hand to call than to raise, and I'm happy to act first (provided I'm facing only one opponent after the flop) and force my opponents to make difficult decisions.

The time I like to act later than every one else is before the flop. Then if I'm dealt a drawing hand ( A5 suited say, or 55) I can better judge by the number of players who have already entered the pot the likelihood of a big payoff should I hit. But the gurus all say that position matters most after the flop - and that's just where I don't care too much about it.

I'm enough of a realist to know that it is likely I'm wrong and everybody else is right. So I'm going to embark on a new experiment to teach myself the power of position. In this experiment I will play the same range of starting hands I did in my Tight is Right experiment, only this time I am going to play these hands without restriction to where my position is. I will then measure how much I made or lost from early position, middle position, late position, and the blinds. I will also allow myself to play good drawing hands like suited aces, and even small pocket pairs. The point is to see how I do playing from each position. Again I'll play 1,000 hands of play-money ring games.

Results should be ready in about three weeks.