Some Holdem Hands to Play in Middle Position

It cannot be over emphasized—starting hands are crucial to win at poker. Selecting starting hands preflop can decide the overall outcome of one's play post flop. Hence, the best preflop decision we can come up with may prove to lead to an easy post flop play and win. This is the way a no-limit Holdem poker is played with lower stakes.

Starting hands in poker also has to do with positioning, especially when we're talking about no-limit Holdem. In fact, positioning may even dictate what kind of holdem hands we need. Basically, Holdem is a game of positioning because our position decides our play throughout. Like when we're in early position, we'll have to start the betting every betting round. With that fact, we decide what to do, what Holdem hands to select, and how we play with opponents.

Playing in late position means we come behind everyone's play. It's like we're after whatever the rest of the players are doing—and this is a plus factor for us. We are given the privilege of watching and gauging everybody's moves and intentions before we make a major decision. In early position, we're being watched and they take advantage of our first moves. In late position we watch them and take advantage of everyone's moves. Thus, in early position, we play rigid and very cautiously. In late position we play casual and loosen a bit.

But how about in middle position? We wait. Being in-between early and late means we have pros and cons all around us, and we better know how to identify the pros and get rid of the cons. Meanwhile, we must hold tolerable Holdem hands like face cards or at least a jack and a 10, or other pairs of some strength, the ones with middle ranks. These tolerable hands are good as long as there's no raise yet on the pot.

Such hands aforementioned are good but don't be too proud of them. They aren't that strong for us to raise anything substantial. Our big chance here is to hit something really good on the flop and come up with a winning playing Holdem hand. If someone raises the flop before the good hand comes, fold everything except paired face cards or an AK. If we have any of these, we re-raise.

Middle position in Holdem poker is playing our best before some lucky player raises the pot. It's doing our very best preflop.