There are a lot of small variables that go into one’s strategy at the poker table, but let’s talk about the seating position strategy. Now, not that seating position doesn’t change on every round (no, you don’t play musical chairs) but seating position is all about where you are in reference to where the dealer is. If you are seated next to the dealer and one of the blinds, then you will be at the very end of the round.

The few people sitting to the left of the blinds are the first to act in the hand. The bottom line is that the people who have to act first have to assess the hand that they were dealt and make a quick assessment of whether they want to raise or not. If you’re at the beginning of the hand, you’ve got to have a really good hand to raise at this point. Let’s talk about the table as a whole.

Recall that the blinds are the two sitting to the left of the dealer; the big blind will play last, with the small blind playing before him and the dealer immediately before the small blind. These three players are typically said to be in the best position for the game, but obviously, the big and the small blind had to put money in the pot at the beginning, so how good can the hand be? Still, it’s good that at least there’s something good coming as a result of having to pay at the beginning. Still, the people playing toward the end of the first time around in the hand are at a distinct advantage because they have a pretty good idea of what the other people at the table are holding. On the other side of the coin, if you are one of the first few people to start the round, you have absolutely no idea what other people are holding. When you don’t know what the other players have in their hand, it’s extremely difficult to make decisions about how you should play your game. You know what you yourself have in your hand, but you don’t know how that hand stacks up against the hands of the other people at the table. An important thing to remember is that it’s all relative when it comes to having the best poker hand.

An important thing to remember when playing poker and worrying about your seating position at the table is that with every hand that is played, your position changes. If you start out with a not-so-ideal position, you will not stay in that position. This is probably the number one reason that poker should not be played with the dealer always staying in one position. ‘Passing the buck’ is one of the oldest practices in poker, traditionally done with a knife, now done with a white chip that says ‘dealer’ on it. Though the way of doing it has significantly changed, the reason for doing it is stronger than ever. The dealer has an unfair advantage to cheat while he’s dealing the cards and shuffling them, so it stands to reason that the role of the dealer should be passed around and around the table so that one person is not the dealer for the whole game. This affects seating position, even though it is not done to rotate people’s playing strategies in regard to their position at the table, it serves in that purpose of rotating the seating pattern around the table. This helps everyone to sometimes be in a better position at different times in the game.