Middle Position
Nothing really changes much even when you get to middle position. Once again if you are sitting in a game where the players are passive and have fair sized stacks and also have the capability to lose their entire stack needlessly then you could speculate in un-raised pots a little more but the pot has to be categorically un-raised. Don’t try getting cute by calling an early position raise hoping that you can take the pot away from your opponent who likely holds nothing but high card poker hands.
Remember that your position although better than early position is still not that great and there are several poker players still to speak after you. The problem with your poker hand is that you need to hit the flop big time in order to continue and a pre-flop raiser will more than likely fire at the flop irrespective of what arrives so what are you going to do then when you miss?…..or were you hoping to flop a straight or a flush. If you were than I don’t much fancy your chances.
Depending on the poker game, if it has been folded around to me and I have a tight table image and the game is relatively normal with no aggressive players to my left or there is not much re-raising going off then I may sometimes throw my opponents a curve ball by raising from middle position with a connector whether it is suited or not. You simply cannot wait until you have a premium poker hand all the time before you raise otherwise your play is just going to be too predictable to your opponents.
But there is one thing that needs to be pointed out here and this is that there are in fact slight differences with regards to middle position. For instance in a nine handed game then after the two blinds, we have the button and the cut-off who are in the two latest positions on the table. This leaves five players in between the blinds and the cut-off in a nine handed game. Early position could certainly be classed as the first two to speak after the big blind but could also involve a third person as well.
So when early position becomes middle position and when middle position becomes late position is not always clear cut and especially when players are regularly sitting out or leaving the game. In a typical ten handed game, I would be much more inclined to raise from say the seat to the right of the cut off than I would the seat that is three seats to the left of the under the gun player despite many poker theory books stating that both are middle position.
So now we can see that middle position plays just that little bit differently to early position and the overall game dynamics are different. We will see in the next part on playing connectors just how things change from middle position to late position and how that impacts online poker strategy.