Texas Hold’em Experts offer various strategies for adjusting your play according to table position, unlike hand ranking which can be readily determined mathematically, position strategies are a bit more of a black art. I was curious to see just what effect position may have on your outcome. I extracted winner table position statistics from 270,000 hand histories. Only pot winner’s positions were noted, return on pot investment data was not available.
The graph show a consistent bump for the big blind position, so consistent over all table sizes it looks like an anomaly, particular with conventional wisdom being that late positions are best, perhaps the up front investment may motivate the blind positions to play a bit harder. At least the graph does show under the gun being the worst as expected, but not by much.
Percentage table below
| Position–> | SmallBlind | BigBlind | UG | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| players:10 | 11.28% | 13.45% | 8.99% | 9.15% | 8.97% | 9.33% | 9.6% | 9.53% | 9.85% | 9.85% |
| players:9 | 12.65% | 14.7% | 9.94% | 9.88% | 10.38% | 10.3% | 10.4% | 10.63% | 11.13% | |
| players:8 | 13.81% | 16.52% | 10.82% | 11.54% | 11.67% | 11.56% | 11.69% | 12.37% | ||
| players:7 | 15.46% | 18.4% | 12.31% | 13.1% | 13.07% | 13.51% | 14.14% | |||
| players:6 | 18.04% | 20.92% | 14.92% | 14.51% | 15.65% | 15.95% | ||||
| players:5 | 20.63% | 24.3% | 18.15% | 18.26% | 18.66% | |||||
| players:4 | 25.8% | 29.7% | 21.87% | 22.63% | ||||||
| players:3 | 33.56% | 36.36% | 30.08% | |||||||
| players:2 | 50.63% | 49.37% |
Taken from the same IRC “No Robot” hand history data for 273,357 hands played 1998 – 2000 that the starting hand win % table uses.