I’ve been mulling the notion of position when tournament tables shrink. When there are nine at the table, you have the small blind (sb), big blind (bb), under the gun (utg), button (btn), cutoff (co), hijack (hj), and lojack (lj). Typically, the remaining two spots are referred to as utg+1 and utg+2, which seems to represent a prevailing philosophy that they are closer to the blinds than the button (else I suppose they’d be lj-1 and lj-2).
What about when the table shrinks to five or six players as it will do at times when three or fewer tables remain? Does utg remain utg in your playing strategy, where your range presumably shrinks like guys know what in cold water, or do you consider it the lojack with six players remaining and hijack with five, warming to more aggressive play?
Yea, it’s more the latter, although it still sucks to be first to act pre when you want to open, but the post flop position is more important so long as you’re deep enough to play the later streets.
Post flop position is still the same regardless. What matters is that 6-handed, the first player to act now has 5 unknown hands behind them instead of 8. That’s all
If anything, Lojack 6-max can be slightly wider than Lojack 9 handed. The three people who have already folded when 9 handed make it slightly more likely that the remaining players have a strong hand, so the optimal Lojack 6 max range is somewhere in between the 9 handed Lojack and Hijack ranges.
I mean if you are 6 handed UtG and are afraid of playing an early position, just remember that the LJ post flop is generally more important than being UtG pre. Which I believe you were also saying.
As for deep enough, I mean not in ICM, where we would be in shove/fold mode, in which the blinds are the best place to be and UtG is the worst as we will not be playing post-flop.
