Quick question On seat selection

Maybe you should tell us what your thoughts are first?

Why do I need to bias anyone?

Whale on left; good aggressive on right.

I'm just curious about your thoughts, since I assume 90+% of respondents will have the same answer to your question.

What are your thoughts, Always Fondling?

The same as yours, obviously.

I typically like to sit to the left of good aggressive players if I had to prioritize. But I wonder if the money I print off of whales would be maximized sitting to their left and if so, if it is enough to sacrifice position on the good reg.

I doubt it, because now the good reg can "control" both of you, if you know what I mean. Of course, it depends on how good the reg is.

If the reg is actually good, they’re going to fold a lot of the time. Meanwhile, if the reg is on your right and the whale on your left, you are going to be in a bad spot every time the reg raises, since if you 3bet you’re pushing the whale out but if you call you have a bad positional situation.

I think given the choice I would take position on the whale.

Position on whale, not close

If the reg truly wins he/she will play nitty

Having said that I tend not to go out of my way to switch to the max ev seat unless legitimately friendly with the whale; I think most recs/whales are aware they lose long term and are also aware of why a grinder prefers sitting to their left

The good regs I play with are not nitty. When I think of a good reg, I think of someone who is aggressive and knows when to put pressure on, etc. I want position on him. We'll get money from the whale regardless.

Glad this wasn’t unanimous. I tend to agree with Java. I am talking about a good LAG and not a good TAG so I generally prefer position on them and figure the whale will make enough mistakes to negate his positional advantage somewhat.

You always always want the better player on your right. This is pretty common knowledge going back to the 80s!

That is my feeling. But some very respectable forum members posted ITT that they do not share this sentiment.

Don't listen to everything you hear from other people. I feel like some people like to spread fake, false and hurtful information to make people worse. In fact I've noticed a lot of bad information on Tiktok, Youtube etc. I think not everyone has the intention of making players better.

lol I’ve been on this forum for 20 years. CallMeVernon is the COTM guy. He’s not trolling.

Either way I still can't agree with it. In fact if I got pushed out of a pot that the whale was going to be in because of the good reg all the better. I don't like fighting upstream a whale is supposed to be soft easy fun money.

Forced to sit between them, I want the aggro player on my right and the whale on my left. I'm envisioning spots where we can flat the aggro guy's raises with a wide range, and the whale will come along, or we can 3B and likely push the whale out to have position on aggro. Occasionally we'll open from UTG with the aggro in the BB, the whale will call, and the aggro will squeeze. We can either 4B or fold and let the whale keep the aggro honest.

If I could choose the order, I think I'd want the whale to the aggro player's left, and both of them to my right. Might not be terrible to have them both to our left, so long as the whale is to the left of the aggro player.

I'm thinking we want the whale to be in a position to call a lot of the aggro player's bets, and we want to be in a position to come over the top with a raise. Ideally they'll be on our right, but if they're on our left we can implement some limp-raises pre, and some check raises post.

^_^ this guy... how much you up this year doc?

Dude I'm a rec. I don't keep records like I really should. I binked a decent tournament win ($11k profit after buy in and tip) in January, and was crushing it the rest of the month, so up about $25k to start the year, but February has just been kicking me in the dick non-stop. Think I'm down around $5k this month, maybe $6k. Just soul-crushing defeats week in and week out. I know it's all one long session, but it's at the point I think I need to take a break for a few weeks and reset.

You didn't specify in OP that the good aggressive reg was a LAG. Most good regs aren't in my opinion. In my game the better players are basically all tags who don't leak any money, but that also means they will play rather nitty. In a configuration like that I think I would prefer to have position on the guy where most of our money would come from. But you also didn't specify what kind of whale we're dealing with. Are they aggressive or the limp/calling kind. All these things make a difference. In general I really think I prefer to have position on the guys that play >60% of the hands over the guys that only play 20-30%. But I dunno, maybe that would change if this LAG wizard is constantly putting me in tough spots.

I dunno, I don't think this is as clear-cut as some people seem to think. By the way, let's say there's no whale and only one (other) good reg at the table. I also don’t think our preferred position should be to the left of the good reg. I'd rather have them at the other end of the table, at least three seats away, to minimise the amount of hands we'd normally play against each other. I'd rather have people I think I have a decent edge on sitting directly next to me.