The 3 P’s of poker.
Power — The strength of your hand and your stack size.
Position — Where you are relative to other players involved in the hand.
Player — Any and all information or surmises you have about your opponent.

Power — Even the best hand possible is limited by your stack size (amount of money in front of you compared to what’s on the table and/or what other players have. Conversely, the worst hands you play are made that much more worse with low stack sizes.

There are exceptions to the rule regarding short stack and medium powered hands. Short stack strategy is to enter multi-way pots getting all your money in getting 4-1 to 7-1 payout if you hit. Short stack play is complicated and there are whole books written on it.

Position — Simply means when is it your turn? After 8 players make a decision or you make your decision first and of course how many players in front, how many behind. You will lose more money and win less money when you lose or win respectively. This is because you have more information when you act in late positions and less information from early positions. Information is the key to making good decisions and good decisions is what makes a winning player.

Player — Simply means even more information, but on specific players. It’s only applicable when you know specific information about opponents in the pot. Tells, betting patterns, Hand strength preferences and do they pay attention to position. Of those 4 points, tells are the most difficult because tell only become apparent in a stress or duress situation. Stress being commonly having to make a key decision for substantial money. Duress is more specific. It’s players attitude. Are they on tilt? Are they playing the ‘rent’ money?

The other 3 dictate the calibre of opponent you’re up against. If the player is solid on all 3, then they’re a solid player and a bit harder fish to catch. Just remember if you see an opponent show a weak hand, don’t immediately decide they are bad players. Evaluate their positions and stack size along with the preceding action. This will give you the reason why the entered the pot. When you evaluate an opponent in this way you build a profile in your head about that player and find ways to exploit them by either saving bets or earning bets against them.

A bet saved is a bet earned and you can make a good nightly profit just on positional steals and bets saved.