I was at my synagogue today.  There was a Bar Mitzvah reception in our downstairs function room.  Nearly 250 people showed up. Seating was at a premium.  Fortunately, I escaped the sanctuary a little before the rabbi was completely finished with her remarks,  so there were still a few seats available when I arrived.  Few things are worse than trying to eat Jewish food on a paper plate standing up!

After walking through the buffet line and filling up my plate with bagels,  lox, cream cheese,  Caesar salad,  fresh vegetables,  and tuna fish,  I looked for the right place to sit down.  Spying a seat next to my friend Ron,  I walked over,  said hello and sat down.  We had a nice conversation and I enjoyed one plate and then a second filling from the buffet line.  Easy!

Not so in poker.  Although most people treat seating at a stud poker game just like they would seating at a wedding or Bar Mitzvah reception,  the truth is that getting the right seat at the right table is a skill at least as important as remembering cards.  Not all of the seats have the same potential for making money.

Now before you start railing against my idea as some superstitious belief in a lucky seat,  hear me out.  This has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with skillfully winning money.

Let's start with the table.  We covered the notion of finding a good game in an earlier column.  It's critical that you find a game with plenty of loose,  passive, bad players.  They're the ones who will freely and easily give you their money when you have a winning hand.  So you need to seek them out while avoiding the games with the good,  tight,  aggressive players.  The more loose-passive players you can find,  the better.  Think of them as the table with the best food.

But finding the best table alone is not sufficient.  You must also decide where to sit.  In poker as in real estate,  location is very important.  Which seat do you want at the ideal table?  There are several factors to consider before you sit down.

Let me first introduce a concept that I learned from Mike Caro,  one of poker's greatest theorists.  Imagine that you could affix a time-lapse camera to a helicopter that hovered over the casino poker room.  Forget,  for this exercise, the terrible effect that helicopter would have on the cards on the table.  Just imagine a stationary camera peering down at the poker game and filming,  in time-lapse style, a frame every few minutes or so.  You've seen those movies that watch a flower bloom and then die in about 30 seconds.  Imagine that at a poker game.

What do you think you'd see?  Well,  you'd see the blur of the arms and hands as they moved into and out of the pot,  tossing and placing chips,  every so often scooping a bunch of chips back to the stacks.  But what would you see if you focused on the stacks themselves?  Simply this:  You'd see that the chips moved clockwise around the table.  Over the course of a full 24 hours you'd notice that while some stacks would go up and some would go down, generally,  stack sizes would increase clockwise;  those to the left tending to get larger.  In general,  the money would rotate in that fashion,  as players bet, called,  raised,  and folded it would appear like an unsteady but clearly discernible wave,  moving steadily if unevenly,  like the  "wave"  of fans at a baseball game.

What does this have to do with your seat?  Well,  you'd like to be in a position to gather in as much money as possible from these seemingly immutable waves as they passed in front of you.  You'd want to be to the left of the biggest stacks, giving yourself a chance to use your betting action to pull in this money as it moved in front of you from your right before other players got to make their grab for this money.

That's the concept.  Perhaps it's too broad and vague for you to grasp intuitively. So let me be more specific and precise.

Players with large stacks tend to be looser and more aggressive than short stack players.  Guys who have just the minimum amount of chips on the table tend to be tighter and more conservative.  Of course this is a huge generalization,  but take my word for it.  That's an observation based on thousands of hours of casino play.  Accordingly,  you want to be in a position to see what they're going to do before you act so you can make your best stab at making the hand heads up between you and them.  In this way,  you'll give yourself the greatest chance of winning their money.

Even more specifically,  imagine for the moment that everything I've written is correct and you're seated to the immediate left of the big moneybags at the table.  He's in all sorts of hands,  whether he is strong or not.  Now ask yourself, would you like to play your medium strength hands against only this guy or with a few other players competing against you for this guy's money?  Isn't the answer obvious?  Go heads up against the weakie,  no?

So when moneybags is in the hand for either a call or a raise and you have a good hand,  you want to raise him,  to make it more expensive and therefore less likely that others will also call.  Him they'd be happy to play against.  But him and you,  that's a different story.

Here are a few other considerations that should guide you to the right seat.

Some players in these games will actually be quite good  --  playing very aggressively and selectively.  Where would you like to sit relative to them?

The answer is that you want to sit to their left,  so you have the advantage of seeing how they act before you have to decide to act.  If they're not in the hand you will be more likely to play.  If they raise,  on the other hand,  you'll be less likely to play your medium-strength hands,  knowing these other players generally to be very strong when they're in a hand.

So you want to sit to the left of the loose moneybags as well as to the left of the skillful tight-aggressive player.  But what if one is on one side of the table and the other is on the other side?  Hey, I didn't say this would always be easy, simple,  or even linear.  Sometimes  --  often, in fact  --  decisions are difficult and answers are vague.  For me,  most of the time,  I'd take my chances with the tight-aggressive player,  and sit as close to the left of the loose big stack.  I figure that the tight-aggressive player,  like me,  won't be in many hands.  So the chances that we'll tangle with each other is relatively small.  More important is my position relative to the guy who is in nearly every hand.  How I play against him will affect my bottom line more than how I play against the solid player.  So I'll take the seat to the big stack's left and pass up the seat to the immediate left of the good player,  if given exactly that choice.

"Oh!"  you exclaim,  "But what if there's only one seat open?"

Well,  smart guy,  then you take the one seat.  But you should always ask for a seat change button for just this reason.  Then when the next player leaves the table you will have first crack at moving to the open seat.  If you're happy where you are,  then stay.  But at least you'll have the choice of moving.