Big leak remembered

I was having a hand discussion with Jared that made a light bulb go on for about the 50 zillionth time probably.  I forget all the specifics, but he raised preflop with 99 and got called by a regular in later position.  Villain is super aggro postflop, like 5+, I think.  Effective stacks were 100bb or maybe a tiny bit deeper.  I don't remember the board 100%, but I think it was T86 rainbow.  He c-bet some reasonable amount, and villain minraised.  Jared asked me what I would do, and what my plan was for the hand.  It's a pretty sick spot, and I don't like any choice, really.  I went into the IM tank and finally decided although I didn't like any option, there was too much chance he's ahead, so I said I would call the minraise, check/call most turns, and re-evaluate on the river.  Probably folding if he 3-barrels big though. 

He asked for villain's range and we talked about that for a while, talked about hypothetical turns, and what if we had AA or a set, etc., etc.  Then we came back to the actual hand and my plan for it.  He gave me credit for some reasonable thinking about the hand and they hypotheticals, and for realizing that all options pretty much suck.  And he did say that, especially with a little history, flat calling the flop  and check/calling the turn is not totally unreasonable, but it's likely going to lead to a lot of tough river decisions, especially against an aggressive player.  So, what he advocated for me was to just fold to the flop minraise.  It might be a small mistake, but it avoids a potentially large mistake.  It's important to note that villain had not yet abused his position; essentially there was no real history.

Basically, out of position + out of a clearly good option should  tend to = out of the hand.  At least for me.

Of course, we're going to play OOP sometimes.  But when we are, we need to make sure that we've either got superior hands or superior skill relative to our opponents.  Obviously, it's always good to have better hands and more skill than our opponents.  My point is that when we're not sure where we stand, we could still justify not folding in position, but if we're not sure where we stand out of position, it's much harder to justify staying in the hand.

Interestingly, I was listening to Tommy Angelo and KRANTZ yesterday, and they both talked about position quite a bit.  Anyone who's read anything by Tommy Angelo knows how important he feels it is to play in position more often than your opponents.  KRANTZ had an interesting take on it as well...he said that if you look at forum strategy posts, the overwhelming number of call vs. fold questions come up when Hero is OOP.  And parenthetically, in that spot, people like to call too much, in general.