There’s an interesting tension between advantage and initiative in poker. The player who is last to act has a positional advantage — he has the most information in a game of incomplete information. The player first to act has the initiative. He can choose what information to provide to players with position. If you adjust for the incompleteness of information this is similar to the idea of tempo in Chess.

Imagine two players are playing blind (they haven’t looked at their cards). One raises in position and the other calls from one of the forced bets out of position. No matter what the flop comes, assuming neither player knows the other is blind, the first person to act wins.

If the player with initiative checks (calls zero) then the player with position can bet and force a fold. If the player with initiative bets he pollutes the information available to the player with position, who is now forced to fold instead.

In an actual game there are several confounding factors, but not as many as you might think.