You and a group of colleagues or friends arrive at a restaurant and are shown to your table. You now have a split second to make a decision that could make or break your evening: which seat position do you grab?

Thankfully Alex Cornell has written a handy visual guide to help you make the right choice, thereby avoiding the need to spend the whole meal sat next to the dullest conversationalist or in a place where you can barely hear what your fellow diners are discussing.

Here’s an excerpt:

6 Person Circle: How loud the restaurant is determines how important it is that you claim a middle seat. A quiet space allows for cross-table diagnoal talking, and generally one conversation. A loud space however forces multiple conversations and less diagonal.

Now go over to Alex’s site and read the whole thing.