Heads Up Poker
Strategy
Heads up poker
is playing one on one against another opponent.
There are many ways that you might find your
self heads up against another player – playing a
simple ring game and all the other players leave
the table, it’s down to you and another opponent
in a tournament that you are playing or maybe
you selected a heads up poker game at your
favorite online poker room.
Heads up poker
games have become very popular and to be
successful at it you need a different strategy
playing heads up poker than you do when playing
at a full table.
Heads up poker
is about understanding your opponent. It is
more than just playing the cards. Players that
do well are players that play a lot of hands and
play them aggressively. Being a good player in
a heads up game not only requires aggressive
play but also requires the ability to read hands
well and to be able to play the poorer hands
well.
In your typical
ring game, you usually need a pretty good hand
in order to win the pot. This is not the case
in heads up poker. In heads up poker you need
to play the majority of hands. If you fold too
much then you will end up losing a lot of money
when posting the blinds.
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Your main
weapon in heads up poker is going to be the
raise. Especially if you feel you have a better
hand than your opponent. On thing to remember
is that starting hand values have greatly
increased because there are only two players in
the hand. Choosing to play high cards can be
very effective especially if you play them
aggressively.
Low and middle
pairs now end up being powerful as well.
When you have a
hand that you feel reasonably confident that you
can win with, that is the time to get money into
the pot and put the pressure on your opponent.
When you don’t feel your hand is very strong
that is when you look not to raise or put money
into the pot.
If you are up
against a player that you know bluffs a lot I
recommend that you slowplay a good number of
hands on both the flop and turn. Then I
recommend that you raise on the river.
Let’s take a
look at how that strategy looks in heads up
poker.
Our assumption
is that because we are playing heads up our
opponent is aggressive, sometimes super
aggressive. This is when I like to slow play my
hands. Suppose that I have a pair of Kings and
my opponent raises.
Most of the
time in this situation I will call him before
the flop to trap him later on. Suppose the flop
is K-9-5. Now I like to check and just call
again. Let’s say that the next card is a 2 so
the board reads K-9-5-2. Now I check again and
if my opponent bets, I finally raise. If I trap
my opponent here he will be less likely to bluff
on every hand, because he knows that I am
capable of trapping him again soon.
This is a good
example of playing the player.
Heads up poker
is fun, it is fast and you can expect some
pretty big swings in your bankroll. Fortunately
you can find some reasonable limits to play at
online. I like to play in $5/$10 heads up games
at
Bodog Poker. You can actually start out
in Heads up games for as little as $2/$4 or
$3/$6 at Full Tilt which I think is a perfect
limit to start out at if you are new to heads up
play. |
