The Heads Up Thread

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Me and Gaf have played a bit over the last couple of days and it's been very even and a really interesting battle. There's a lot we can discuss and in general there's a lot the forum can discuss about heads up play so thought it would be a good idea to make a thread! I don't know if Gaf noticed but i tried out a lot of different moves during our game and i learnt an awful lot about my own game, his game and HU in general. I think i out thought myself way too much in our last game because i'm still a HU noob trying to learn the dynamics of it. I'm interested to know what Gaf thinks about HU as he's played tonnes more of it then me. We're looking at recording our next match, maybe with commentary just for entertainments sake!

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Re: The Heads Up Thread I just had a good NL100 HU match lasting about 200 hands i won near 2 buy-ins but it should have been more really ideally. The match panned out like this: My opponent was limping every button, and calling about 3/4 of my button opens so we had a fair bit of post flop action so i had to find out as quick as possible how high he rated his hands i.e 1 pair, 2 pair, high cards in the main. I quickly found out he had no concept of value betting as he checked down 1 pair a few times and called down 2 pair on non threatening boards so early on i established that whenever he reraised he had a hand, and when he v bet say half the pot on the river he had a vstrong hand. I found this out by calling him down and so i went behind about half a buyin early on but made sure i used the info to my full advantage. As he was calling pre flop a lot i cbet the flops almost always as it's going to be very profitable against a passive person who doesnt fold preflop. When we got to showdown i realised early on he couldn't fold to cbets at all and would mostly see the turn with any air then fold to further pressure. So i was in an awkward position for a few hands until i figured out what to do against someone who wouldn't fold the flop and didn't evaluate the value of their hands. I decided if they like to see flops and fold on later streets i was going to widen my raising range OOP pre flop to about half the hands as against a flop calling station i was bound to hit a big hand and get paid off eventually and with the river read on his vbets i wasn't concerned with losing big pots with marginal hands to him. Another adjustment i then made was to be tighter on the turn and river. So basically i gave myself a looser image by raising more pre flop to get max value out of taking down slightly larger pots against a passive player post flop, but unknowns to him i was going to only play big pots on later st's with big hands. The final piece of the jigsaw was to show bluffs in larger than average pots. I did this in two large pots and a couple of other solid pots with my read that i point out in the first paragraphs that if he was passive on later st's it was quite easy to push him out. So now with the selective shown bluffs i gave myself a real loose image with the large raising % pre flop, high cbets and shown bluffs. This was to get him to overvalue his 2nd and 3rd pairs on later streets so i could garner extra $ from my vbets on the river although as i say earlier i was playing a lot tighter on turn and river so was always showing down the goods. It got him riled and he commented do i ever miss the board so my plan worked as he started to call down weaker and eventually cracked and pushed pre with J8s vs my AK which held up. I was up near 3buyins at one point when my plans were in full flow but got uber cold decked with A5 on 3624 board vs his hit gutshot 57. So ended up nearer to 2 buyins. So i'm really happy that i can adjust in real time HU and that my tactics worked out. HU is really about playing your opponent and adjusting all the time and i really like the intimacy of playing 1 person, getting reads and that kind of thing, as opposed to 6max where it's largely about the big pots and essentially hoping to cold deck your opponents more than they cold deck you. I'm not as convinced as Gaf there's more money in HU then 6max but i see the variance as lesser definitely.