Solid Heads-Up Poker

Heads-up No Limit Hold’em is probably the purist form of poker one can find. It is you against your opponent for all the marbles. Most times when you are heads-up you have been grinding away at the tables for a number of hours or days to make the Final Table. Once you get there you still have eight other players that are just as hungry for the top spot as you are.

Pre-Flop Play

I have been preaching for years that heads-up play is not about going in with a pre-conceived strategy. As with any poker table or poker player you have to understand what your opponent is trying to do to you before you attempt to devise a strategy to counter their approach. So knowing your opponent and what they are capable of is high on the list of things you need to be aware of when playing heads-up.

Most poker players know that when you are short handed, 6 players or less, you must open up the range of hands you are going to play in order to succeed. This same understanding applies to heads-up play as well. You must also consider that the blinds are going to be sky high especially in an online structure. Hands like [A][T] – [A][2] now have significantly increased value and can be incorporated into your general poker strategy whereas earlier these hands would not even be considered playable in many situations. [K][Q] – [K][8] are now considered strong hands heads-up for the same reasons.

The power of position remains the same even more so when heads-up play is involved. Depending on what my chip count is in relation to my opponent I want to establish two things when playing heads up:

1. Let my opponent know that he cannot run me over and steal my blinds at will
2. I want to see flops and avoid a shove fest if possible unless I have a big hand to call with.

The idea of losing the small pots and winning the big ones applies even more so when playing heads-up because it is a do or die situation. Losing one large pot can literally lose you the tournament so you want to be smart about your aggression and calling all-in bets. You also want to be very coy about playing big premium hands. The standard 3x’s the big blind raise does not necessarily apply in heads-up play.

This is one of the very few scenarios in which I advocate the minimum raise. If your opponent happens to make a big raise while you are holding a premium hand like [J][J] – [A][A] or [A][K] I am going to flat call unless I feel a re-raise will put him in a situation where I am confident I can get the rest of the chips in the middle. Otherwise, your re-raise may push him out of the pot if he is simply bluffing at you attempting to steal the blinds.

Post Flop Play

You will often find yourself in situations where you have second pair and your opponent is firing out at you after the flop. This is where your understanding of your opponent and what they are capable of comes into play along with a little math and intuition.

For example:

Hero is holding [Q][T]
Opponent is holding [K][8] on the button.

We will assume that both players are even in chips and you called a pre-flop minimum raise.

The flop comes down [A][T][8] rainbow.

You check and your bets out. At a full table it’s an easy fold but heads-up I have a couple of options at my disposal with this situation.

1. Flat call and see how my opponent reacts on the Turn
2. Re-raise to find out if my Tens are any good

Either one of these two plays are correct depending on how well you understand whom you are playing against. If that player tends to be hyper-aggressive and has been raising my blinds over and over again then I may re-raise in this spot and likely get an instant fold. On the other hand, if I suspect my opponent has a big hand I can flat call and hope to hit something on the Turn that will give me two pair or trip Tens.

The Turn brings a [X] and my opponent checks.

Now that he has shown weakness I am going to bet out but I am not going to put myself in a situation where I lose a lot of chips should he come over the top. Had my opponent bet out here, let’s say he bets out half the pot, I have a decision to make. Good heads-up players can kill you softly and don’t need to have big hands to do it. They just chew you up pot by pot until your stack is gone.

If my opponent folds after I bet behind his check then I scoop a nice pot and the war continues. Obviously the flop texture plays a very large role in how you approach the Turn and River but the idea is to gain knowledge by controlling the pot size and seeing flops when heads-up. If you can do that successfully and get a little luck here and there you will win more than your share of heads-up situations.

By: Curtis Mayfield III

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