PokerA Beginner’s Guide to Heads Up No Limit Cash games – Part I
For sometime now, Heads Up cash games have been the fastest growing form of poker online. Playing Heads Up is exciting and a great learning experience too, so it should be no surprise that it has taken off recently. Offline, the costs of a paying for a dealer and table prohibit this type of poker from being played anywhere except at the highest stakes, but the Internet has changed all of that. Paddy Power Poker has its own Heads Up section, which is situated at below the No Limit Hold’em tables in the poker software. You can play any limit between $.01/$.02 and $100/$200. It might be a good idea to get some practice at the lower limits before jumping straight into the $100/$200 game!
Playing Heads Up is a great learning tool for any other form of No Limit Poker, because it forces you to analyse your opponent and adapt your strategy to beat theirs. Typically I would spend the first few hands of a match trying to feel out my opponent and get a feel for how his strength and weaknesses. I would then try and prey upon his biggest weakness. Usually this is something as simple as an unwillingness to fold, or playing too tight, but sometimes better players require a more advanced strategy. In all forms of poker it pays to be aware of your own image, but none more so than whilst playing heads up. Always remember that your opponent will be reacting to you, just as you are to him. Try and stay one step ahead of him.
An example of this would be against a reasonably good aggressive player. You get to the river of a big pot and check, and then call his bet so fast it was so clear you had no intention of folding. He is going to realise that you were tying to induce a bluff from him, so it’s very unlikely that if the same action occurs again he will bluff you as he will recognise what you are tying to do. A big bet in the next couple of hands after that action will tend to be a very strong hand.
Luckily the basics of a good strategy are easy to implement. Most successful Heads Up players never limp on their button. If the hand is worth playing, it’s worth coming in for a raise. If your opponent folds, then that's fine, you take down the blinds. And if he calls, that's fine too, as he is calling a raise out of position, making it easier for you to stack him, or to take down the now bigger pot with a continuation bet. Because it is Heads Up, you can play a much wider range of hands than you would 6 or 9 handed. Whilst on the button, you should aim to play roughly half your hands. You can adjust this depending on your game plan for the villain. Sometimes if I want to force the opponent to play back at me I will start to open 100% of my buttons. This forces your opponent to start three-betting you and can be useful to force the action from tight players.
When you are on the big blind, whilst you should be aware that you are going to be out of position for the rest of the hand, you are going to have to play a certain percentage of hands. If he is raising a lot, you need to work out a balanced approach, folding most of the time, calling some of the time, and three-betting some of the time. Be very glad if your opponent is regularly limping into pots! All limping achieves is gives a random hand a chance to win the pot.
One way in which Heads Up is very different than 6 handed is that your three-bets are going to get called most of the time, so to make life easy for yourself I would recommend that you polarise your three-betting range. Polarising a range just means that it will contain very strong hands and very weak hands, but not hands of medium strength. A good example of this would be a hand like A8. If you three-bet with this it can be very hard to play after the flop if you flop an ace. But a hand like AK is much easier (obviously), as is a hand like 52s. If you flop a pair with 52 and get any action you can be reasonably certain you don't have the best hand!
Use those medium strength hands, like A8 or JTo, as your calling range. Turning a profit with your calling range is all about knowing (or more realistically, guessing) how many bets your opponent will make on any given board. Some bad players will continue to fire bets into a pot even when they have a hand with a certain amount of showdown value. However most will play their hand predictably. So again, it all comes down to watching your opponent closely and trying to predict precisely how he will play. In general, in a raised pot players will fire one or two barrels, never three. It usually takes a very bad, or a very good player to fire that third barrel on the river.
I will discuss post flop play, game selection and other Heads Up related subjects in a further article.
Daragh Thomas