|
Part V-B: Heads-Up Play
Most online poker sites have
rooms designed with only two seats, for heads-up, or one on one play.
These rooms used to start at the 1/2 Limit blind level, before
micro-games gained in popularity. As far as a 1/2 or lower Limit
heads-up room goes, they might be the only heads-up blind levels where
you are likely to find some soft competition. However, at blind
levels this small, the rake that the house is taking is so large
relative to the allowed buy-in amount and bet size, that I would say
its not worth playing in them even you feel like you can win.
After a five hundred hands or so, literally 15% of the money that you
and your opponent started with has gone to the house. That makes
a long term profit pretty difficult in this kind of room.
When you move up to only a 2/4 limit heads-up room, you are likely
to find much stiffer competition. The players that sit in the
2/4 and up rooms are very often heads-up sharks. Heads-up is
mostly or exclusively what they play, and they sit there waiting for
full ring game curiosity seekers to wander in and fall prey. The
skill set for heads-up is quite different from a full ring or even six
player game, and heads-up sharks take advantage of that fact.
Personally, I am not a stellar heads-up player, and I don't care all
that much for the dynamics of the action. But I can give you a
quick run-down of some of the basics:
Since you're playing
against only one other player, you have to loosen up your pre-flop
decisions considerably. In a heads-up game, with an aggressive
strategy, you are calling and/or raising pre-flop about 60% of the
time, as opposed to about 18 to 20% in a full ring game. You are
still throwing away your worst hands, but all the bad Ace hands become
good hands, and a King High hand becomes statistically favorable to
call down to K,4 off suit.
Bluffing, blind stealing, and the
image you present to your opponent become even more important than in
a full ring game. Reading your opponent and cracking his play style
and strategy is also immensely important in heads-up.
Having
the position of being on the button is also more valuable in a
heads-up game than in a full ring game, where it is already extremely
valuable. This is due to the fact that in a full ring game there
are circumstances when being in last position does not always mean
that you are the last to act in relation to a raise when there are
several people in the hand. In heads-up the button position can
not be compromised in this way.
There is also a different top
20 starting hand ranking chart for heads-up play based on the fact
that your hand is only being compared to one other hand rather than 8
or 9 other hands (see quickcharts for a comparison of starting hand
rankings). Pocket pairs go way up in value while the value of
suited cards is diminished, as are hands that might make a straight.
In heads up you are playing more for the value of a high card, or a
decent pair-hands that you make more often, rather than for straights
and flushes. This is because in a full ring the value of
straights and flushes comes in when you consider that since there are
more people, at least one other person is a lot more likely to draw a
strong enough hand that he will pay you off for making your flush or
straight. In heads-up, having only one opponent, he is not
likely to make a strong enough hand to compensate you enough for
making your straight or flush to enhance their value as playable
cards.
Whereas the core strategy of tight aggressive play still
holds, the skill set involved in bringing it all together effectively
against an experienced heads-up player is such a significant departure
from a full ring game, I would suggest that novice players avoid those
rooms all together, until devoting significant time to the study of
the heads-up style of play in itself.
If you want to get the
feel for heads-up play there are two ways that I would suggest that
you start out. The first is to go to a low value sit-and-go
where you can play a heads-up tournament for only a 5 dollar risk.
The second way would be on the chance that you were sitting in a
larger ring game in which everybody decided to leave except for you
and one other person. At least in this case you can play
knowing that most likely your opponent isn't a heads-up shark. |
|
