Heads-Up Play = Old School Poker

This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy something, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

• The Information War
• The Technical Aspects of Heads-Up Poker
• The Effects of Wide Ranges on HU Poker
• Small Blind Attack in HU Poker
• If the Big Blind Raises in HU Poker
• Short Stacks in HU Poker
• Big Blind Defense in HU poker
• Postflop Play in HU Poker
• Practicing HU Play 
• Conclusion

On June 1, 2024 I watched the final round of the WSOP $25K Heads-Up tournament on PokerGO. Darius Samual, a relatively unknown businessman, defeated Faraz Jaka, a highly respected pro and owner of Jaka Coaching. I had a rooting interest in Faraz, as I am a student of his coaching site.

I believe Faraz put on a clinic on how to combat the extreme aggression of a Heads-Up (HU)  opponent you believe is trying to run you over. What Faraz couldn’t have known at the time was that he was the victim of craptacular card setups. Even though Faraz won a big flip and tied the match at one point, Samual’s table image had been established. After that big flip, it was still an uphill battle for a talented, experienced pro like Faraz.

Darius Samual deserves credit for how he seemed to recognize what was happening, and how he exploited it. Even though a LOT of sun-running aided Samual’s aggressive play, this match shows how aggression and table image are king in HU poker.

This match beautifully illustrates how HU poker is all about metagame. I encourage you to get your hands on a recording of this match. You can find it on PokerGO.

Why should multi-table tournament (MTT) players devote significant study time to No-Limit Hold’em (NHLE) HU poker? After all, it is rare for MTT players to encounter this situation. You should devote significant study time to HU play because the prize structures of MTT’s award so much more prize money to 1st place than to 2nd place. Even though you don’t see HU situations often, having the skill advantage in HU play contributes significantly to your overall profit.

Of course, if you like sit-and-go’s (SNG), especially HU ones, you encounter HU situations much more often. You also encounter them in most of the jackpot poker matches you play online.

HU poker differs from all other poker forms in a number of ways. 

The Information War

Poker is a game of incomplete information. In poker, the chips flow from a player with less information towards a player with more information. In HU poker this information advantage or deficit is completely undiluted by interactions between other opponents. It’s even more important. HU poker is at its essence an information war.

It may seem unfair, but one way to have the information advantage is to run better than your opponent. In HU poker, extreme aggression is the key. If you’re running really well, it’s difficult for your opponent to know that. He is compelled to believe that you’re just trying to run him over. You know you’re getting good cards, but he cannot know that. You have the information advantage. 

Strangely enough, if you’re getting bad cards and folding a lot you may have a slight information advantage. This is because your opponent may misinterpret that as overly passive play on your part. But folding doesn’t win chips. You can exploit this information advantage, but not to the degree that you can exploit the information advantage that comes from running well. When you do play hands, your opponent may fold hands he might otherwise play if he didn’t have this false perception of you. But this means your value bets are not getting paid off as often as they otherwise would. 

Another way to get the information advantage applies only to live games. If you are picking up tells from your opponent, this is information that can pay off handsomely. This job is made easier by the fact that you have no one else to pay attention to. Keep an eagle eye on your opponent. 

Of course, your opponent has no one else to pay attention to either. You must have a complete lockdown on your own table mannerisms. This is easier said than done at the tail end of a long, grueling day of poker. Stand up and stretch. If you get a break, take a brisk walk around the casino to get the blood flowing. You need to be a robot. This is not to suggest avoiding table talk with your opponent. Just make sure you’re the one winning the information war when you do it.

“I had the right to remain silent. But I didn’t have the ability.”

– Ron White –

Another information advantage is a technical characteristic of poker: playing in position. The player in position has more information than his opponent. In NLHE HU play, the Small Blind (SB) is also the Button (BTN). The SB must act first before the flop, but then acts last on each street after the flop. What this means is that in spite of having to act first, the SB gets to drive action before the flop. The SB should take advantage of this by opening a ton of hands. The BB must be much more selective, only playing hands that should do well out of position after the flop. 

The most important way to gain the information advantage is by extreme aggression and unpredictability in your play. In fact, memorize the following statement:

The Technical Aspects of Heads-Up Poker

Where does all this psychological stuff leave the technical side of poker? Do solvers and other tools have anything useful to tell us?

As it turns out, there are some interesting things we can learn from these tools that apply to HU poker. Last year GTO Wizard rolled out a HU database that shows that, if anything, we need to be even more aggressive preflop in the SB than I had previously thought. 

A fundamental principle of all poker forms is that aggression wins. When you bet or raise, you have two ways to win: 

1. When your opponent folds.
2. When your opponent calls and you win at showdown.

When you call, you only have one way to win:

1. When you win at showdown. 

If you are betting and raising more than your opponent, you’re going to win. If you are folding or calling less than your opponent, you’re going to win. 

Be the one doing the most betting and raising.

The Effects of Wide Ranges on HU Poker

Because of the extremely wide ranges at play in HU poker, certain principles that govern normal poker are weakened to the point of being nearly irrelevant. 

For example, solvers usually recommend small Continuation Bet (C-Bet) sizings. In some situations they recommend larger sizings or even overbets. These sizings depend on range advantage. However because of the extremely wide ranges encountered in HU play, there is not much range advantage for either player on any flop texture. The SB enjoys a marginal range advantage on some flops that heavily favor tighter opening ranges in normal NLHE games. This is due to the capped BB range when he did not 3-bet preflop.

Use C-Bet sizings to confuse an opponent who may be ascribing some technical principle to your sizings. If he’s folding too much to your smaller sizings, keep using smaller sizings. Throw a bigger one in there once in awhile to maintain the confusion. Your opponent will eventually adjust to this. Your job is to quickly recognize when your opponent alters his strategy, so that you can exploit the alteration. This wins the information war. Start randomizing bet sizings at this point. 

The main effect of the wide ranges in HU NLHE poker is that you can assume a flop didn’t hit anyone. Queen-high is probably good.  

Note the typical ranges from a HU NLHE hand in the Flopzilla image below. If you’re unfamiliar with NLHE hand charts, the strategy chart lists aces through deuces from left to right and from top to bottom. Each square is a unique combo. Pocket pairs appear in the diagonal from top-left to bottom-right, with AA on the top-left and 22 on the bottom-right. Suited combos are above and right of the pair diagonal. Offsuit combos are below and left of the pair diagonal.

The BB range is depicted with a green outline around the chart in the upper-left-hand corner. The flop is 9h8c7d. In normal NLHE games this is one of the best flops the BB can have. He has the range advantage. However with the wide ranges in HU NLHE games, this flop does not give either player a significant range advantage. 

The same is true of the A72 flop in the following image. This flop would normally give a preflop aggressor a large range advantage. But here the SB has a marginal range advantage of 53%:

Another effect of the extremely wide ranges in HU poker is on blockers. In normal poker, you can use blockers as one of the factors that impacts a decision to bluff, hero-call, etc. However in HU poker the extremely wide ranges dilute the effects of blockers. Don’t use blockers for your decisions in HU games. In HU NLHE, A2 offsuit is a value bet, not a bluff with a blocker.

Small Blind Attack in HU Poker

The following image is GTO Wizard. The effective stack is 20 big blinds. It gives the SB opening strategy. The suggested plays have color codes that you can see on the right. In this image purple means all-in, orange means raise 2 big blinds, green means call (limp for the SB), and blue means fold. Multiple colors in a hand combo on the left chart depict the percentage of time you would perform each strategy with that hand combo.

A couple of things should jump off the page at you. 

First and foremost, the strategy recommends that you fold only 4.7% of the time. You are playing almost everything. In practice you should open fold more than that, to mix your play up sometimes and be unpredictable. If you show your opponent you will never fold, he will adjust his play to compensate, but in ways you cannot easily read. You are actually losing the information war when this happens.

The solver also shows that you are limping almost two-thirds of the time. However because HU is mostly psychological rather than technical, you should actually not limp anywhere near this much at 20 big blinds, if at all. When you limp, you give the big blind a chance to see a free flop. If he then bets into you on the flop, you won’t know what to do. 

You only adopt a limping strategy to avoid wasting chips if your opponent has demonstrated a propensity to jam at this stack depth. Find the stack depth that your opponent starts jamming at. Then adopt a limping strategy at that stack depth and below. You will still be able to play in position after the flop.

If he jams excessively preflop, you’ll eventually find a spot to trap him. In your limping strategy, you can open raise 2bb 100% of the time with your strongest value hands that like to see your opponent jam. For example: 88+, AJo+, ATs+, KQs. Open raise some bluffs half the time with your weakest offsuit hands that can cheerfully fold to a jam, such as 93o-63o, T2o-32o.

Consider how solvers arrive at their strategies. Two supercomputers play billions of hands against each other until they both arrive at a strategy that they cannot deviate from without losing money. If they deviate, they lose money even if their opponent doesn’t alter their strategy to exploit the deviation. Both computer players arrive at what is known as the equilibrium strategy. Another consequence of this process is that both computer players understand this, and both know the other’s overall strategy perfectly. This is known in solver-land as clairvoyance. 

Between human players, especially in live games, there is no clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is the main reason solvers limp so much in HU play, but the lack of clairvoyance is an important reason you should not limp much.

You don’t have to religiously adhere to an exact SB opening strategy. You should open around 80% of the time, and always for a minimum open raise at any effective stack depth. That’s not to say you fold the bottom 20% of hands on a hand chart in a program like Equilab. You put yourself at the mercy of the deck if you do that. You might not get enough of those bottom garbage hands to get enough folds to maintain confusion, or you may get too many.

You want to be able to show up with ANYTHING at showdown. A good approach seems to be to fold the bottom 40% of hands half the time for each. You win the information war when you show up with 72 offsuit after you’ve been folding 20% of the time.  

If the Big Blind Raises in HU Poker

If your opponent 3-Bets, you need to have a good idea of his 3-Betting range. This is a huge part of the information war. Many times their 3-Betting range will be overly value-heavy, because they are not 3-Betting enough. It’s okay to fold junk in this scenario. But you will need to defend more often than usual because Minimum Defense Frequency (MDF) applies in HU games. Fold too often, and you will let your opponent print money. Be keenly aware of it if your opponent opens up his 3-Bet range after you’ve folded a time or two. You will need to start defending even more widely. 

What you can’t afford to do is significantly tighten your preflop opening range if your opponent starts 3-Betting wider. Notice that you’ve made your opponent alter his gameplan. You’ve won the information war. This is not the time for passivity. Remember that you will have position postflop. Call more widely to exploit the change. Open up your 4-Betting range to exploit it. Often this will be a jam. 

With the wide open ranges in HU NLHE, you will need to use a wider 4-Betting range than in normal NLHE to keep your play balanced and your opponent off-balance. It’s very opponent-dependent. That’s why you need to keenly observe what your opponent is doing. 

At the beginning of the HU session, you can stick with a safe, value-heavy 4-bet range. But don’t get married to it. At some point your opponent will tire of your incessant open raises and will want to fight back with lighter 3-Bets. Be keenly aware of when this happens. You will often need to use live reads in a live HU game.

As in normal poker, one of the most important live reads you can make is when an opponent has had it with your aggression. Put your opponent to the test with a 4-Bet. Sometimes it will backfire and you will finish the tournament in 2nd place. Most often though, you’ll get your opponent to fold away a sizeable pot. He’ll have often folded the best hand. He’ll be frustrated, further strengthening your advantage in the information war.

Short Stacks in HU Poker

When the effective stack depth decreases below 15-20 big blinds, you can bring in some open jams yourself. This is effective because of the psychological effect it has on your opponent, especially if he is the one who is short stacked. You’re putting him to the test for his tournament life continuously. If you’re the one who is short stacked, you can pick up precious blinds while denying your opponent the opportunity to make the kill. Make these open jams 100% of the time with 33-22. Do it about 50% of the time with A9o-A2o, raising :2 big blinds the other half of the time. 

With effective stack depths of 10 big blinds and below, you can discard the 2 big blind open raises entirely. Unless you are folding the weakest hands, you are either limping or jamming. The GTO Wizard image below is a 10 big blind strategy:

Note that the open jams are weaker offsuit aces and kings, baby pairs, and some hands that have decent equity if called. Also note that the limping range includes traps like AA. This solver strategy maintains the unpredictability and wins the information war. You don’t have to memorize it, but try to understand why the solver is doing the things that it does. Then craft your own strategy. 

With short stacks, the solvers have little useful information for us if we are responding in the BB to a SB limp. Nowhere is poker is a solver output more distorted by clairvoyance and impossible for human players to accurately execute. This image is the BB response to a SB limp at 10 big blinds effective:

The most useful takeaway from this solver output is that the BB should aggressively respond to a SB limp, and with a mostly top-heavy raising range. And this is against an unknown opponent.

You could simplify this strategy by discarding the intermediate bet sizes entirely, and stick with either jams or 2.5 big blind raises. You could discard the complex mixed strategies in the lower offsuit hands, and just check your option with them. Maybe you could make such a raise with any of them once or twice during a session and either take the pot down or show it down and confuse your opponent. Just understand that you want to raise the strongest hands and jam with the second strongest ones. The hands that you jam like to get folds but can hold up okay in a showdown. 

It is crucial to have good reads on your opponent here. If your opponent is calling jams too much, you can discard the 2.5bb raise and just jam AA. You would also remove the weakest jams from your range and just raise with them. 

If your opponent is folding to jams too much, you can add some bluffs to your jamming range. The lowest kings come to mind.

Big Blind Defense in HU poker

Because you are at an information disadvantage after the flop in the big blind, you should not defend it over-aggressively. You need to defend your big blind a lot against the SB’s extreme aggression. But you don’t want to play all kinds of garbage hands out of position after the flop. You lose the information war if you play too many hands out of position, especially in deep effective stack situations where you play multiple postflop streets. 

Offsuit and disconnected hands are difficult to play out of position. Avoid most of them. Offsuit, disconnected hands jack-hi and below need to go into the muck. You could play J7 offsuit because you have a chance to make a straight. Your jack-hi hand could also win at showdown. Toss J6 offsuit directly into the muck if you face a raise from the small blind. 

Queen-hi and better hands have enough showdown value to defend in the big blind against what should be an extremely wide small blind opening range.

You can defend all suited hands. These have a chance to stack your opponent and win the tournament. It’s worth the gamble to defend 72 suited and 32 suited.

The BB should 3-Bet aggressively against what should be the SB’s wide opening range. Be careful not to excessively cap your calling range with a predictable, value-heavy 3-Bet range. The strongly capped calling ranges seen in the examples earlier in the article gave the SB a range advantage, albeit a small one. Instead, use a range with additional value hands and with bluffs that give you better board coverage.

Your bluffs should be hands that you can cheerfully throw away if they don’t get the fold and then whiff the flop. Just don’t go to the mat if you 3-Bet 75 suited and the flop pairs one of your cards. Your opponent’s calling range will have more pairs that beat yours than if you had just defended preflop with a call. This is especially true if your opponent is not opening enough preflop to begin with. 

You want to build a pot with your strongest hands, so you should usually 3-Bet them. Because of the wide ranges involved, you should add additional value hands to your normal 3-Bet range. However, each value combo you add to your 3-Bet range caps your calling range more strongly. This can’t be avoided. However, you can mitigate this with additional bluff combos that can still perform well postflop when called. 

You should be 3-Betting all of your aces, and all of your pocket pairs. Deuces and other low pocket pairs can be a challenge to play out of position postflop. But remember that when you 3-Bet preflop, you have the betting lead on the flop, and your opponent has capped his range as well by only calling your 3-Bet. Your deuces are more likely to be good than in normal NLHE, at least through the turn.

Of course you will want to alter this strategy if your opponent is overly tight. The tighter your opponent, the less likely your deuces are good. You are winning the information war if you can throw away deuces because you know your opponent is too tight in this HU game, and not because it’s the prescribed GTO play in normal poker.

When you 3-Bet in the BB, use large sizings. A multiple of 4x the open raise size comes to mind. If you notice your opponent has increased his open raise size to try to discourage your frequent 3-Betting, punish him by increasing the multiple to 4.5x. If playing live, don’t forget to notice the pained expression on his face as he folds. It’s fun – and informative.

Postflop Play in HU Poker

As stated earlier, range advantages are not usually significant in HU games, and thus you should not base your postflop decisions on range advantages. It is much more important to confuse your opponent. 

 

You never need to slowplay monsters, even if it can help confuse your opponent. This is because your high bluffing frequency will compel him to call a lot. You could end the tournament right here. It’s tempting to slowplay, but don’t do it. Your high bluffing frequency compels your opponent to pay off your monsters.  

Your job is to determine if your opponent is size-inelastic with his C-Bet defense frequency. If you determine that your opponent will call regardless of the C-Bet size, he is size-inelastic. You are ahead in the information war. You can use pot-sized bets for value and smaller bets as bluffs. When he calls your small sized bluffs, re-evaluate on the turn.  

Some calling stations are turn-honest. Some are river-honest. Your job is to figure out which one he is. When you figure that out, you are winning the information war. Then bet any hand on his honest street. 

A good understanding of GTO principles is important in HU NLHE. This is not to recommend you slavishly adhere to good exploitative GTO poker as if it were a normal game. This is to identify an opponent who is adhering too closely to GTO strategy as it applies to normal poker.

Many GTO-savvy people don’t adjust adequately to the differences between normal poker and HU poker. You can exploit that. They use sizings and frequencies as if this were normal poker. They’ll overfold, so you can bluff more. They’ll call with hands that they should raise in the HU game, so you can value bet thinner. They won’t fully grasp how your range interacts with flops. They’ll be out of their comfort zone, so you should confuse them.

For example, at 30bb effective you open to 2bb with 72o and the BB, a player who adheres to multiplayer GTO strategy, calls. 

Flop (5bb) KJ3 rainbow. BB checks. You bet 4bb. BB calls with 63s.

Turn (13bb) Ace. BB checks. You bet 12bb. BB folds.

You have completely whiffed this flop. But your C-Bet sizing is roughly congruent to what GTO strategy recommends for a high card flop and ace turn like this. The BB folded because because the sizing dictated it. He might call a smaller bet. But in his mind it’s getting too expensive to defend fourth pair. If your opponent knew that you had hands like 72o in your range, he might make this call. In practice, he should have called in a HU match.  

In the BB position postflop you will want to use a lot of check-raises. Aggression is key. Check-raises are a polarizing play, meaning you use them with the top and bottom of your range. Now, you don’t necessarily have to check-raise with air. But you need to use bluffs that you can cheerfully fold when you get raised, but have some potential to pick up equity or improve on the turn. Gutshots, hands with two or more backdoor draws, and even some open-ended straight draws that can’t hit the nuts come to mind.

Because you’re using a higher than normal amount of value hands for your check-raises, you need a higher than normal amount of bluffs. Because of the SB’s wide opening range, it is less likely than normal for your opponent to pair a flopped ace. If your opponent folds too much, check-raise once on an ace-high flop when you don’t have an ace and have a bit of backup equity.  

You need extra value hands when you check-raise in HU poker. You can use any top pair, in addition to the usual overpairs and nutted hands. 

Don’t slowplay nutted hands. Check-raise them. Build the pot. You are more likely to get paid off because your opponent should be skeptical of your range in HU games. 

In the BB position the stop-and-go play is hugely effective, especially if you have the chip lead. The stop-and-go is when the BB calls a preflop raise planning to lead on the flop. This especially works as effective stacks get shallower. Use this play with all kinds of value hands and bluffs that have equity. But mix it with your check-raises. Your range for this play is actually focused on the bluffs, with some value hands that protect those bluffs. You want to be unpredictable.

The most important result of this play is to send a message to the SB player that you mean business, and that you intend to punish his hugely wide range. A side effect is that people aren’t used to responding to donk bets. You will confuse your opponent and win the information war.

Practicing HU Play 

One way to practice HU play is to enter HU SNG’s on PokerStars play money games. PokerStars allows you to accumulate play money chips by taking free ones every four hours. If you’re in a hurry, you can purchase bunches of them for a nominal price. Be sure to turn off the chat box unless you like getting into trash-talking contests.

Another way is to subscribe to Advanced Poker Training (APT). APT’s collection of training simulators with human-like bots includes a HU one. It has a brief primer on HU strategy too. You can configure the simulator to different levels of difficulty. At the hardest level, your opponent will be super-aggressive.

Conclusion

To sum it all up remember these things:

• HU poker is an information war. Observe your opponent carefully. When you can make your opponent alter his strategy to adjust to what you’re doing when he can’t possibly know what you’re doing, you win. 

• Extreme aggression is key. When you bet and raise more than your opponent, you win. Don’t limp unless your opponent in the big blind has demonstrated a propensity to jam over your raises. 

• The ranges are extremely wide. Therefore range advantage is unimportant. Randomizing your play and confusing your opponent is much more important. 

• Use 2x open raise sizes in the SB. The ranges are so wide that getting stacks in with deep effective stacks is too uncommon for bigger open sizes to be worth it. You’ll be giving the BB an attractive price to call, but you’ll be in position after the flop. 

• Defend your BB aggressively and unpredictably with 3-Bets that give you board coverage.

• Have fun. Go out there and win championships!