I found myself playing some 2/4 NL heads up games yesterday and really enjoying it. From time to time, I’ve gone through phases where I was really into heads up play. I think these are periods where I’m improving a lot as a poker player, because heads up really does force you to play poker. You can’t come in with a fixed strategy and expect it to work with just a little tweaking the way you can in a tournament or a 6-max game. You really have to pay attention to your opponent, think on multiple levels, recognize and exploit his mistakes, etc.
It was particularly tricky for me because the first guy I played for a while was wildly loose aggressive, whereas my second prolonged session was against a really loose passive player. The latter was tougher to play against, though I actually lost more money to him. I don’t have enough experience with heads up play to say for sure, but I felt like he was running really well, he seemed to flop top pair like every third hand.
There’s not really a particular hand I want to look at so much as a strategy for dealing with loose and passive players. First off, I should say that he wasn’t a giant fish or a calling station. It’s not like he would pay off anything, but more that he recognized I was aggressive and made a lot of his money by checking and calling against me, sometimes with like middle pair.
It’s tempting to say, “Just stop bluffing him!” but the truth is that I want him to pass the action to me all of the time. In the original Super/System, Doyle Brunson says that he’ll continuation bet a small pair even when three overcards flop because his opponent will “be looking for me to bet… and I don’t want to disappoint him. It would hurt my table image.” (483)
When my opponent is checking everything to me: his trips, his top pairs, his middle pairs, his draws, I’m in control. I can decide how large I want the pot to be, I can take free cards when I want them, etc. This is particularly important in heads up play. So I keep firing when I have a hand and when I don’t. The key is to balance this so that you aren’t bluffing too much. Occasionally you’ll pay him off, but sometimes he’ll pay you off, and sometimes you’ll make him fold the best hand.
When a guy is always check-calling his medium strength hands out of position, you have to punish him by occasionally firing more than one barrel. You can change it up by sometimes betting the turn and sometimes the river, but you can’t let him see a cheap showdown every time he’s out of position. This kills your two biggest strengths: your position and your status as the aggressor.
So just as an example of this, there was a hand where I had raised pre-flop, I don’t even remember what I had, but the flop came out As Ks 3d. I had slowed down a bit recently and decided that I was going to keep firing at this board. It’s a good board to pound on against a guy who is playing too many marginal hands out of position, as he’s likely to hit but not hard. On the flop, he’s definitely going to check and call any A and any K, but he’ll fold almost all of those hands to heavy pressure. So I bet and he called, just as I suspected he would.
The turn was the 5s, and he check-folded to another bet. The third spade is a great card for me to bet because this opponent new I was capable of having a made flush, a good flush draw, or even just a good Ace. This is a very tough range for him to play against from out of position. Even with a good Ace of his own, he can’t really check-raise me, because in order to price out my draw, he’d have to risk his whole stack if I did have a better made hand.
That’s another value to aggression: your bet costs you only the amount that you bet, but especially when you have position, calling that bet might require your opponent to commit his entire stack to the pot. That kind of strategic imbalance is obviously very profitable.