Heads up strategy

[krille]

Ok I am just pondering about something after having just finished a heads-up duel.

I was the short stack with 2000 to his 6000 and was soon down to 1000 since he was raising my blinds while I only caught trash. Anyway, I finally made a stand and went all-in with A2, he called with J9s and I took it down... ok back to 2000. After about 3-4 hands he raised my blind again, and after seeing what he raised with last before (he raised quite often) I took my Q9 and pushed. He called quickly with Q2... now I can see why he raised with the hand, but is it really a good idea to call my all-in? I won the hand of course and the next hand I pushed with A9, he called with KQ, I own and took home the SnG. (The blind were around 200-400)

Now I have a numer of questions here:

1. Is my push with Q9 a good idea?
2. Should he really call with Q2... possibly giving me the chiplead?
3. Was his all-in call with KQ clever?


I know these may be a bit random questions but these situations come up very often and since the diffrence between first and second is quite large it is important to know all the right moves.

[dethgrind]

There are two tools that I've found very helpful in thinking about these situations. The first is a chart (http://home.earthlink.net/~craighowald/data/matchup2.html) on Bozeman's website which lists heads-up odds of one hand against a predefined range of hands. This will answer questions of this sort: "if I know he'll call with his top 25% of hands, and fold the rest, what hands should I push and which ones should I fold?"

The other tool is this poker calculator. (http://koti.mbnet.fi/jraevaar/pokercalculator/) This is the best one I've been able to find. It lets you choose multiple opponents and define ranges of hands for each player, and simulates however many deals you want to determine the odds for each player.

As for your questions:

1. You only have around 5 big blinds left. Q9o isn't great, but you don't really have much time to wait for better hands. You're even money against the top 67% of hands as defined by that chart, which is roughly what I expect your opponent will call with. So I think pushing is correct. He might fold if he was raising with complete garbage, and when he calls you're in decent shape.

2. It's pretty close. Assuming he min-raised (800 chips), if he lays down his Q2o, you'll have 2800 and he'll have 5200. His chances of first place are 5200/8000 = .65. If he calls and loses, you'll each have 4000. If his chance of winning the hand with Q2o is x, he gets first place x*1 + (1-x)*(4000/8000). Simplify, and we get .5x + .5. Setting this equal to .65 and we see the break-even point is x=.30.

So he needs to be a 7 to 3, or 2.3 to 1 dog or better to call. Whether or not he is getting these odds depends on what sort of hands you'll push with. I think it's really close.

3. His all-in call with KQo was probably a mistake. You each have about 10 blinds at this point. So there's no immediate risk of getting blinded to death, and he should expect you to tighten up your raising standards. He's a dog to most reasonable hand ranges you could be raising with here, and if he loses the hand, he doesn't get first. So I'd say his call was not clever. It was probably a mistake, though not a big one.

[krille]

thanks those are some very interesting links