12-12-2001, 05:39 PM
I just finished about a hour long session of heads-up NLH. The money was fairly deep (stacks about 100 times the big blind), so it was mostly a game of posturing with few showdowns and zero all-ins.
As I was playing the following idea occurred to me. I felt that my opponent played really poorly for certain sized pots but fairly well for other sized pots. I therefore felt tempted to manipulate the betting so that the pot was often a size he played poorly in.
To be explicit, here's a pattern that worked very well for me. I open pot from the SB (also the button) and he called in the BB. 6 BB's in the pot. Flop comes whatever; he checks, I bet pot, he calls. 18 BB's in the pot - the magic number. This was the size I thought he dealt with extremely poorly. Because of this I bet pot when checked to on the flop a much higher percentage than I normally would.
His main weakness was that he check-folded far too often when total blanks hit the turn. More dramatically, he had remarkably little sensitivity to the size of my bet. I could take down a nice sized 18 BB pot with as small a bet as 6 BB well over half the time.
My questions are these. Has anyone else ever experienced this while playing heads-up big bet Hold'em (ineptitude for certain pot sizes)? Is it a reasonable weakness to exploit (i.e. raising with marginal values or checking with decent hands to obtain that magic pot size), or am I giving too much away by doing so?
FlopTheNuts
As I was playing the following idea occurred to me. I felt that my opponent played really poorly for certain sized pots but fairly well for other sized pots. I therefore felt tempted to manipulate the betting so that the pot was often a size he played poorly in.
To be explicit, here's a pattern that worked very well for me. I open pot from the SB (also the button) and he called in the BB. 6 BB's in the pot. Flop comes whatever; he checks, I bet pot, he calls. 18 BB's in the pot - the magic number. This was the size I thought he dealt with extremely poorly. Because of this I bet pot when checked to on the flop a much higher percentage than I normally would.
His main weakness was that he check-folded far too often when total blanks hit the turn. More dramatically, he had remarkably little sensitivity to the size of my bet. I could take down a nice sized 18 BB pot with as small a bet as 6 BB well over half the time.
My questions are these. Has anyone else ever experienced this while playing heads-up big bet Hold'em (ineptitude for certain pot sizes)? Is it a reasonable weakness to exploit (i.e. raising with marginal values or checking with decent hands to obtain that magic pot size), or am I giving too much away by doing so?
FlopTheNuts