Short-handed and heads up

[ddubois]

Awful. Atrocious. Worst player ever. <-- Me when the table is falling falls apart and it's down to 2-3 players. I have played some 1/2 and 2/4 limit when short-handed, and I felt I played reasonably, even profitably against players who would fold too much, but no-limit, wow, I suck. I lost track of how many stacks I have given up trying to play on under these circumstances.

Aggressive players push me off half my blinds and every pot I miss, and when I finally get top pair, I go to far with it and drop half a stack or more to two-pair. Meanwhile, I never get paid off when I finally get a monster. I must be trivially easy to read. I do try feebly to mix it up, sometimes betting out, sometimes check-raising. Sometimes I try to call down with middle pair, but I invariably chicken out as the incresingly-sized bets keep coming. I do try to check-raise bluff some, or "value bet" (?) my ace-high here or there, but it's crushing when they have something and call me down.

I have no strategy for what hands to raise pre-flop nor how much. I don't even know if I should be raising at all. (TheGrifter posted something about short-handed games where he never-raised recently. I'd like ot hear more about that strategy.) Maybe hands as weak as AJ or 99 become good enough to "trap" with, and announcing that my hand is strong impairs my ability to extract any value for them?

[Ghazban]

The smaller the game, the more important reads become. Whenever I play SNGs and get to the final 2, its usually blatantly obvious to me which of us is the better headup player.

I was trying to find some good general advice for HU play and basically was told by almost everyone I spoke to (and every reply to my posts on that subject here) that its totally dependent on who you're up against. Against tricky and/or aggressive players, your variance can be quite high so, even if you are playing well in overall, you could be losing money over a smallish sample size. The best advice I ever got was to play HU SNGs for stakes low enough that I wouldn't mind losing. Its not quite the same as a cash game as the blinds go up regularly but I've found it to be a great learning tool.

Experience is really the only way to get good at shorthanded games.

[ddubois]

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Whenever I play SNGs and get to the final 2, its usually blatantly obvious to me which of us is the better headup player.

[/ QUOTE ]
Heads up at the end of an SNG with massive blinds is such a different animal that it can't even be compared IMO. I actually feel competent in that scenario, as often most of the play is pre-flop.

[Ghazban]

Depends on how quickly you get to the final two I guess. I've had some pretty good HU matches to end 6-max SNGs and even a few for 10-max (not on Party, where I think the blinds go up too fast).