Heads up tournament play -- I need to improve

[weekapaugz]

Embarassing night in my home poker game has made me vow to never have this happen again. Please refrain from comments about the way the tournament was set up -- I didn't want to bother the host and his methods.

I'm heads up with T12000 against another who has T6000, we'll say. It was close to that. Blinds are 300 and 600. I need to win to make up for losses in the cash game earlier. I ended up losing pretty handily. The other night I had a massive chip lead over another player who came back pretty quickly but I managed to get his chips in when he had KJ and I held AJ. Tonight I lost a bunch of chips with Ad 7d, and he had Ac 8s. I wasn't too upset about that beat, especially with the way it was played. But I'm having a terrible problem playing against opponents heads-up when I'm the big stack. I know, I know, plenty of people will ridicule me, that's fine, you can all go about your business, but if anyone wants to share some strategies I'd really like to hear them. Basically, I'm having a hard time reading strength, and I lose too many chips by throwing away hands to raises from the short stack, knowing if I reraise he'll go over the top when I'm not holding a premium hand, and I get reduced to putting money in with something like 7/images/graemlins/club.gif 8/images/graemlins/club.gif. I'm in the big blind with Ad Jc, and he calls from the small. Mistakenly, I go all in -- that was probably my downfall. Anywho, anybody want to help me out or point me in the right direction? There's a lot of 6max stuff on this board and I'd just like a little help here. Much appreciated.

[SCfuji]

oh boy do i feel your pain. i have a friend who is a worse cash game/tournament player than i am when the table is full, but when we have our little small stakes heads up tournaments he destroys me. as of late, i have improved against him... maybe it is because we have played enough, but i minimized the occasions where he could put me in difficult spots where i had to make tough decisions (ala a decision for all my chips). so, i decided to turn the tables on him and try a new strategy the next time we would heads-up. i shoved my chips in before he did at crucial times and i ended up beating him handily. and now we have usually split the number of wins almost 50/50. just be more aggressive, but do them with better hands than 78s. i used to get somewhat angry that i couldn't beat my friend and would try to bully him with stronger hands.

that just does NOT work!

hope things go better for you,
fuji

[Nottom]

Honestly when you have the guy out chipped 2-1 and he only has 10 BBs in his stack, you are just looking for a chance to get all the money in preflop. The stacks are really too small for much postflop play if anyone raises preflop, so just raise him all-in with any decent hand and put the decision on him. If you open for a raise and he comes over the top, you should almost never be folding at this point.

There is nothing wrong with putting all your chips in with AJo preflop with these stacks, it is a monster heads-up and should be treated as such.

You also might want to try posting in one of the tourney forums (the SNG might be most applicable) since they are in these situations all the time.