HU Strategy

[jon_1van]

I've started playing a few HU SNGs on PS.

We all know that when blinds get big your best HU strategy is a push fold system of some kind.

Let's say you switch to the system when the effective stack is 7 BB or less.

Do you alter your play any when the effective stack is say 9-11BB? If so how do you change your play if you are the small stack or if you are the big stack.

The situation I'm thinking of is when I'm playing HU and the BB in 30 and the small stack has ~320 or the BB is 50 and the small stack has 500-600.

Normally I'll raise a hand like 57s but when that raise commits me to a reraise I like it a lot less. Any thoughts?

[citanul]

go look at the karlson-sklansky hand rankings. if you can't find them in any other way, i believe they are posted at eastbay's site. but i think you should be able to find them using the search pretty easilly.

c

[jon_1van]

Thanks for pointing out those hand rankings. They will be interesting to look at I'm sure. (I've breafly gone over them so far)

But that's not really what I'm looking for.

The hand rankings appear to apply to push/fold scenarios. I'm interested in how you should adjust your play before the a push/fold system is best. Everyone thinks that push folding is best when someone has fewer the X BB. But how exactly do you play when someone has X + 5,6, or 7 BB?

[citanul]

well

a) once you understand the k-s rankings you'll understand a lot more than just the "under x bb" scenarios. thinking that they are some sort of work that shows that short stacks should go all in a lot isn't entirely correct.

b) play poker. it depends on the opponent. if he's going to let you pick him apart, pick him apart. if he's going to run it out with any two, run it out with the top like 55% of hands or some [censored] like that.

c) in general, if you raise and he pushes and you want to know what to do here, you should go 'what's his range' then you should go 'am i getting the right odds to call his push with my cards and his range' and then you should call or fold.

not very difficult.

[tewall]

The book "Kill Phil" mentions that if the stacks are in the 5xBB range that counter measures to a push every hand strategy will yield at best a 51% or 52% edge. Even if the stacks were much larger, the counter measures had a limited affect (much smaller than one would think intuitively). Unfortunately I don't have the book in front of me to get the exact numbers, but the bottom line is if you adopted a strategy of just always pushing, it's likely your opponent would be playing less than optimally, and you could profit just from that. Alternatively you could drop the very worst of the hands (like low unsuited hands with 2's and 3's).

I remember reading a post where someone did extensive testing on heads up matches and came up with an optimum strategy of something like pushing with 60 to 70% of all hands and calling with 40%. I'm just going from memory here.

Here's the link I was thinking of which discusses this:

http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/show...;fpart=1#595131 (http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=595131&page=16&view=colla psed&sb=7&o=all&fpart=1#595131)

Another interesting discussion is http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Number=1104446&page=