HOH II - D\'Agostino v. Ivey
 

I was reading HOH II last night at the bookstore and I read the section where Harrington dissects the Heads Up play between D'Agostino v. Ivey at Turning Stone. Since I play alot of Heads Up SnG's this section interested me.

Anyways, throughout the chapter Harrington criticized D'Agostino when he did not atleast call the BB when he was the SB. Basically Harrington said that regardless what hand you have, you will always have pot odds to atleast call the BB from the SB.

I agree with this assertion up to a point. In my Heads up matches, when the blinds are small I never fold in the SB, I atleast always call and usually raise because of the benefit of having position the rest of the hand. However, when you start with 1000 chips and the blinds get to say 50/100, I often fold in the SB if I'm not prepared to go all in. Sometimes I will just call, but every time I do I am prepared to go all in if my opponent does.

I guess my question is the following - is there an appropriate time to fold the SB in a Heads Up match?? Especially when the blinds are high and your "M" (as Harrington calls it) is low? I think that a call in this position is often a sign of weakness. I know that most times when the blinds are large and my opponent just calls the BB from the small blind that I usually go all in if I have any kind of hand. As well, when I first started playing HU matches I noticed my opponents would do the same to me.

Furthermore, I know that during their Heads Up play, Dags and Ivey never really got to the point where the blinds were so high that all in moves became common. I am wondering if Harrington would still have criticized Dags if the blinds were large and both players "M's" were low.

Any thoughts???

Thanks,
PTN

Re: HOH II - D\'Agostino v. Ivey
 

Harrington asserts that his "call any two in SB" rule is strictly for games where stacks sizes relative to the blinds are fairly large.

However, all depends on your opponent. If he is the type to raise everytime you limp, then by no means should you be limping with those weaker hands, you have mix up your play a bit more in these types of situations.

When blinds becoming higher relative to your chip stack, say 1/10th of it, then you must use some discression in your hand selection. A lot will also depend on your opponents style.

And no, I'm Harrington would not fault D'agostino if he folded 62o if he had 500K in chips and the blinds were 30/60K.

Re: HOH II - D\'Agostino v. Ivey
 

Harrington never said that you should "always" call. If the BB tends to raise a lot, he says you should only call with a top 40% hand if the stacks are shallow. He also says that you should sometimes just call with hands that you would normally raise with. By doing this you discourage the BBs tendency to exploit your calls with reraises. Ivey did this a few times.