3-bet pre-flop or check-raise the flop?

[kiddo]

As I said earlier Im not an expert at hu. But today I tried playing like this, always call in BB and checkraise flop if I liked it. I played 3-4 hours at $5/10 and $10/20 and the guys I played against was poor but I noticed a few things:

1) Its much easier to play this way, u dont have to think until he does something on flop. U dont have to mix it up preflop and on flop.

2) Since u always play the same way its pretty easy to detect patterns in your opponents play (at least against the players I played), you always do the same and now its up to them to get a good mix of valuebetting/bluffs/slowplays on flop.

3) Bad players almost always call when u flopcheckraise them, no matter what hand they got, but if u 3bet preflop they will fold flop if they got nothing, so u often get 2 bets from them on flop when they got 3 outs or less. (This made me start to 3bet some of the weaker hands of my normal 3betting range, like KJ or small pocketp.)

4) When they see that u never raise preflop and never bet flop the once I played tried to counter that which made it easier to read them (cause they did it so clumsy) and made them play less then optimal (if they had seen my hands).

Im still not convinced its a good way to play against all type of players and against players very good at adapting. But I really dont know.

[Victor]

ok, i think my style at hu has always been somewaht close to this. i only raise my primos but rarely fold anything else. fold like 5%. prly too tight tho. kurosh would know. regardless against most players they cant recognize your 3bet range anyway so it clearly gains value.

[StellarWind]

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Tilt can and often does play a huge factor when playing heads up even at high limits. Whether these people are "dumdums" or rocket scientists is irrelevant.

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There are definitely players who have specific leaks that make the preflop 3-bet a must. A classic is the autocapper who must have the preflop initiative at all cost. Anyone on wild tilt is in the same category. So are certain unpredictable bad players who erase their memories when the flop hits and don't autobet at all.

No matter what poker strategy someone advocates there is an opponent who makes it look very, very good. No matter how strongly I criticize a play in general, I would be the first to say that you should use it against the right opponent.

So I agree with you, but I'm really discussing decent opponents who are playing well right now.

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To say it's going to be much harder to figure out that KK is no good after you just call pre-flop is absurd.

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An average high limit heads up player 3-bets 20% of his hands pre-flop (I have 270,000 datamined hands of 300-600 to prove it). AA accounts for .45% of that 20% hand range.

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You have a math problem here. Assuming a 20% free bettor always 3-bet AA it should account for 2.26% of his 3-bets.

But that is hardly the issue. By the time KK has reason to suspect a problem on an AKx board there will normally have been several raises. At that point Hero's logical hand range is quite narrow--just a handful of hands that hit the board very hard. It will often happen that some of those hands can be ruled out by the failure to 3-bet preflop. Perhaps ten possible starting hands of which 3 are AA may shrink to only six possible starting hands if you can rule hands out using the preflop play. So Villain sees that his 70% chance of being good is really only 50% and he applies the brakes in time to save a bet or two.