heads-up

how do people feel about heads up play? i guess, if you find the right opp it can be profitable ,but is it really anyone's format of choice? the only heads up play i care for is at a final table. lol

Heads-up is the purest form of poker.

this format need to be practice and practice . good training for aggressivity . and very important whan you see the paytable on turns .

personally I enjoy heads up, when I was with tilt that's pretty much all I would play. Unitil one drunken evening I came back home and played two heads up match for 500 and lost both to the same guy after the rematch. hard earned BR dwindled there after that night lol. But it is fun and great way to learn to play in tourneys if you final table obviously. Play with the villans head and see then get frustrated when trying to make a play after.

I don't play the heads up tables but when I make it to heads up in a tournament I find that it is quite difficult to play. I think that this is where your preflop game needs to be sharp because there is a lot of raising and reraising. With a not so good hand you can find yourself at the edge quickly. It always sucks not to be #1 especially if you're #2. I guess in a heads up table your opponent would be much weaker than your opponent at a final table of a tourney.

There are many Heads Up Professional Players where that is their bread and butter for profit

I was really awful in HU but I´m getting better and better. I guess learning about SNG helped me a lot in HU. You have to know when is the time to shove or fold (because blinds are crazy high compared to your stack) and when its to early for that. The best way is to have 2/3 of all chips and then shove with strong hands (A10+) and pocket pairs. If you lose coinflip you still have 1/3 of all chips. With 1/3 of all chips your range has to be much more wider. Around 50:50 chips be little more cautious. This is my observation on low limit heads-up with 1500 chips (first level 10/20). I guess when playing deepstack HU there is more room for classic poker.

You just have to be aggressive and be prepared to play with lesser quality hands..

I once played 6 Heads up games in pokerstars sit n go .
Won first 2 , n with increased confidence , played again n again till
my account is nill .
So its important when to raise n fold , one bad decision could effect the whole game . Play cautiously

I won my first HU MTT last night.
Maybe my proudest poker moment as it was the second one I've played and the only Hu i do is at the big end of tourneys or Sngs.
In the last match I came back from 6,000 chips vs 24,0000.
I'm still stunned from it 12 hours later.

Very exciting if you like playing plenty of hands and mind reading.

I like heads up. I think im better than average since most of the time I get first when i get to the final 2 in an MTT. One of the reasons i dont just simply play heads unless theres a promotion. For example in the spring ( I think march) pokerstars had a promotion where you earn 50% more FPPS for every VPP if you play heads up during certain hours. I took advantage of that and profited some money while doing it. I prefer larger MTT's because I can play more at once. I cant do more than 2 heads up games at once, you dont pay enough attention to your opponent if you do.

murrdog, I love heads up poker. So much so, that other forms are really boring for me these days (especially live full ring!). I found that my poker skills were built up far faster starting out in heads up than friends that played tournaments. While they were learning to play a select few hands in a select few positions, I was learning how to play all sorts of hands, strong and weak, in both positions, with a lot of postflop play as well. Playing so many hands in such a short amount of time really built up my hand reading skills and gave me experience in playing so many different situations postflop.

aCutAbove, that's awesome, congrats! It's hard to win a heads up tournament, imagine you're 50% to win one match and there are 64 players... that's 6 wins needed to take it down, less than a 2% chance of winning!

Feels so good to take it down though, I only ever won fun private type tournaments (some serious). Never won any of the regular ones (like the Sunday PS $215 or the WCOOP/SCOOP HU events).

I love love love heads up, it is where i make my most money, playing heads up sng, but it is a difficult form to be good at and very hard sometimes impossible to master, its very fun, i really do feel like its the purest form of poker, but in all i see it sometimes leads to you being weaker in other parts of poker just because to be so good at it you kind of have to have a certain mind and style you develop, i am fascinated with heads up but being a successful player in this format i am also interested in being as good in other forms, it does help for tourney play and 6 ring, but i sometimes have problems in 9 ring and deep tourneys, other than that heads up is awesome

heads up is very fun and profit is there...people underrate hu poker....it is more advanced than any other form in my view of it

anyone who doesn't play HU is a loser. Yeah

I love heads up and shoot out tournements but i prefer higher stakes heads up cash games

Heads up is probably the most profitable game imo in all forms. Cash, SnGs, Shootouts. You name it!

I play heads up and im pretty good in it , I won 8 of my last 10 games .
This is my muscle in the game . You can win over in a very small time
I play for less stakes , but ive seen players buyin in for $200 in doublin in in less than a Minute . It feels great even to watch these matches , just outsmartin ur opponents .
For me , after the first few hands , I see myself liek playin against a Robot/Bot/Computer . And i jsut make some moves where the other guy sure will not predict . And this definitely gives us an edge over them . I donno if i sayin it right but thats how i play these sngos .
Good luck mate

Heads up are very profitable if you know how to play them correctly. They attract tons of fish and especially with the new hyper turbo formats taking off these have become very profitable.

You should check out this; All the Tools Needed to Beat Heads Up Poker thread.

It has some valuable info, a top high stakes HUSNG player who's willing to answer any questions you have and their videos which are great on improving your game.

I love to play heads-up. Most of the time I've done very well...but last night I busted my Black Chip account playing heads up on a house-over-house bad beat. It's actually the first time I've ever lost playing HU, but my account on Black Chip only had like 5 bucks on it anyway so it's whatever.

For those who are curious, the bad beat was:

Board showed: 2-2-K-Q-A

I had QQ in my hand.
Villain had AA.