In this article I’m going to be looking at common situations in heads up poker and at factors that go into exploiting our opponents’ mistakes. While many of these decisions may appear to be simple, we want to avoid getting into the habit of having much of our play be too automatic, and there are often considerations that arise that may indicate alternate lines to best exploit our opponents’ tendencies.
On the button, we normally want to raise with most hands, and what we’re looking to do is put our opponents to the test with aggression and build pots where we’ll have the positional advantage later. Testing our opponent early with aggression is important because any time we make an aggressive move, it forces our opponent into reacting, and in doing so he may make a mistake we can take advantage of. So long as our plan for the rest of the hand is sound, we can raise whether he folds too often, calls too often, or 3-bets too often. It’s also important to raise when our opponent is willing to play big pots post flop out of position.
If our opponent 3-bets us often, we will back off on our raising, as we want to avoid raising and then folding too often. This way we can take advantage of him when we have strong hands by calling his 3-bet or re-raising. Typically, this means limping some of our middling hands like 97s while folding our weakest hands like J5o.
Should he be eager to attack our limps, we’ll look to limp more often, particularly when we can confidently call his raise, like with a hand like 87s. We typically do NOT want to limp a hand like AKs, because we are losing too much by not raising.
We also need to look at how often we’re seeing flops in position and the opportunities that present themselves on the flop instead of just taking the pot down with a raise pre-flop. The looser our opponents are post flop, the more flops we want to see with them, even if this means limping more. Conversely, the better an opponent plays post flop, the more we should look to take pots down when we can. We also want to use this rationale when out of position pre-flop, where the amount of pots that we’re prepared to play is going to depend on the nature of an opponents’ play later in the hand. We should fold more with stronger opponents and play more against weaker ones.
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