I've always liked heads up tournaments, as it's a fun challenge to be playing for more and more money as you advance. Last night I was lucky enough to win 8 matches in a row and the tournament.
The toughest opponent I faced was in the round of 32. He took a 2 to 1 chip lead on me early as he was folding when I had it and not folding when I didn't. He was playing so aggressive I decided to 3-bet/call 35 BBs with A8o, and I hit an ace on the river to beat his 66. Then I made a big call on the river with 3rd pair against his over-bet shove, and he showed me jack high and I advanced.
In the round of 16 I chipped away at my opponent and eventually busted him when my KJo held against his JTs all-in preflop.
In the round 8, I played by far my weakest opponent yet. The guy had very erratic bet-sizing and almost no hand-reading ability. Once I figured out that his min-bets postflop were always weak, I got a bit of a chip lead then busted him when he couldn't fold TT on a QQ88 board vs my QJ.
My final four match lasted 8 hands, we went back and forth stealing the blinds at first and then my opponent 4-bet shoved 88 into my KK, and I was lucky enough to hold.
At the final table, I won the first biggish pot when I rivered two pair and he paid me off with 2nd pair. Then I ground him down to about half the starting stack, mostly being lucky enough not to run into hands with my constant shoves over his button opens. Finally he got sick of me re-shoving and open shoved 14 BBs with K3o into my TT, and the tens held for the win.
It feels great to win and I'm very happy with how I played; I felt I adjusted quickly to a wide array of opponents and avoided the crazy/hopeless bluffs that are often my undoing in heads up poker.
I also managed to make another final table, but it didn't finish up well:
So overall a very good night, hopefully I can keep it going.
Sorry for the lack of posts, haven't been playing any poker at all, that will hopefully change soon though. So since I have no poker playing of my own to report on, I thought I'd point out a couple of the biggest mistakes I see small stakes tournament players make:
Not having a plan
This is by far the most common mistake I see. Way way too many players will put in significant chunks of their stack without having any idea what they'll do if they get raised. To illustrate what I mean, here's a hypothetical example:
Huge field Stars tournament with about 800 players left, 500 get paid. You are in the cutoff on a stack of 17,000 chips. Blinds are 500/1000 with a 100 ante. You are dealt KQ of clubs. The other stacks are:
Button: 75,000 SB: 11,000 BB: 22,000
Any decent player knows KQ suited in the cutoff is strong enough to raise for value, so they raise. But if theres a re-raise, they have no idea what they should do.
This is a problem for several reasons. One, the amount of chips you're raising is a significant portion of your stack, so you have to make sure you're investing it wisely when you do choose to raise. Two, you've yet to consider reads on your opponents. In a 100 BB deep cash game, it's pretty much always going to be right to make your standard raise, so you don't have to be so careful before raising. But your reads on your opponents are hugely hugely important with this high a % of your stack on the line.
Here are a few examples of what you should be thinking, based on differing opponent tendencies:
1. the button has been playing his big stack highly aggressively, the small blind seems decent but just lost a big pot to get short stacked, and the big blind has been very tight. so I'll make my standard 2.5x the blind raise, get it in vs the button if he re-raises, call the short stacked small blind since he'll pushing a fairly wide range for value and I'll be getting good odds, and fold to a raise from the big blind.
2. all three players are very aggressive, plus i've been playing a lot of hands and have a loose, wild image. so if i raise, i'll be forced to call an all-in from all 3 of them. therefore it might be a better option to open shove and force my opponents to fold small pairs and weak aces and take the play away from them.
3. all 3 players are extremely tight and seem to be waiting for big pairs and AK. they also don't like to call raises even when getting good odds, so I'll make a tiny raise thats barely more than the minimum and fold if anyone shoves. that way my steal doesnt have to work as often to be profitable, and i can steal with pretty much any two against my weak opponents.
Planning things out allows you to make the most of your opponents weaknesses, as it will help you easily see good spots to steal and spots where you should never be raise-folding. This way, you'll be able to adjust your opening range depending on table conditions, and you won't make the mistake of having the same opening range for every position like many strategy books advise. If you're not sure whether or not you should be raise-calling or raise-folding in a spot, save the hand history, then after your session use pokerstove to assign an approximate range to your opponent. The more you do this, the easier your decisions will become, allowing you to play more tables at once and make more money.
Overestimating your own edge
Another huge mistake I see many poker players make is passing up too many +EV spots because they think they can find better spots in the future. In a cash game that you're properly bankrolled for, this is a mistake 100% of the time. In tournaments though, there are some situations that can be +chipEV but -$EV. These effects are most pronounced on satellite bubbles, tournaments in which your goal is not to get all the chips but merely to go broke the slowest. And good SNG players of course know that because of the flat payout structures in SNGs, its often right to fold the best hand on or near the bubble.
But in big field MTTs where most of the money is in the top 5 spots, its almost never going to be right to pass up a +chipEV spot. Situations like this could arise at or near the final table if there are a bunch of very short stacks, but such spots are very rare, and they're pretty much non-existant early in the tournament. The illusion of time fools many poker players; they believe that the longer they stay in the tournament, the better their chances are of winning. Assuming you are equally as skilled as your opponents, this is completely false, as your chances of winning are directly proportional to the the percentage of chips in play you currently have. In big field MTTs just trying to survive is not going to be a winning strategy; you may make the money more often but you won't finish in the top five nearly enough to be profitable.
I constantly see tournament players saying they folded in a close spot because they felt they were better than their opponents. And in ~neutral EV spots, there's some merit to that. However, what you very rarely see is a player who decided to gamble with slightly the worst of it because he felt his opponents were better than him and that this was his best chance. I understand most poker players have big egos and are very confident in themselves, but in tournaments you can't table select like you can in cash games, so you're sometimes going to end up at tough tables with very good players on your left, or heads up against someone who you'd swear can see your cards.
We've all been in that spot, but I can only think of one occasion where I've seen a player recognize he was outclassed at the time and adjust accordingly, and that was Shaun Deeb in an FTOPS tournament last year. It was a $500 heads up shootout, and Deeb was matched up with Annette_15. Annette was reading him like an open book and getting the best of him, so Deeb decided his best chance was to play big pots preflop and neutralize her post flop skill advantage. Using this strategy, he went on to win the match and eventually the whole tournament. Deeb has won well over a million dollars in online tournaments, so when I read his post on Two Plus Two after the tournament where he said he felt he was being outplayed and switched to playing huge pots preflop, I was impressed to say the least. To me it takes a great poker player to swallow their pride and change their gameplan to give themselves the best chance.
In conclusion, I leave you with one of my all time favorite televised hands, as a precaution for what can happen when you bet without a plan and overestimate your edge:
