4:01am: There’s a trend going on in heads up sit n gos. By lately, I mean within the last 8 months or so. I believe it is a function of people attempting to lower their variance and clean up their game. For the most part, the number of people who push all their chips in on a draw has gone down significantly.

I am basing this observation over the last 750-1,000 heads up sngs I’ve played. As recently as a year ago, and more noticably the year before that — you could fill your tank up with gas within a week if you had a dollar for every time that one of your opponents put it all in on a draw.

Why the recent change? Have people finally realized that flush draws only hit 1/3rd of the time? Did they finally crunch the numbers on open ended straight draws? Is it no longer thrilling to them? And more imporantly… is this a good or a bad thing for you and me? I don’t know the answers to the first four questions, but to the last one I say that it’s not necessarily a good thing. In general, I find that people realized that there’s no need to gamble to this extent in heads up sit n gos in order to turn a steady profit. In MTTs? Sure. In heads up sit n gos? Not so much.

This is not to say that no one is gambling, or that no one puts it in the middle on a draw. It’s just simply an observation that it doesn’t happen as much as it used to. Regardless of whether or not your opponent is doing so, always remember this: it’s always better to draw against better players, meanwhile taking the inferior players to a place I like to call “value city”.