10:03pm: With me finally getting completely settled into my brand new home, with my brand new office, I have finally been able to dedicate the time necessary into putting in some serious volume heads up. Join me, why don’t you? — in becoming a complete heads up machine (that is, if your desire is to do this for a living). We’ve been preaching volume, volume, and more volume for quite some time, but it feels like the weight of the world on your shoulders everyday when you feel like you have to play 20+ games. Being as such, it would be beneficial if we invented some sort of routine/program to follow in order to break it down and seem like less of a burden.

So let’s do this: committ to playing 24 heads up sit n gos a day, 5 days a week. Break each day into eight segments consisting of three games a piece. Play each segment however you’d like. Take as many breaks in between each segment as you need, and play them whenever you’d like. The only catch is that you must play the required eight segments each day. This includes times when you go 6-0 in your first two segments and you don’t want to “ruin” your unblemished record by continuing, so you decide to stop for the day. No, you are not allowed to do that. No matter how you cut it, you are going to play eight segments of three games per day.

Here is a link to a sample spreadsheet I am using to keep track of these segments.

So why this method? What does it change? How does it help you?

Well, it does a few things:

• Keeps your thoughts/mindset encapsulated, meaning you only worry about the present, and not the past or the future
• It prevents the player from taking a results-oriented approach
• It keeps things in perspective because it gives variance a fighting chance of evening out
• It’s a completely organized, streamlined approach and is much more business-like than just randomly playing games whenever one feels like it.
• It will allow you to follow a regulated schedule, which makes the process seem much more like a job and less like gambling.
• Each segment is a fresh start. When you go 0-3 in one segment, the next is a new chapter in which you are entitled to forget that the chapter before it even existed.

The three game segment approach also yields a forced result. There are no ties. There are four different outcomes:

• 3-0
• 2-1
• 1-2
• 0-3

If you’re anything like me, you’d consider 75% of those results “managable”. The only one of the four you REALLY don’t want to see is 0-3. Anything else should be considered acceptable results. Even if you finish 0-3 in any of your segments, that’s ok — that’s why you play eight of them.

Another thing you should note is that I have chosen Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday as the days dedicated to playing my sessions. These days were specifically chosen and hand-picked, based on the days of the week which were most profitable, as determined by Sharkscope. If you’d like to find out which days of the week are most profitable for you, simply click your name and then “More Options” and then “Graph Results By..” and then “Day of the Week”. Choose your days wisely, as I have. You can even choose to play the hours of the day which are also most profitable for you. Relying on this data also assumes that you have a relatively large sample size, or else the data is meaningless. 1000 heads up matches should be a large enough sample size to yield the information you need in regards to this.

Remember, heads up sngs are nothing more than mindset tweaks and making self-psychological manipulations in order to keep yourself grounded, and to keep the results steady, upward, and consistent. Implementing this organized approach is a big step into getting serious about heads up sngs for some serious extra cash, if not for a living.

Start a Clean Slate at a New Room, a New Sharkscope, and Keep HFL Free in the Process

10:30pm: You hear it all the time: be aggressive. Aggression, aggression, aggression is supposed to be the key to winning poker, right? No doubt there’s some truth to that. So what makes you or anyone an aggressive player? Are you classified as an aggressive player if you bluff a lot? To answer this question, let’s backtrack and define the different types of aggression. There are two forms: (a) wreckless and (b) well timed.

Wreckless aggression is pretty much an illogical, alpha-male sort of aggression for those with bigger egos than IQs. People who are wrecklessly aggressive bluff in spots where:

• There is no value in doing so.
• Fold equity doesn’t justify the push
• Their table image has been established such that the whole purpose of bluffing has been negated
• They have no regard for the range of cards they will get called with in spots they choose to push

On the other hand, well timed aggression is aggression that is completely deliberate and well thought out. If bluffing is “madness” then well timed aggression is definitely the method behind the madness. Well timed aggression may consist of times where:

• The estimated odds of your opponent folding offset the smaller chance you will get called
• You have established a level of trust with your opponent such that the move is well disguised
• The board is such that your opponent has more cards that could beat them than cards that cannot
• Your opponent cannot logically call without one or two exact cards in their hand

Either way, obviously the result we are trying to acheive is to get our opponent to fold, which is why we call this technique bluffing. We don’t have a hand, and we would like to win the pot without having to show our cards.

Now that we’ve established the two kinds of aggression (that consequently lead to bluffing), let’s decide which kind is a more suitable choice for the winning heads up sit n go player. While I award brownie points for courage for those who practice wreckless aggression, the path to true heads up sng success is paved with well timed aggression. There are simply times when it makes absolutely no sense to bluff. Let’s examine these times:

• In the 10/20 blinds, and you only have 20 invested in the pot. Your opponent has bet the pot, and you have absolutely nothing. Let it go, there is no value in protecting what little you have in the pot at this point. Wait until the blinds mean something to start stealing.
• When you suspect that your opponent has caught on to the fact that you’ve been stealing quite a few pots. The more pots you drag, even if they are small, the more likely you are going to be forced at some point to prove you’ve got the goods. People catch on. This is why I suggest waiting until later to start firing with air, because establishing a tight image early on is worth more later on when the blinds actually hurt to lose.
• When you’ve just shown a bluff. I can’t tell you how many times I see people show a bluff, and then try the same move again no more than 10 seconds later. I’m well aware that some people would think that I would think that there’s no way someone would do it twice in a row without having the goods, therefore I might give them the benefit of the doubt and fold the second time. Problem with that thinking is that most people aren’t on that 2nd-3rd level of thinking, and will simply call you the next time you bet big — as they should, because you have betrayed their trust.
• When pride is starting to get in the way. We’ve seen this situation before: you’re trying to bluff someone, and they keep calling you with bottom pair — and frankly, it’s pissing you off. First off, STOP. This is not about pride, or bragging rights, or who’s got the biggest kahunas. This is about money, and it’s clear that your opponent doesn’t trust you. To counter balance this, you should probably take him to a place I like to call “value city”. It’s nice up there.
• When the risk/reward ratio is too low. Way too often, I see people fire 400 on the river into a pot with 80 chips in it, I fold, and then they show me 9 3 offsuit. Ok, so what? You risked 400 chips to get 40 of your own back? Even if I fold 9 times out of 10, that’s only a net profit of [40 x 9] = 360 chips. The one time you get called you lose 440 chips. Does that sound like a winning proposition to you? I would sure hope not.

After everything I’ve just presented you with, the main thing you need to know is that wreckless aggression is -EV, while well timed aggression is +EV. There has to be some kind of deliberacy within your system of bluffing for it to be effective. Just because something is deliberate and premeditated doesn’t mean it is dechipherable. The trick to effective bluffing is coming up with your own undechiperable method of aggression.

The key to successful bluffing is to be a good storyteller, because when you bluff, you are attempting to tell a story — even if false. The story has to be believable, or else the whole purpose of such a move is null and void. When your opponent is faced with a tough call in the later stages of the hand, they will probably try to piece together the fragments of the story to see if everything “fits”, and then come to a conclusion on whether or not your story is believable to them. Wreckless aggression and well timed aggression aside, there is a such thing as a good bluff and a bad bluff. Let’s try to pick them apart.

• The bad: You’ve played pretty tight the whole match. Whenever you’ve raised, you usually held two cards 10 or higher (KQ, AK, QJ, etc), and your opponent knows this. This time you’ve raised to 90 (from 30) preflop with AsKd - and the flop comes: 5d 6c 9h. You make a pot-sized continuation bet, and your opponent calls. The pot is now 540.The turn is 7h. Your opponent checks to you, and you decide to check behind, hoping to hit one of your overcards. The river is a total brick: 2s, and your opponent once again checks to you.

  Being perfectly honest with yourself, you’re probably a little upset that you have so much money invested in this pot with such a premium hand, and you’ve totally missed the board. You’re almost 100% sure you’re beat but you feel your opponent can’t call unless they hold an 8, so you decide that you want to throw a temper tantrum (because you missed) and steal this pot by betting 500 on the river. You do so, and your opponent goes into the tank.It is at this moment that your opponent is piecing together the story you have just told them to see if it makes any sense. Every time you’ve raised preflop, you’ve held two high cards. Therefore, there’s really no scenario with you raising preflop that involves you holding an 8 in your hand, unless you raised with 88, but that’s not entirely likely. You checked the turn when the straight hit the board, which means that you were either scared of the card, or you totally loved it. If you had an overpair, you would have probably bet the turn to see where you were at with the intention of folding to a raise.

  In addition to this, if you had an overpair, the river bet is entirely too large for this holding to make sense. With an overpair, you would want a call. 500 screams, “please don’t call me”. Therefore, a logical mindset would deduce that you’d either have the straight or nothing at all in this spot.Given your normal preflop raising range, and your betting patterns on this board, it now starts to make sense that the story you are trying to tell is false. Your opponent calls with A9, and you were caught in a fairly non well-thought-out bluff.

• The good: Good bluffs involve manipulating “sure fire” information. That is, the rare times when you are able to put your opponent on a VERY specific range of hands. This will enable you to represent cards that you know are scary for your opponents hand. For example, as stated before in one of my articles (on Tells, I believe) most opponents who raise 4x preflop are holding mid pocket pairs almost all day. Your opponent believes you to be a relatively loose player, but knows that your calling range is a lot more narrow than your raising range. Therefore, when they make a 4x raise preflop and you call, it is reasonable to assume that they are thinking that you are holding overcards to their middle pair preflop.Let’s say that your opponent makes it 80 to go in the 10/20 blinds preflop on the button, and you call not even looking at your cards. In fact, it would be a good exercise in this hand to stick a post it note on where your cards are just to emphasize that cards aren’t as important as the storytelling is.

  The pot is now 160, and the flop comes 2c 3c 9s. You believe your opponent to be holding 44-88. They make a bet of half the pot (80 - which, by the way screams “I’m leaving myself room to fold this weak hand”), and you decide to call with the intention of bluffing the turn if (a) the flush completes or (b) an overcard hits. The pot is now 320, which means you have 160 chips invested into the hand.

  The turn is an excellent card to pull this move off (Kc). Your opponent bets half the pot once again (160), but this time, you decide to raise and represent either/or the club or the king. You decide to raise to 460, making it another 300 to call for your opponent. Once again, as we discussed before, this is the moment where your opponent goes into the tank and pieces together the story. Here are some of the facts that add up to your raising seeming truthful:

  1. You are sure your opponent perceives you as tight, and you called a 4x raise preflop

  2. You just called the flop, which is often what someone with overcards and more frequently, a flush draw would do.

  3. Your opponent doesn’t know that you know that their 4x raise means “middle pocket pair”, and as a tight player, you’ve shown a tendency to at least have the highest card on the board in raising situations

  4. A flush draw just completed, which is yet another way their hand could be beat.When you add up all the facts, the benefits of folding outweigh the risks of calling, and since your story seems believable, your opponent decides to lay his hand down, and you drag the pot.

So to summarize, equally as imporant as how you bluff is the times you choose to do so. Think about these things, and whether or not the bluffs you tend to make do, in fact, make any sense at all. Before you think about pulling the trigger, make sure all the facts line up. Then and only then will you begin to see the true value in storytelling.

Start a Clean Slate at a New Room, a New Sharkscope, and Keep HFL Free in the Process

1:28am: Unfortunately, due to running HFL and also playing live poker 3 nights a week, and running a part time Ebay business 6 months out of the year, I am unable to put in the volume online in heads up sngs that used to. So how did I put in the volume before life got hectic?

By Using the “NFL football season” method.

The NFL is one of the most popular sports leagues in the world. Being as such, most people are aware that there are 16 games in an NFL season. Keeping this in mind, this method would mold each poker session into a microcosm of sorts of an NFL season.

Let me explain. If you follow NFL football with any sort of regularity, then every year you go through the ups and downs that is an NFL season. You also probably don’t panic right off the bat if your team starts out on the wrong foot — say, with a 1-3 record. If they win the next one, they are only one game under .500. The same holds true for heads up sngs. If you pre-commit to this set number of games each day, I find that people usually hold their composure better in a contained environment/system such as this, than they do if they are just arbitrarily playing without any real plan or system.

Any time you get serious and organized about your poker endeavors, it’s almost always a good thing. By employing this method, you’ve basically guaranteed yourself a fighting chance of beating variance because it is focused more on results at the end of the day rather than results by the hour. This is not to say that even less-than-desirable end of the day results mean anything, but it’s certainly better to put more emphasis on doing well over a 16 game stretch than it is to put emphasis on doing well on a game-to-game basis. In addition, this method also helps you stick to volume commitments. So many times we say “if I play X hours per day, and make X dollars per match, I should make X dollars per year”. However, those figures mean nothing if you don’t stick to your volume. This method will ensure that you will make [avg. profit/game] x [16] x [5] dollars per week if you play and “NFL season” per day, 5 days a week.

So let’s say you play $20 heads up sngs, and you average $3 profit per match over a 1,000 game sample size. Using this method, you will ensure that you make $3 x 16 = $48 per day.  Play 5 seasons a week, and you’re suddenly looking at a near guaranteed profit of $240 a week, which is also $960 a month. That’s not exactly chump change.

Like I said before, doing well in heads up is nothing more than a series of mind tweaks and mental manipulations you do with yourself in order to stay in the right mindset, because mindset is everything in heads up poker.

So to this I say at least give it a try - and everyday can be football season year round.

10:32am: Somebody once asked me what my secret is to keeping my graph so steady and upward. I couldn’t really sum it up into one phrase, until I read the first line of this article describing how Kenny Tran won event #25 at the 2008 World Series of Poker:

“I definitely have a strategy. I like to grind people out and make them feel bored. I just torture them and let them finally make a mistake.”

All of a sudden, it hit me: this is exactly the same strategy I employ, especially in the early blinds at a heads up SNG. Everyone talks about “mixing up your game”, “playing unpredictable”, “loose aggressive” — and to all that I say: yadda yadda. Loose aggressive is not the new basic strategy. By basic, I mean that in everyone’s quest to try something different and unpredictable, they become — well — rather predictable.

In sharp contrast to this, the whole reason people play poker is because it’s an action game. Half the enjoyment of half the people who play poker is in the adrenaline rush that they feel when playing the game. If you grind them down slowly, you take that enjoyment away from them. So to that, I say try something truly new and innovative, go ‘against the grain’ and do what I do:

“Torture them to Death”

Keep HFL Free

2:24pm: How you play off your opponents strengths and weaknesses has a direct correlation with how successful you are. In fact, the best heads up players in the world have no identity at all. They are merely just the “anti-you” when they play you. Spotting someones achilles heel is the key to success. Everyone has one. However, the one who spots it first will be the one with the decided edge.

As SteveK said, you must use tell tale signs during the match to formulate your idea of what their achilles heel is, and you must do it as quick as possible. The important thing to note is that everything means something. Examples of “everything” can include:

• Quick calls (usually weakness)
• Limp re-raises pre flop (usually strength)
• Long delays followed by checking (usually weakness)
• Over bets on the river (usually strength)

All of these things, and much more usually factor into the equation of reading your opponent. Betting patterns are also of the utmost importance in heads up matches. While there’s no one right way to read into betting patterns, there is indeed a wrong way to do so: by not making logical sense of it all, and failing to think it through.

Empathy is perhaps one of the most important concepts in poker. Empathy is simply the capacity to recognize or understand another’s state of mind or emotion. You have to anticipate how each move makes them feel, and to a degree even take it a step further by anticipating how they are anticipating how each move they make makes you feel.

A good practice is to try to listen to people talk, anywhere you go. Anytime someone makes a statement to the other, anticipate what their reaction is. Odds are, your first guess will be a lot more “off” than your next guess 20 minutes later, after having spent some time to get to know their personality. Same thing with poker. This is why you always hear me talk about “feeling your opponent out” early on, and not getting too involved at this stage of the match. The goal is to gather a series of reactions, using empathy as a database to predict with greater accuracy reactions later on in the match.

Keep all this in mind next time you find yourself playing big pots early on in the match. Sometimes playing the cards works, but sometimes it’s best to just slow down and most importantly, “think about it.”

1:45pm: This is a well written article contributed by SteveK (using the submit an article button). He brings up a lot of good questions, and I think it’s a good idea to ponder these things before moving forward with the answers to them. Enjoy

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Have you thought about it?

I mean, have you thought about it? By ‘it’, I mean how you would handle each type of player you run into at the tables. To me, that is the beauty of Heads Up matches; that you can label someone as a “calling station”, “maniac”, on tilt, too tight, etc. You do everything you can to exploit this current (or permanent in some cases) leak in their game like no other format. This applies to ring games and MTTs as well, but it is far easier to get deep in someone’s head in a heads up match. I play and talk to people on a regular basis that need to ask themselves the following questions, among many others:

• How do I handle a Maniac?

• Do I expand or tighten up my calling range?

• How do I handle “Tight Ted”?

• Do I try to bet him out of more pots or do I try to wait for a huge hand and hope he calls?

• How do I handle someone I’m pretty sure is drunk?

• Should I make any adjustment at all?

It gets more complicated if you use Sharkscope. You ask yourself, “Wow, this guy runs at a 10% ROI and he is raising every pot, what does this mean?” and “This guy runs at a -15% ROI, is my top pair with a crap kicker good here when he is putting me all in?” Upon looking at this guy’s chart, I see he does quite well at these stakes but moves up and gets crushed at the higher games. Sound familiar?

How should this affect my approach? This guy usually plays much higher, so why is he down here and how should this affect my approach to him? It’s essential to have a plan of attack going in, but in any competition adjustments are everything. Do you know how you would handle each type of player once you have put an appropriate label on them? You should.