Top 5 Tips for Heads-Up Poker

All these tips are evenly important! Do not think that tip five is less important than tip one. Try to learn these things and get them into your game. Always try to learn new things and improve. If you don’t learn any new theory, you will have a huge disadvantage on the poker players who are improving their game.

1. Always stay focused! Don’t do anything else besides playing poker.

You should always pay attention while you play your villain. Because if you don’t, your villain will get an advantage over you. You won’t be able to notice leaks or flaws your villain has that give away reads if you’re reading your Facebook feed.

2. Try to be aggressive!

When you play heads-up poker, aggression is very important. If you don’t show any aggression, your villain will run you over. On the other hand, if you do show aggression, it’s likely that you will run over your villain! Try to be aggressive, but also try to understand the actions you for becoming aggressive. Don’t go randomly 3-bet or 4-bet hands without any reason. Your decisions should make sense and have reason for them to work out in your favor!

3. Focus on position

Position is also a huge thing in poker, not only in heads-up, but in all forms of poker. When you’re last to act, you have the advantage that you have seen what your villains decision had made. You can act on that. When you’re not in position, try to be aware that he is, and will make his move based on your move. When you think like that, you can try and find a way to influence his decision, or try and put him on a wrong track. Always be aware wither you are in position or not. This should be in your system, like riding a bicycle or driving a car.

4. Dare to fold!

It’s not a bad thing to fold. We all have been in a situation where you can say that you had to move all in on the river, because you were ‘pot committed’, I don’t believe in that. In these situation you are sometimes almost 100% sure to lose, but because you are so called ‘committed’, you go all in anyways. Where if you don’t, you saved that amount of money.

5. Play your villain! Adapt, adapt and adapt again!

Heads-up poker is all about adapting to your villain. You should pay attention all the time to what your villain does. Is he aggressive? Is he passive? Does he 3-bet me a lot? How easily does he call me c-bets, and so on. Adapting is most of the time common sense. For example, your villain is very aggressive and 3-bets a lot, you can call with a wider range of hands, because he is often likely to have a marginal hand.