Moan thread (also some hu strategy)

Hectorjelly

I dont play a lot of heads up anymore, I quite enjoy it but its pretty draining. An american guy I know plays a lot of hu matches and we got into an argument/discussion the other day. Basically my theory was that in a medium stacked hu match against someone you are better than (with 25-40bbs or so) there is little or not point in raising preflop unless they consistantly make more mistakes in raised pots than unraised ones.

Any raise in a pot or no limit game exponentially increases the size of the best on later streets. So if you are regularly raising preflop the size of the pot is going to be three times bigger, and any bet on the flop is going to be two to three times bigger than normal. In a limped pot a bet and a raise on the flop increases the pot to around 10bbs, in a raised pot a raise make it at least 15bbs which means you are now commiting your whole stack to the hand should you continue.

So by raising preflop you know make the game a much less deep afair, and therby reduce the skill that a good player can employ over the later and more important streets. A raise preflop means that a draw on the flop can never really be called for value as a bet on the turn is going to be in the region of 15bbs.

The later the street the more edge a good player has over a bad player, for several reasons (more info provided so far, less streets to get drawn out on, bigger bets etc). So by raising preflop you are also making it unlikely that there will be significent action on the turn or river,

An advantage of raising preflop is that its an easy way to steal blinds, but its easy to steal pots after the flop as well, allthough it requres more common sense and imagination, and also should be less risky.

Just to note, if the blinds are bigger or smaller then raising preflop becomes essential.

Anyway to get to the point today I played a hu match for the ireland team. I get 78s on the sb, against a player who perfectly matches the desciption above. I make it 300. From then on I play the hand perfectly, but OMFG im an idiot.

cardshark202

I think raising preflop was the reason I lost HU to tom in the boards thingy.
I experimented with the no-raise strategy you speak of online, and had a 75% win rate over a very small sample size, then I stopped playing them for some reason.

DeVore

Firstly, HJ all that seems self evident but its one of those things people dont consider. I've taken to playing raised flops with fairly crap hands if the stacks are deep simply because the size of mistakes made on post-flop play are far bigger then preflop where it seems most players have a good idea what they should do.

CardShark, our game was strange in that we were both playing aggressively and it was one of those games where both of us were playing the player a bit more then the cards. I dont think either of the first two matches got past the second level ffs

DeV.