Last week, we discussed three-handed strategy for a single-table sit & go. This week, we will tackle heads-up play.
It's important to be able to play the endgame effectively in SNGs. When playing poker online in a standard single-table sit & go, for example, the payouts typically have 50 percent of the prize pool go to the winner and 30 percent to the runner-up.
At this point of a SNG, the effective stack is usually under 10 big blinds or it will be in short order. The shallow stacks tend to make the game simple and relatively easy to play. Generally, you want to be going all in or folding. Which hands you do this with depends on the tendencies of your opponent.
- Heads-up Match-ups in Hold’em. A-J, and lower, and it’s why Ace-King is such a powerful hand, particularly at the business end of no-limit hold’em tournaments when people move all-in with any sort of Ace. Math is the underpinning of poker and if you regularly get your money into the middle with the worst of it you will go broke.
- Poker Starting Hands Percentage & How to Play Your Position A common question amongst beginning poker players is, 'How tight or how loose should I play?' More specifically they ask, 'What.
Facing an Unknown or Balanced Player
When you are facing an unknown or balanced opponent, it is best to utilize an unexploitable strategy. One strategy that has stood the test of time is called the 'Sit And Go Endgame' system, or SAGE for short. It was developed and introduced by Lee Jones back in 2006 and is still relevant to SNG strategy today.
Essentially, SAGE is a shorthand memory trick that helps you determine if a hand is an unexploitable shove or call. Here is how you use SAGE.
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First, you must calculate the Power Index (PI) of your hand. Number cards are valued at the displayed amount 2 through 10. Then jacks are worth 11, queens 12, kings 13 and aces 15.
To calculate your hand's PI, double the value of your highest card, then add the value of your lowest card. If you hand is suited, add another 2 points. If you have a pair, double the value of one of your cards, add the other one, then add another 22 points.
For example, with , you double the value of the jack (11 x 2) and add the 7, totaling 29. With , you double the eight (8 x 2), add the 7, then add 2 more for suitedness to total 25. With you double one of the sixes (6 x 2), add 6 more, then add 22 for being paired to total 40.
Once you've calculated the PI of your hand, use the chart below to look up the number of big blinds in the effective stack to determine if your hand has a PI high enough to play.
For example, when the effective stack is 7 big blinds, you must have a PI of 26 or higher to shove and a PI of 30 or higher to call. This means it would be recommended to open-fold (PI = 25), to shove but not call with (PI = 29) and shove or call with (PI = 40) based on our calculations above.
This shorthand is game theoretically optimal for effective stack sizes 7 BBs or below. It starts to break down for bigger stacks, so I am including a second short chart with the percentage of hands you can shove or fold 8-10 BBs unexploitably as recommended by Max Silver's SnapShove app.
SAGE Chart
| Effective Stack Size (BBs) | Shove if PI is at least | Call if PI is at least |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 17 | Call Any Two Cards |
| 2 | 21 | 17 |
| 3 | 22 | 24 |
| 4 | 23 | 26 |
| 5 | 24 | 28 |
| 6 | 25 | 29 |
| 7 | 26 | 30 |
SnapShove
| Effective Stack Size (BBs) | Shove Top X% of hands | Call Top X% of hands |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | 61.7% | 45.4% |
| 9 | 59.9% | 40.6% |
| 10 | 58.4% | 37.6% |
These are great defaults to use when you don't know what mistakes your opponent is likely to make. But when you know he is too tight or too loose, you can deviate from this baseline to exploit him even further.
Facing an Overly Tight or Overly Loose Player
SAGE would have you call a 7 BB shove with a hand like (PI = 30). This is great to know against a good player who is shoving hands as bad as (PI = 26), but not against a player who shoves too tight.
If you know this to be true about your opponent, you should call him tighter than SAGE suggests. If you can determine the bottom of his shoving range, just call him slightly tighter than that.
By the same token, the range of hands SAGE suggests to shove is profitable against a player who calls correctly. But if your opponent calls too tight, then you can shove even wider than the SAGE ranges.
Feel free to throw in a few more hands, especially those that contain big cards, but don't go overboard. There are players and situations where you can get away with shoving any two cards — but this approach can quickly become a slippery slope to Spew Valley, so be careful.
When facing a player who shoves or calls too loose, you can just stick to the SAGE ranges. The fact that he is getting it in with more garbage than you just improves the EV of every hand in your ranges.
Heads-up play is where the real money is in a SNG. But because of the short stack sizes, it can be one of the easiest parts of the tournament to play. If you utilize these tips, you should win at least your fair share of SNGs in the long run.
Next week, we'll wrap this series up with a discussion of sit & go bankroll management.
Also in this series...
Ready to start giving sit & gos a try? Put these tips into practice at partypoker.
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Heads up poker is a form of poker that is played between only two players. It might be played during a larger cash game session, where the game is breaking up and only two players remain on the table, or where two players are trying to start a game and playing heads-up while waiting for other opponents. It is also a necessary phase in most sit-and-go (SNG) poker tournaments; the single remaining tournament winner will at some point have to face only a single opponent. Alternatively, heads up poker may be played on purpose, either in a cash game format, or as a SNG, where two players play a winner-take-all tournament for a fixed, previously agreed upon amount of money. On larger online poker rooms and during certain tournament series, one may stumble upon larger heads up tournaments, usually in the shoot-out format. Usually, in order to ensure the fairness of the game, all players finishing at the same level of the tournament bracket will be paid out the same amount of money, no matter what their finishing place is.
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Strategy[edit]
The rules of heads up poker are the same as in a game with three or more players, except in community card poker, the blinds are usually reversed in order to decrease the positional advantage in matches between two players of similar skill. Nevertheless, the strategy employed tends to be vastly different from a multi-handed poker game. Since only two players take part in the hand, the chance of having the best hand is much higher than in a multi-handed game, which causes the game to become more aggressive than normal. Bluffs for example become easier to pull off in a heads up game since it is only necessary to bluff a single opponent in order to win the pot, whereas in a multi-handed game there is a greater risk of someone having a big hand that cannot be bluffed.
In spite of the diversity of strategies one can design, it is important to remark that the heads-up limit Texas hold'em variation has been claimed to be 'essentially weakly solved' in January 2015 by the Cepheus poker-playing bot. Theoretically a slightly better strategy exists but would not be able to win more than one big blind per thousand games on average. A person using that strategy would not be able to prove with statistical significance that it was better than Cepheus even with a lifetime of playing against it.[1][2]
The bot can be played online at poker.srv.ualberta.ca, and users can even query strategies from the software.
Tournaments[edit]
In poker tournaments heads up poker is played as individual events and there are also heads up championships. Heads up poker tournaments are typically played as knock-out tournaments. An example of a heads up tournament is the National Heads-Up Poker Championship.
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References[edit]
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- ^Bowling, Michael; Burch, Neil; Johanson, Michael; Tammelin, Oskari (Jan 2015). 'Heads-up limit hold'em poker is solved'. Science. 347 (6218): 145–9. doi:10.1126/science.1259433. PMID25574016.
- ^Emily Conover (8 January 2015). 'Texas Hold 'em poker solved by computer'. Retrieved 15 January 2015.