FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#078 – Heads-Up Championship Part XIV – The Dark Art of Heads-Up Poker

Posted by Editor | Filed under 2007 NBC Heads-Up Championship, Andy Bloch, Gavin Smith, Heads-Up, Mike Matusow, Shannon Elizabeth, Strategy

Full Tilt Poker‘s system crashed trying to get my avatar on the system, keeping me from playing the $400,000 Guarantee and keeping me from making updates for several hours. The semi-finals are going on right now. Shannon Elizabeth has a small lead over Paul Wasicka, and Chad Brown has a big lead over Gavin Smith. I’ll write a bit about what’s going on, as well as how they got here, but I wrote a feature while the site was down to provide some insight into the heads-up games of the players at this level.

I have gotten some anecdotal information about heads-up play from watching the matches, talking with the players, and knowing a few things about poker (specific to the participants and the situations). I considered doing a careful, comprehensive analysis. But why do that when I can just run a bunch of ideas at you?

Gavin Smith and Spook Culture – Gavin loves to play garbage cards. He does it for the same reason Ted Forrest does: you can beat aces easier with T-4s than you can with kings, and you’ll probably lose less. With a deep stack (and the early levels of the heads-up matches are deep-stack, but NOT the later levels), hand values frequently become inverted. It’s hard to shut someone with an inferior hand out of a pot before the flop, or bet enough to make it bad business for them to pay to see the flop. (In addition, if you TRY to make it super-expensive, then you’re telling your opponents “this is my aces-raise, compared with my smaller K-Qs-raise.”)

The man with T-4s is usually going to lose, usually just that one preflop bet. But how much is he going to win when he wins? Potentially everything.

There is an aspect of risk, however. Against Phil Gordon’s aces, Gavin got his money in correctly with Th-4h after a flop of Q-8-9 with two hearts. He was almost 50% and by being the one to push, he would have gotten a lot of hands that were better than his (or would have been better after the next card if it didn’t make a straight or flush to Gavin) to fold. Imagine if you have A-8 and someone pushes all-in on you? Or pocket tens? Especially early in the match.

In fact, Phil had The Hand That Will Never Fold, with pocket aces, one of them matching the suit of two cards on the board. So Gavin was potentially losing a lot more than his preflop bet. That probably has something to do with why he pushed all-in. To bet enough and leave himself folding money if he misses on the turn means that he CAN lose a lot with T-4s, and the reason you play that hand with a deep stack is to have a much greater ratio of what you can win to what you can lose.

Pocket pairs are much better hands to play in the deep-stack-worse-hand-passes-better-hand-on-the-flop game. Imagine if Gavin had pocket eights. Or pocket deuces and the flop was Q-8-2. Instead of being in the position of needed the folding equity or needing to win a coin flip to keep from being eliminated, he would have gotten in his money with the “worse” hand (preflop) with Gordon drawing nearly dead.

That’s why guys like Gavin and Ted Forrest confound the poker world by playing junk. At least, that’s a little bit of it. I’ve gotten just a glimpse of the dark art so it’s all I know.

Shannon Elizabeth’s Angel Heart – Shannon Elizabeth is playing one of the best players in the world, a man she knows and respects, and whose towering poker achievements threaten to intimidate her, Barry Greenstein. But she sits on her emotions and plays the part of poker combatant, the most stereotypical area where being a professional actress is helpful in poker.

She’s hitting some flops and taking pots away from Greenstein by leading out on the turn, or raising on the river. She has a chip lead.

She calls a raise with J-6. The flop is magic: J-J-6. This is Johnny Chan versus young Erik Seidel stuff. Chan flops the straight on the last hand of the 1988 World Series and milks it until Seidel pushes all-in. Shannon calls Barry’s bet on the flop. Then calls his bet on the turn. It’s not until Barry bets the river that she raises all-in. Barry, who rivered a straight with his A-T, calls and loses.

So I asked Shannon this morning, “How did you sit on your emotions after you flopped a boat? Was your heart pounding in your chest?”

“Whenever I sit down to one of these matches, my heart is already pounding. I just tried to take my time, act like I missed the flop, hope he bets. I didn’t even realize by the end that he could have had queen-jack or something and beaten me. I just wanted to wait as long as I could to get my money in.”

That Idiot (a/k/a Andy Bloch) – I asked Andy Bloch at dinner after the first day of matches, “From your match and everything you hear, doesn’t it seem to you that top pros know less about the basics of heads-up play than you would imagine?” Andy was too diplomatic to agree with the general statement but there were many aspects of heads-up play that seemed obvious to Bloch and others school in game theory that will not well understood.

If I act like I know what I’m talking about (especially when it is critical of other pros, many of whom have won millions at tournament poker), it’s because I spent a year working on a book with Andy Bloch, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and nine other top pros. I can’t tell you that they told me everything they know, or that I know how to apply it all or reason from it. And I obviously don’t have the experience (beyond a high volume of online tournaments, which has been pretty positive) taking this advice to the tables.

But I have some understanding of what many of these players are doing, what they are trying to accomplish, and at least generally how they think these things through.

The way Andy Bloch thinks about heads-up, and Annie Duke, and Howard Lederer, and Chris Ferguson, is that certain plays are dictated by game theory, the simplest being that you can’t respond to an opponent in a way that makes it automatically profitable to behave in a certain way. The corollary is that you have to take advantage if your opponent responds to one of your moves in a way that’s automatically profitable. This comes up most often in deciding how often to raise or how often to fold to raises.

Another idea is never to limp on the button. Chris Ferguson explained this to me in a way even I could understand: “Having the button is a big advantage. If you always raise on your button and get called, and your opponent always limps on his button and you check, you are playing a bigger pot on every hand where you have the advantage of position, and a smaller pot when you are at a positional disadvantage.”

The third idea is the simple math related to the quality of the cards. If you are heads-up, it’s just two random hands. You don’t have a table full of players with nothing invested, player after player with a shot at a better two-card hand than you. There is a great deal of folding equity in raising with anything, because of the chance your opponent has something worse. And you’re on easy street if your opponent folds too often. Finally, most hands aren’t that much better than other hands before the flop. A-K against 3-2 is only 2-to-1. Unless your opponent has a pocket overpair or some freak situation like you have Q-7 and your opponent has K-7, you’re only about a 60/40 underdog most of the time. Even if you move with A-7 and run into 7-7, you are 30% to win. If you have A-7 and your opponent is going to fold a bunch, you can live with that kind of downside.

So Andy Bloch goes into these tournaments thinking (a) I’m going to raise 90% or so of the time on the button; (b) I am going to call a lot of raises from the big blind; and (c) I am not going to correlate my post-flop play with the quality of my cards.

This last is very poorly understood. Most players – and it’s clear to me that this includes some of the best players in the world – believe part of defeating an aggressive opponent (and Andy’s style of play is unquestionably aggressive) is trapping. Andy’s raising every big blind! He’s exposing himself to a trap as soon as an opponent picks up a big hand or a big flop, right?

Maybe, maybe not. If Andy raises and you fold four times in a row, what’s he going to think when you raise him back? He knows you have strong cards, and he’s stolen so much the first four times that he can give one up, especially because you are very likely to have a big hand. So what if you just call. Again, your call tells Andy volumes if you are routinely folding. Now he knows you have a good starting hand PLUS he gets a shot to outflop you. If he raised with Th-7h and you flat-called him with queens. He’ll check-fold or take a shot with a small bet and fold if the flop is A-K-4. (But how good do you feel with you queens on that kind of flop anyway?) Look what he does on the occasional K-T-7 flop, though.

The practitioners of Andy style, if they encounter an opponent who plays back when they are strong, simply steal their way to victory. They give up their hands when they encounter resistance, which isn’t often.

That’s why the proper defense is to play back with NOTHING. If Andy is raising 90% of the time and he gets reraised often enough, he knows you can’t have A-K or Q-Q every time. Now he has to call with some substandard hands, and HE is the one who doesn’t know what to make of a Q-7-4 flop, even though he caught a piece. Against someone who plays like he does, he might call a bet there. Against someone who plays back only when they have something, he’ll fold.

I’m sure I’ll catch heat for it from Mike Matusow when he finds out I said this, but I think Andy Bloch outplayed Mike. I couldn’t see the cards or what happened on most of the hands, but I heard Mike complain that Andy raised on the button 90 hands in a row (“and just my luck I get an ace the one time he folds”). And he referred to Andy’s betting as “4,000, 4,000, 4,000” and “Mr. Auto Bet.” After the match, Mike said, “He played so bad. I couldn’t get a hand for three hours” – the match went only an hour and a half – “and I still got a chip lead. All I needed was a hand when he kept betting, betting, betting and I could have taken him down.”

Andy told me that he thought Mike folded much too much and seemed to be folding every hand he didn’t hit anything on the flop. He was pretty sure Mike almost never bluffed, and gave up a couple pots where he could have had a race or was maybe getting the right odds to call but that he didn’t want to take the risk.

Matusow has one of the best tournament records ever: two bracelets, a ToC win and a third place, two WSOP final tables, final tables at the WSOP every year since 1999, millions and millions won. He has played some superb short-handed and heads-up matches during that time.

If we were to list the areas in which Matusow is supremely skilled in tournaments, I think you’d find most of those things drop in importance in a heads-up match where you are deep-stacked for the first few levels, and very short-stacked after that. This is true of many, many great tournament players. This format plays into the strengths of a game theoretical player, which has helped Chris Ferguson finish second two years in a row and helped Andy Bloch this year.

Of course, you gotta catch cards.

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