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#422 – Full Tilt Heads-Up Championship – Day 2 Preview
The semi-final matches are
Table 1 – Andy Bloch v. whilelime
Table 2 – David Singer v. Brian Hastings
The matches start at 16:00 ET.
I strongly recommend you watch these matches. Even without seeing hole cards, you can learn a huge amount about playing heads up. Seeing how good players try to establish control through aggressiveness, seeing how it settles when both players try that, seeing how the decisive hands develop – there are great lessons there.
At 15:30 ET, a half hour before the matches start, there are four $5 + $0.50 “sweat” tournaments, one for each player in the semi-finals. You can register for only one but the one named for the eventual winner gets $5,000 added to the final table prizes.
I received an e-mail from Howard Lederer last night about the hand that turned the match toward Brian Hastings. As you might recall (or if you are too lazy to click that link in the previous sentence), the match swung strongly in Hastings’s favor after a hand where he won a huge pot with bets on every street with J-J and a board of J-5-6-5-2. Howard told me that he had, as I suspected, the case jack, his hole cards being Q-J.
Good luck to the four players remaining. I’ve watched matches played by all four and, of course, know a lot about Andy Bloch’s heads-up approach. These are four tremendous players, but only one can win at the end. (The losers get $168k or $320k, so don’t feel too bad for them.)
