Heads Up Limit Hold Em

Kongregate free online game Texas Hold 'Em Poker: Heads Up - Improve your poker game! Play no-limit Texas Hold 'em poker in a 3D first-person perspective a. Despite all these caveats, the idea that a computer can play even heads-up Limit Hold’em perfectly may be a tough pill to swallow, especially for those who see poker as a game of psychology and feel rather than straight mathematical probability. Fortunately, the bot is available online for use by the curious or dubious. Fixed Limit Heads-Up Strategy My strategy was to open close to 80% of hands from the button and call quite liberally from the small blind. In limit hold’em, you basically always get the pot odds to call a bet. Fixed limit games have two bet sizes, the small bet and the big bet. Heads-Up Limit Hold’em Poker Is Solved By Michael Bowling, Neil Burch, Michael Johanson, and Oskari Tammelin DOI:10.11 Abstract Poker is a family of games that exhibit imperfect informa-tion, where players do not have full knowledge of past events. While many perfect information games have been solved. Get access to the 2nd part of Doug's video series on Heads Up strategy by clicking here: https://www.upswingpoker.com/heads-up-no-limit-video-series-youtube/.

Playing before the flop is your first opportunity to voluntarily put money in the pot. Don’t just toss in the first single bet to be a part of the action. Make good decisions by following the advice given in this lesson and stick to our recommended starting hand requirements until you gain more experience. There is no shame in folding and waiting for a better hand to play. On the contrary, the shame is in falling prey to the donkey’s mantra of “any two will do!”

Before we mention starting hand requirements, let’s talk about the mindset that captures successful limit play. That mindset is the ability to be patient and selective about the hands you play. Patience is a critical element to winning hold’em play. Good players exercise the patience to wait for hands that they know have positive expectation and then play them aggressively. In a nutshell this strategy describes the selective, aggressive mantra that has been espoused by Krieger, Sklansky, Malmuth, Caro, and every other credible limit hold’em pundit of the last several decades.

Tight is Right

The tight-aggressive approach is the backbone of a successful limit player’s strategy. The reason this approach is so successful is simple—the vast majority of the poker playing public are long term losers who do not have the discipline or knowledge to beat the game. Let your opponents make the mistake of playing too many hands while you become more selective. It will pay dividends. If you only play hands that figure to be the best against opponents who play too many mediocre hands, it just makes sense that you will win money. This critical skill is the foundation upon which other skills need to be added to make you a formidable limit hold’em player.

The most common mistake made by limit hold’em players is that they play too many hands. Look, no one enters a casino or logs on to an online game with the intention of folding hand after hand. But when you look at the entire universe of possible two-card starting hand combinations you might be dealt, the vast majority of them are junk, which means the correct play is to fold most of them. If there’s one tip that will raise your game significantly, it’s this: be selective with the hands you choose to play, and then be aggressive with the hands you do play.

Starting Hand Selection

Hold

What hands should you play if you’re going to be patient and selective? Well, that depends in large measure upon your position relative to the dealer button. The best starting hands are playable from any position, but other hands have very different characteristics.

We have created a starting hand chart that can be used as a guide. This chart will load as a PDF document (link opens in a new window), which you can view on screen or print off for easy reference.

Understand that our attempt to categorize starting hands by their strength and positional considerations is a loose guide. There are many factors that may encourage you to tighten or loosen your play from these guidelines. As in all poker decisions the phrase, “It depends” comes to mind. That is to say our starting hand chart is a guide, not a set of intractable rules.

Limit

In fact, you may want to look at a starting hand chart this way:

  1. If you’re a beginner or a consistently money-losing player, treat this guide as the gospel.
  2. If you’re an experienced player, you can treat these recommendations as a guide.
  3. If you’re a skillful, winning player, please consider these recommendations a point of demarcation for your own creative, winning play.

But before you decide to deviate from these guidelines, have a reason for taking action that’s at variance from our recommendations.

We haven’t included every possible starting hand on our chart. Unplayable hands, also known as ‘junk’ don’t need any further explanation. I’m sure you will recognize them. In fact, the majority of the hands you’ll be dealt will fall into this category. Let your weak undisciplined opponents play 7-2 because it was suited—you throw them in the muck where they belong.

Type of Games

It’s important to be aware that different games play differently. The texture of the game—whether it’s tight and aggressive, tight and passive, loose and aggressive, loose and passive, or a mixture of these, will dictate what hands you should play. For example, if you’re playing in a loose and passive game, you can limp in from early position with small pocket pairs. If you’re playing in an aggressive game these hands are better off mucked from early position.

There is an old adage in poker relating to how tight or loose the game in which you’re in is being played. The adage advises to play tighter than the table. While this is obviously an over simplification it is generally true. While tight is certainly right, all you need do is play tighter poker than the table. The reason this will work is that through prudent hand selection coupled with your position you will be playing fewer (and generally better) hands than your opponents. However, expect loose games to tighten and tight games to become looser, and be ahead of that curve to ensure you’re in the most profitable zone at all times.

Calling vs. Raising

A lot of limit hold’em players will limp in pre-flop rather than raise. If you’re in a passive game and have a hand like J-Ts then you might want to limp because you’re looking to get as many people into the pot with you as possible in anticipation of flopping a big hand like a straight or flush—and making money from a large number of opponents. If you have a pair or high cards that can win without improving, such as A-K, you’re much better off raising and narrowing the field down to heads-up than you are by simply calling and inviting a number of players to enter the pot after you, one of whom might get lucky and steal the pot away from you.

Practice heads up hold em

If you call and are then raised, you’re going to call one more bet and see the flop. If it’s raised and re-raised, some players will do the same thing, regardless of the strength of their hand. Imagine entering the pot with the speculative hand of for a single bet from middle position. Now the player to your left raises, another player re-raises and yet another player makes it four bets, which is normally the cap in fixed limit. Weaker players will normally call as they have already invested a bet and the hand does have lots of potential. Stronger players would recognize the futility of throwing away three extra bets when it is apparent that they are way behind the competition. These distinctions will become clearer and clearer as your experience grows.

Cold Calling Raises

If the pot has been raised before it’s your turn, you must tighten up significantly and adjust for the position of the raise. Inexperienced limit hold’em players will frequently cold-call raises with mediocre and potentially dominated hands, such as A-J and K-J. These are costly errors. Be selective and avoid cold-calling raises with hands that have a slim chance to catch the cards they need to enable you to win the pot. Most good players, if they don’t have a very good hand, will simply throw their hand away and wait for a better opportunity. Remember that it takes a much better hand to call a raise than it does to make the initial raise yourself.

Always observe the pre-flop betting action in a limit hold’em game, because it provides valuable information about the strength of your opponent’s holdings. If there’s a bet and a raise and someone cold-calls, my first thought is “here’s a guy with A-Q who is terrified of a big pair and even more terrified of A-K”. He thinks A-Q is a pretty good hand and says to himself… “I’ll call and see what happens with it.” Of course it’s important that you assign a range of hands to your opponents, not just a specific hand. But most players will re-raise before the flop when they hold a premium hand and cold-calling a raise or cold-calling a re-raise is usually a sign of a hand that’s not in first place.

Hold

Conclusion

The question or whether to hold’em or fold’em is the first and most important decision you will make. If you’re new to limit hold’em then study our starting hand chart and follow the guidelines given in this lesson. Starting hand selection may differ slightly from pundit to pundit but these are a solid outline for a beginner to embrace. As your experience and knowledge of the game increases your starting requirements will vary based upon how tight or loose your table is, knowledge of the tendencies of players yet to act behind you, any betting that has occurred in front of you, and your current table image.

If you only play hands that figure to be the best against opponents who play too many mediocre hands, it just makes sense that you will win the money. Playing tight requires patience which many or even most recreational players just don’t exhibit. They are in the game to play, not sit to there and fold hand after hand and sit on the sidelines. This is the reason that most poker players are long term losers—they play too many hands. Sure they can get lucky playing junk on occasion and that is what keeps them coming back but their lack of patience and discipline is their financial undoing. If you truly seek success you must have the discipline to be patient.

Related Lessons

By Tom 'TIME' Leonard

Limit

Tom has been writing about poker since 1994 and has played across the USA for over 40 years, playing every game in almost every card room in Atlantic City, California and Las Vegas.

Heads Up Limit Hold Em

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Heads Up No Limit Hold'em Strategy

O RLY


The purpose of this page is to provide rebuttals to some of the arguments that are sometimes raised against limit structure games and LHE specifically. It is targeted at people who already know a lot about poker but may have a dismissive or negative attitude towards this great game.
In limit, you can't protect your hand. People are always calling you down and sucking out on you!
It is true that LHE players are more showdown bound than players in no-limit or pot-limit games. Often these call-downs are correct, because the pot is laying such a good price against the size of the bets. Although this does reduce your ability to protect your hands, it's a dynamic that is shared by all the players in the game. The fact that play often continues to the river is actually part of what makes LHE so interesting and fun to play! This does, however, dictate a different kind of strategy than you may be used to if you're a NLH player.
Sklansky' s Fundamental Theorem of Poker states, 'Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.' These kind of FTOP errors can be maximized in no-limit games where weak or fishy players can be punished through the power of bet-sizing.
This is of course true. Unfortunately, the consequence is that inexperienced or recreational players go broke more quickly. It is hard to keep players interested in your game if they are constantly and consistently crushed at the tables. Although it may take more time to win money from inferior players in a limit-structure game, they are also more likely to continue playing. The old road gamblers had a saying: 'You can fleece a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once.'
Doyle Brunson called No-Limit Hold 'em the Cadillac of poker.
Who?
Seriously, though, if NLH is the Cadillac of poker, then it's also a gas-guzzler. If you don't get what we mean, see the previous topic about Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker.
It's nice to have a favorite game and NLH is a great one. Our purpose is just to show that limit-structure games have some advantages over their no-limit or pot-limit counterparts, and to encourage you to try playing them yourself. We are especially advocating heads-up limit hold 'em as an exciting alternative to other games that are currently more popular.
Limit Hold 'em is a solved a game (and therefore not worth playing).
There are really two points to address here. The one ('limit hold 'em is a solved game') is usually said as if it implies the other ('and therefore not worth playing').
Let's start by noting that 'solved' in this context is a Game Theory term with a very specific meaning. As stated on Wikipedia, 'A solved game is a game whose outcome can be correctly predicted from any position when each side plays optimally.' This definition also introduces the word 'optimal' which we will look at again below.
Some things to note right away: (1) If LHE were to be solved, the two-player (HUHU) version of the game would be the first for which a solution would be found. To the best of our knowledge, two-player games are always more easily solved than their multiple-player counterparts. (2) No such solution currently exists. There are some bots that play very well, sometimes beating even top players. But no one has thus far published a solution for the game. This can easily be corroborated by searching the Web for documentation of a solution.
A third problem arises when we examine the difference between Game Theory Optimal (GTO) play and exploitative strategies. Most poker players would like to win as much money as possible while playing. A GTO strategy is essentially one that is un-exploitable, meaning that the best we would expect any opponent to do over a large enough sample is to break even. But in poker, we often encounter opponents who play in predictable and exploitable ways. So a player applying a GTO strategy (if one existed) might actually be making less money than someone playing an exploitative strategy!
The bottom line is that even if the game were solved, this has nothing to do with whether or not the game would still be interesting to play! As noted on the previously quoted Wikipedia page, 'Whether a game is solved is not necessarily the same as whether it remains interesting for humans to play. Even a strongly solved game can still be interesting if the solution is too complex to be memorized.' Certainly this would be true of any solution for HUHU LHE.
The games are dead.
There are doomsayers throughout the poker world today. Many of these started playing during the poker boom and have unrealistic expectations about the ease with which you should be able to find soft games, others are poor losers, and some are just predisposed to exaggeration and gloom.
One thing we wish to point out is that this problem is not exclusive to HUHU LHE. If you look over your favorite poker forums, you'll find this sentiment is generic to all games and is hardly ever espoused by long term members of the poker community or other credible sources.
It is true that the games have dried-up in comparison to what they were like a few years ago and this is, ironically, one of the more intriguing reasons that 'The games are dead' theory is promoted. The regulars in these games want to discourage you from competing for their action! For example, it may be assumed that if you were at least good enough to find the 2p2 HUHU LHE forum, then you're probably capable of learning the game, and therefore you will be discouraged from doing so!
At the end of the day: Whenever there is anyone in the world looking for a poker game, there is always someone willing to play with him. In the world of online poker, such connections are easier than ever to make. If HUHU LHE sounds like fun to you, don't be discouraged by a bunch of spoilsports! At least give the games a shot and decide for yourself.