Discuss: Five Basic Mistakes to Look For In an Opponent

[XxPenguinxX]

Masterholmes:

Not to speak for the author at all, but I believe that you have hit upon a few of the differences between cash game and tournament HU. The author specifically states:

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The presence of an ante in tournament poker, and the smaller relative stacks, make heads-up tourney advice of limited applicability to no-limit cash games

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Getting "blinded down" is not a real consideration in cash games, since you can reload whenever you choose. If you both have full effective stacks of 100BB plus, there is little need to base your strategy around defending your blinds.

In a tournament, of course, if you consistently fold your big blind you give up valuable chips, and the only way to "reload" your stack is to win them back. And with every chip you lose the "power" of your stack decreases, and the power of your opponent's stack increases, making your job harder.

Picking a hand and moving in is not a good strategy in deep stack HU cash games either - you risk a lot of chips for little gain. A 3-bet will often have a comparable fold equity to a push, and has much less risk if you happen to have picked the moment when your opponent has a premium hand.

HU at the end of an MTT or SNG is a different kettle of fish entirely - I think the STT forum has a lot of wisdom on that, based on ICM calculations.

As someone who plays a lot of HU SNGs, I can only reinforce my agreement with the author that the two are almost incomparable at times.