It is merely impossible to win any poker tournament without a proper heads-up strategy in place. Most professional players employ a great heads-up strategy and we have developed a few tips which would help you acquire the same skills.
Regardless of where you would be playing, in the traditional casino or over the internet, every single tournament would come down to the heads-up match between the winner and the loser. Actually, that’s the only showdown which would decide the winner or the loser. It doesn’t matter where you play; the basic structure of heads-up play remains the same. Given that most poker players are not good with heads-up strategies, knowing these strategies would automatically give you a distinct advantage over them.
A majority of the poker players believe that at the time when it comes to the heads-up play, it’s all about luck. However, that is not the case. You can’t be wrong enough. The simple fact is that a lot of players do not know how to play the heads-up game and therefore they claim of being ‘unlucky’ with the strategy.
The first and the most important principle of all heads-up strategies is that you need to change your play. It is known that the value of the starting hand changes dramatically from one opponent to another. Therefore you need to come up with unique combination, so as to beat the opponent.
For an instance, any hand with an Ace is considered to be a good hand and should be played in an aggressive manner. This would lead to another principle for the heads-up games. As a player, you need to be pretty aggressive, even if you happen to have a poor starting hand. You need to keep the pressure on the opponent and try to collect chips on every single opportunity in the game. However, while playing poker tournaments, most players are already aggressive and hence you would need to re-raise often, so as to drive them out of the competition.
Lastly, with all of these principles mentioned above, the bottom line is that you need to play more hands. This would call for raising pre-flop with any face card such as the King, Queen or Ace and re-raising on the same. Such an aggressive strategy would help you to build a bankroll against the timid players and would keep the better players from knowing your hand. A strong hand would surely give you more opportunities to trap the opponents.