Heads Up Sit and Go - The Nature of the Beast
Marcus Bateman
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Marcus Bateman /
08 March 2009 /
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...it is important to understand that heads up games will not give you that monster score of multi table tournaments, they will just give you a steady profit over the long run.
Heads up sit and goes provide a great opportunity for spinning up a bankroll to the beginner or play money player. The variance is very low in these games, as they combine many features which allow skill to shine through over the short term.
The first point about these games is that heads up games require much more skill due to the massively increased number of decisions a player has to make. You can't simply sit back and wait for big hands in this format - you have to be playing lots of hands in order to stop the blinds from eating you up, and this means that any edge you have is made significant much faster than in any other games, and your profits are made in a much more steady manner.
The second point about these games is that they are very quick (especially if you play the turbo structured ones), which means that you can play a huge number of these games in very short periods of time, which allows you to quickly overcome the variance. As an example of this, when I play a schedule of around thirty to forty of these games every day for a week, I hardly ever have more than one or two losing days, and this is very useful to someone who is just trying to grind out consistent money from poker.
So that's the good news. The bad news about heads up sit and goes is that the profit margins in them are very slim. Even the very best players at these tournaments struggle to hold on to a return on investment, or 'roi', of above 5% over thousands of games. Obviously slim margins like this can soon add up to huge sums of money , but it is important to understand that heads up games will not give you that monster score of multi table tournaments, they will just give you a steady profit over the long run.
These games are definitely some of the most fun and intellectually challenging games on the Internet, and over the next few days I want to outline a basic low limit strategy that yields good dividends in the low stakes games.
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