1.2. Goal of this article

In general, the playing style in a heads-up largely depends on the size of the blinds in comparison with the stack:

Situation 1:
If one of the players has less than 5-10 BB, a raise is most often useless and you should either push all-in immediately or fold. A fine example for this is Morgoth's SnG coaching video. The pushing range moves from Ax, Kx, Qx to any two depending on the opponent.

It is difficult to come up with clear rules when to push, as it depends on the opponent's calling range which in turn depends a lot on the actual course of the game.

Certainly, any ace and any pocket pair is enough with such high blinds, but many more hands come into consideration. Eventually you will get a relatively good feel for such situations after numerous heads-ups, and a push here can't be as “extremely wrong” as in situation 2.

The so-called Sage System delivers a strategy where decisions are made via solid (albeit somewhat inflexible and abstract) rules. The further article will therefore be based on the following situation.

Situation 2:
The stacks are still relatively large, above 10 BB. Here you have to be more careful with your pushes (the blind steals are less lucrative compared to the danger of running into a strong hand).

Nonetheless it is often pointless to make normal raises with various “strong” hands. The best example is 22: in heads-up the hand is strong by all means, as you are at least 50:50 against most hands, and combined with the fold equity it is a good hand. The bad playability post-flops puts you to a descision though: push or fold? How do you want to continue after a flop of e.g. T J K against Villain's bet if he called our raise pre-flop?

The same applies to aces with a small kicker: You only hit the ace about once out of six times on the flop. Without an ace on the flop, you will often get into a difficult situation when the opponent puts up resistance.

The main goal of this article is to set the guidelines for when to push or fold in situation 2, so when you still have more than 10BB. Many of the results still apply for situation 1 as well though.

Notice: To fully understand the context, it is required that you have dealt with the Independent Chip Model strategy article from the Silver section.