I know quite a few regs open 85-100% of their buttons in a HU SNG when the stacks are deep. What % and range of hands do you open when the stacks start to get short and are in reraise shove range? (ie 25bb or so) Obviously, if your opponent is still folding a ton and not reraising often (or at least less than 50% so that a minraise open is still profitable) then you can still open a ton of hands but many players punish if you open super wide and are that short stacked. Do you still have a raise-fold range or do you raise-call any hand you open when they reraise more than 50% of hands when short?

Maybe I rambled on too much, please give me some other perspectives

There's no generel strategy imo. Depends a lot on the villain. As yourself these questions:

1) How often does he fold to my PF open?
2) How often does he raise my PF open?
3) How often does he fold to my flop cbets?
4) How often does he raise my flop cbets or floats them?

Basically, if he's tight preflop, I minraise a wide range. If he's loose, I tighten up a bit depending on how loose he is.

If he's tight postflop, I minraise a very wide range preflop. If he's loose postflop, I either open less preflop, or cbet less.

It's really very dependent on villain...no general rules. You always have to adapt to the villain when playing HU

Also, this question would probably be better for the beginners thread...

Rules and criteria are a good starting point, but that's all they are. To become a winner you'll need to break the shackles of limited thinking and robotic lines. Develop ranges and adjust per opponent, per stack sizes. HUNL is the most adaptive game you can play.

You really added nothing to this topic but maybe boosted your ego I guess with your standard response that it basically "depends". I'm a winning player already. I make reads and adjust already. I'm looking for factors as the previous post pointed out to make better decisions. If you can give real help, then I'd appreciate it. If you want to type a few worthless sentences again, you have your right to do that too.

He said the same thing as me in other words

All he said was not to play in a static/robotic way. It's advice a lot (even winning players) should listen to. There's winners at the 50s+ who are so used to playing fish, that they play like robots...and the sooner ppl change that approach to a fluid concept, the better for them.

Now whether that advice is useful to you or not doesn't matter really...no need to flame him!

Well, you gave some specific reads to look for and actions to take. I did probably jump the gun though as his response might help some players and that's what this board is all about imo, helping players who need it!

I don't use 2p2 as an ego booster, just trying to offer some help. Sorry if you interpreted my words as snobbish in any way, even though I don't know how that's even possible. Good luck.

SN/site/stakes?

I find it kind of surprising that a winning player at most stakes would ask this question.

Yes, it's basically a simple question. What range of hands are you opening with what reads when the stack sizes get small? It is a very important question though and I am sure a lot of winning players haven't thought about it enough. You apparently have though, so should be able to furnish an answer, yet choose to belittle my question. Thanks for the non help!

Don't hate on bpmst2, he was really trying to help.

I do apologize for my response to bpmst2's post. I jumped the gun. I'm just used to reading so many @!$& responses at 2p2... like the response "ac on" made. I'm sure by playing $20 HU SNGs that he knows all

I was genuinely curious, and nothing more.

I do suggest that you go ahead and share your own thoughts on this topic. You may get more accurate help as people could then disagree with and you could argue against them. You may discover something new by seeing how your ideas differ from those of other people.

We'll call it even, due to all the bull**** replies people give in these types of threads.

It's tough to play the blame game, because you often have regulars that contribute a lot to these forums so they feel like it's "their home" and then you have newer posters that make a thread that really should be in the beginner or husng regs thread, and regulars get annoyed that they didn't take the time to even read the FAQ.

Not really talking about your thread either, just in general, as it's probably what you're talking about with the responses on 2p2.

I won't sidetrack too much, but I see it as a larger issue with 2p2. I've heard over the last few years a lot of respectable poker people say bad things about 2p2 users. A lot of them only read NVG or BBV, or don't really pay attention to the tone of the community when posting.

It's the same if you're walking into a new group of people for the first time. You wouldn't come in and just try to take control and aggressively push people around when you meet a group for the first time in real life, right? Well since it's online and people think it's like a lot of other message boards, they underestimate the feeling and community and little quirks and "semi rules" that have developed here on 2p2 for a long time and they just don't get it. A lot of poker room reps take the same approach and it just hurts them. Generally, the less stubborn and aggressive somebody is, the happier they are when posting on 2p2 for the first time.

By my actions, I obviously turned this into too much of a flame fest already. I'm just hoping we can get by it and get some decent strategy information. I used to get by continuing to raise almost every SB even when stacks got pretty short and I still do most of the time. But there are a class of players that basically rape me cause I open too often and wasn't thinking enough about what range I should be opening to lower exploitability.

I think these are the important parts.

1. What is this class of player? How are they exploiting your opening range?

2. You may be opening too often, but maybe not waaaay too often. I've been thinking about this recently but haven't any math on it yet, sorry. I'm thinking that we can continue to minraise a wide-ish range preflop, not 50%+, but still relatively wide, and tweak our calling ranges.

3. What range you should be opening depends on #1. How are they exploiting you?

Let's say they're 3bet-shoving over your minraises. I don't know if this is the case, but let's pretend it is. You can tell right off the bat that they know when it's profitable to do so. Think about why they think it's profitable: They believe they have a lot of fold equity, right?

This is another one I haven't done any math on yet, but take the 3bet-shoving EV calculation, try to set it to 0 and see how their fold and pot equities need to change. Play around in poker stove to see if you can come up with opening and calling ranges that will get you close to the equities you need to make their play break-even, taking a range that you could consider to be "typical" of someone who is 3bet-shoving a wide range (any pocket pair, Ax, good Kx?).

Actually estimating a range seems more like art than science, which is why I haven't really gotten to it, but it's where I would start. I really haven't had to worry about this at the stakes I've been playing, though.

If a player is without fail stealing your opening (30bb or less) you can start to limp hands you don't want to call a shove with. This is a simple adjustment I was talking about in the above post. I'm referencing hands such (TJ, QT, etc). Hands that play well post flop but dont have a ton of preflop strength. Obviously, don't get tied into this method too much as well since you are giving free flops when you have the chance to win their big blind immediately. The point I'm trying to make is that ideas such as this let you expand your game and toss out the standard of, "Ok at 25/50 auto open every button to a min." This is the robotic lines I see countless players use, especially in the mid stake games ($33-55).

Thanks for the response.

I was just looking through a previous thread by Skates and in it he says that if Villain is reraising less than 50% of the time (and is playing 3b/fold) that he raises every button as the play shows pure profit (easy maths, risking 1.5BB to win 1.5BB). And if Villain is reraising more than 50% that he will raise-call or fold only, not raise-fold. The issue I see with that though is that Villain might be reraising more than 50% when you open a ton of buttons and then when he sees you fold more than usual he most likely will tighten up if he has half a brain.

Going by a different approach... By continuing to open wide when the stacks get small (let's 25bb), the usual response by a decent Villain is that they 3b shove fairly often assuming they have fold EV, which of course they have plenty if I continue to open 85-100% as I did during high stack sizes. It is very hard to tell how often (or with what range) they are shoving as 3b HUD stats are for the whole match or multiple matches though maybe they could be filtered to show 3b when under 25bb. Still there might not be enough data points to accurately converge to their range or 3b %. Doing some maths they are risking 24BB (1bb as BB already in pot from the 25bb starting stacks) to win the 3BB in the pot after I minraise the button. Let's say they have 42% EV when they are called (calculated with some rough ranges in pokerstove so I think a decent ballpark to work with). Then they get back 21BB (risked 24bb) out of the pot of 50BB that gets created by a call so have a neg 3BB result on average when they get called. When we fold they win 3BB so in this case they need us to fold 50% for the play to be profitable. Thus I'd want to be able to call with about 50% of my open range for their 3b not to be that profitable. So let's say I am calling with any ace, KT+ and any pair which has about 58% EV vs a 55% shoving range. That is about 25% of all hands so I could open 50% of my hands.

So do we go with something like that or do we play only fold or raise-call with our entire range when Villain 3b's more than 50%? Personally I think I'd like more of a balanced approach rather than a hard cut off where I play a totally different strategy than before the cut off (being 50% 3b in this case) because it is very difficult to find that cut off accurately.

Working in some limping (which I usually do when someone 3b's me a ton along with folding more preflop as the standard adjustments I make) makes things even more complicated.