Heads-up Poker

I just made the money in a heads-up tourney on Stars (128 players, $22+2). I gotta say, these are a lot of fun and the field is relatively soft. I expect they aren't fun if you lose the first round. I know they would be a lot of NOT fun if you lost the third round (getting you no money after two hours).

I'm not willing to test the hypothesis, but I bet a good heads-up player (I consider myself pretty good, as in better than average) could make a lot of money on these tourneys. Contrary to what I expected, there actually is a good bit of skill involved as long as your opponent isn't over aggressive and pot sizes stay relatively small. Lets just say, winning my first three rounds, I wasn't all-in very much (including a comeback from a 2:1 chip deficit). Kudos to Stars for putting a lot of play into the tourney's.

One downside (or upside, depending) is the delay between rounds as other tables finish up. It is kind of nice to get some down-time between tourney's to eat, surf the web, and write blogger entries :) On the other hand, if you don't have 4-5 hours free, don't even fire the thing up. Do a 4-player tourney instead (which are also pretty soft).

We'll see what happens. I'm guaranteed $50 now, and winning my next round will get me $50 more. After that the money jumps are ~$100 to $200ish.

Stamina is a bit of an issue (these are stressful sometimes!) but I think I'll be ok. Did I mention 1st gets $750+?

(a bit later...)

Wow, I got worked. Didn't really have the chip lead at all that game and couldn't really get anything going. Probably my biggest mistake was a large bluff that didn't work out. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted...