Pokerwise I’ve had a crappy weekend, and the way I was playing I decided to unregister from the miniftops heads up tourney

I did manage to sort out some problems with my game though (around tournament 15), but as you can see from the red ‘luck adjusted’ line I ran into enough ‘bad luck’ to not make any difference (tbh I don’t put any credence into these EV adjusted values at all, but like any good statistics; when they prove your point they must be right). It was pretty bad though, and one game I was up $2550 vs $450 when I disconnected – by the time I rebooted my shitty modem and reconnected I was the one with $300 left

Nevertheless, the problem I sorted out was my starting range. When I started out on husngs I was playing by instinct, taking my 6max range and widening it out to what felt right, and all was good with big rocketing graphs every day. I then found a starting range on husng.com and started implementing that.

Since that day I’ve broken even. Small sample, but it wasn’t right at all – I was getting into too many marginal spots, ending up overcommitting and spending most of my time fighting to come back from behind. So today I took a step back and thought what a heads-up range for SNGs ought to be. Basically since in a husng we’re playing shortstack poker most of the time, it makes sense that the Nash table is giving us the right distribution- after all, it’s calculated from the all-in preflop equity you have in a hand based on two players under shortstacked conditions.

So I twiddled around with the ratios until it presented 70% and 30% of the hands (so 70% is my opening range on the button and 30% is my calling range on BB). In this table the 70% is everything except the light grey, and the 30% is in bold;

The husng.com table varied in that it had the entire suited side for opening under the button with the junk as mainly the bottom section of the unsuited corner. TBH the husng.com table was for a cash player, and so that’s a very different dynamic, so I’m not saying it was wrong. But for husngs, it was totally unsuitable. My games instantly improved, with the number of awkward decisions vastly reduced. Shame the number of idiot calls that sucked out on the river didn’t.

Also I don’t care what anyone says about not needing hand charts. They’ll tell you that heads up is fluid and your range depends entirely on what’s best to beat your opponent. That’s true, but without having a solid and appropriate foundation from which to add or remove hands you’re just building castles in the air…