Defending your big blind 7-13bb deep (heads up hyper edition)

There comes up an interesting spot in heads up hypers when you are 7-13bb deep and in the big blind.

Some small blind players like to abuse big blind players in this spot for not having a good defence. They do this by relentlessly raising preflop as either 2bb,3bb or allin. They could end up with having a 50% pfr, which is incredibly out of line. However the counter-strategy is rather simple. The following strategy is to be used against the 2bb raise size.


The first part of the strategy is to re-raise allin with all your value(*v1) hands and also hands that don't play well postflop (54o,T5s,74s,K3o,K2o,A2o, J6-7) but have enough equity + fold equity + equity when called or have blocker to good hands. The overall range will look something like this:

reshovestrat.PNG

The second part is to flat hands that play well postflop that don't fit into your value jam range (67-JTs,QTs,K9s,Q9s,T9o) as well as flatting some very strong value hands (AA,KK,QQ,JJ).
flatstrat.PNG

In my experience a strategy that looks like this is very effective as beating low stakes opponents as they will have to adjust their strategy which is good for us or if they don't we can print money.

There is a lot of theory behind this strategy that could take a whole book to explain, I have mostly pieced it together using some concepts from advanced heads up no limit holdem by Will Tipton and some articles that I have read on upswing poker. As always poker is a game of adjustments and counter-strategies. Whoever can adjust the fastest and implement counter-strategies to adjustments wins.

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