The arc of how heads-up poker has been viewed amongst the poker community at large has shifted quite a bit. It used to be viewed as the ultimate mano-a-mano test of poker skill, and for online poker players, a cohort of people not known for their macho aggression, there was a lot of online trash talk and stunting. Players who would only play bad players were called a derogatory term stolen from boxing, “bumhunters,” and the best players held high-stakes lobbies on sites like championship belts. Then solvers came along and since heads-up play is one the easiest forms of poker to solve, there was a bit of a lull in heads-up action because everyone was afraid they were playing a bot. Lately, there’s been a resurgence in heads-up action, especially on Coin Poker, where there has been a lot of high-stakes battling at HUNL and HUPLO.
However, the HU battling had not yet reached the live arena until recently, when Ossi Ketola challenged several poker pros, including Kayhan Mokri and Daniel Cates, to play heads up at the Bombay Club in Tallinn. There were several million-dollar matches, but the action was kicked up another notch this week at the Super High Roller Series at the Onyx Club in Cyprus. Ossi Ketola began playing some $2,000,000 heads up matches vs. Kayhan Mokri and ended up playing two $5M matches and one $6M match vs Daniel “Jungleman” Cates. They played 100bb freezeouts with no blind increases, which sounds like one of the most basic forms of poker, but has historically been a pretty unpopular format of HUNL. Generally you’d either play a SnGs where the blinds increase or just play cash.
Jungleman is the favourite in the match; he’s a better poker player and a more experienced heads-up player, but maximizing your winrate in this format can be tricky. In cash games, you’d rather play the opponent who will give you the highest BB/100 possible. In a SNG, you’d want to play the person who plays a strategy that allows them to win the match as often as possible. It’s a subtle but meaningful distinction. If you’re playing someone who open shoves preflop every hand, you’d call Q7o in a cash game and collect the EV you’d get from flipping with overlay in the pot. In a tournament, you would never call Q7o; you’d wait for a better spot, because if you lose you won’t get another one.
I was interested in watching the match to see two strategies clash. Jungleman should have been trying to play small pots and whittle Ossi down, while Ossi should have been trying to play big pots to give himself a puncher’s chance. As someone who has played in tournaments with Ossi, he is no stranger to playing a big pot with a bad hand, which is why when I turned on the stream, I was shocked by some of his play. The worst type of player to be in a HU match is to be a “bleeder,” someone who doesn’t fight for pots and over-folds at every node. Ossi continually folded very strong bluff catchers, some of which beat value, and he’d nonsensically lead when he had a good hand. He wouldn’t have been better off going all-in dark every hand, but it’s closer than you might think. To continue the boxing metaphor from the introduction, it’s been said that “styles make fights”; these matches should have been an entertaining contest between two competing styles and instead turned into a bloodbath.
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Housekeeping
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
A PIO ICM sim of the hand where I got knocked out
A vanilla PIO sim using the actual flop check raise size I used in game
A flop sim of this 300bb deep hand and several turn sims with different sizes
A sim of this entire hand and a river sim after my turn strategy is
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething for POTD #108 where I go through my thought process and routine while playing a poker hand
POTD #108 #onemorething
Another thing I like about randomizing in live poker is it creates a routine to follow in a hand. Due to lack of discipline and lapses in focus I do not always perfectly adhere to it, but usually when facing a flop bet I have already rolled a number preflop. Using this hand as an example, I will walk you through my thought process and routine:
I rolled a 40. Should I call or raise? If I call what will the pot size be on the turn once I call? Once I calculate the pot size, I’ll roll a number for the turn. Then on the turn, I would determine whether or not I get leads with range and if I determine it’s pure check-range I wouldn’t re-roll (you could if you wanted to, but I just keep the same seed). If I decided to raise the flop, I would decide if I am playing multiple raise sizes, which usually means I am raising all-in and non all-in. If I determine I’d playing multiple raise sizes, I’d ask what my raise size should be given my roll. If I choose non all-in as I’d do here over 300bbs deep. I would ask myself what is the appropriate raise size in terms of the pot and calculate what, say a pot sized or half pot sized raise would be i chips. if I decided to raise the turn this deep, I’d almost certainly use a timebank to figure out my appropriate sizing.
This also helps with balancing timing tells for live reads because even if I am just calling the flop and know from the jump I am just calling the flop, I am using my time to prepare for the next street. Sometimes if I have enough time, I will use it to count my stack or my opponent’s stack or determine what physical chips I should put into the pot or sometimes what sorts of turns I’ll be looking to lead. I do not think these moves make my timing unreadable or flawlessly consistent, but it adds enough noise to my timing that it makes getting timing tells off me a lot more work. Sometimes I take really long because I have a tough decision, sometimes I am thinking about what turns to lead when I know I have a pure call and sometimes I mess up counting the pot size. Hopefully these combine to make it so others will not know my general hand strength from timing. I think some very regimented players give off timing tells because it can be very obvious when they break from their routine. I like adding some predictable elements and some unpredictable elements into my routine.
Media
I gave a lecture on the value of position at VClub on Monday August 11th and they posted it online for all to see, you can watch it here
I finally saw The Naked Gun (2025) earlier this week. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of my favourite recent film comedies and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad is one of my favourite film comedies period, so I was excited to see the director of the former tackle the latter and I was even more excited when I saw the great reviews it was getting. It’s a comedy that is chock full of very funny jokes and I laughed throughout and at 90 minutes it did not overstay its welcome. However it was missing the near perfect comic magic of the original. Liam Neeson is game and funny, but there is a reason why Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker cast Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin, after his role in Airplane!. From “I am serious and don’t call me Shirley” he displayed an uncanny knack for delivering their absurd dialogue in a dopey deadpan, which Neeson can’t quite match. The 2025 version is a good movie, but in the future when someone refers to The Naked Gun they will not need to say “the Nielsen version” or add the subtitle “From the Files of Police Squad” to clarify they’re talking about the 1988 version.