I've started playing some heads up NL tourneys on Paradise, and haven't seen much here on the HU tourneys, so thought I would start some discussion. So far I am 10-11.
I guess the first and most important point is whether these are worth playing or not. The rake is 5% compared with 9-10% for other tournaments, but as most of us know, HU is a luckfest, so how much of an ROI can reasonably be expected? Does anyone have any experience with this? On the plus side, even with a very small ROI, a lot of many could be made because they are fast, and close to 20 of these can be played in an hour 2 tabling.
The second point I'd like some input on is raising from the 2 positions. For the most part, I have followed Harrington's advice by raising small from the Button, and big from the BB. The idea being to discourage action when out of position and encourage action with position. I am starting to have my doubts with this strategy however. It is fine with opponents who will fold more readily to a bigger raise, and also fine when the blinds get big. But with opponents who call too often preflop and also call a lot of c-bets, I'm finding that this strategy just makes the pot bigger when out of position. So I am wondering if a better strategy for some opponents may be to raise just as much from the Button if they are going to call anyway and tighten up raising requirements from the BB to play less big pots out of position and more big pots with position. Most players (especially those that call too much -- the targets of this strategy) won't notice that I am raising more often from the button. If they did notice, this could easily backfire because they will know I have a stronger hand when raising from the BB.
