Spin Heads-up

Despite its relative difficulty, it is important to master the SB preflop range. Beyond simply knowing it, it is essential to understand how the range is structured in order to be able to deviate from it to increase your gains based on your opponents' behavior, and also to memorize it more easily.

Here are a few points to consider regarding the SB:

• It's a position that requires playing almost 100% of hands, even 100% if you dominate your opponents.
• You will often face 3-bet all-ins from your opponent. You need to know which hands to call, which will depend heavily on your opponent's profile. Generally, it is advisable to call very tightly, as your opponents will not raise often enough. However, in rarer cases, you will need to widen your range of hands to call against very aggressive opponents who make ISO all-ins with almost all their hands.

With a large stack, it is necessary to know when to use the min-raise or the limp.

• Your minraise range will include your best hands (99+, A7s+, aQo+...), hands that play rather well post-flop but you won't regret folding in case of a 3-bet from your opponent (92s, 83s, 84s), and finally hands with blockers on the opponent's raise range, which can also be folded without regret (K5o+, Q5o+...).
• Your limp range, will include some good hands to trap your opponents as well as all other hands.

Starting from 12.5BB, your open shove range will widen blind after blind. This will include all hands that have good equity against the opponent's range, but are not strong enough to call an all-in after a limp (96s, J6s, K5s, T9o, Q9o), or do not play very well postflop (Axo, 22, 33, 44).

Facing a limp from the SB in Heads-Up is a very common situation.

Exactly like in BB facing a limp from the SB in 3 Way, your HU range will be composed of ISO and check.

Among the ISO, two options are possible: ISO all-in and ISO non all-in.

• In the ISO all-in, we include all our hands that dominate the SB limp range with limited post-flop playability but are very profitable to ISO all-in. This ISO all-in range is wider than in 3 Way, because in Heads-Up, the SB limp range is much weaker.
• In the ISO non all-in, we include our remaining best hands, as well as some medium strength hands to balance the range. It is interesting to note that there are significantly fewer ISO with these medium hands than in 3 Way. Also, note that you can choose to check 100% of these hands if you are not familiar with post-flop strategies.

The BB range against a Minraise from the SB in Heads-Up is mainly composed of calls and 3bet all-in.

3bet all-in are preferred with most of the BB's good hands, especially when your stack is short. Indeed, it is difficult to play out of position, and the SB range can be quite wide depending on the profiles.

Very good hands, on the other hand, can be used in 3bet non all-in with more depth, or in calls to trap your opponent when your stack becomes smaller.

The ranges we suggest against an open shove from the SB correspond to GTO ranges. However, these ranges should not be followed to the letter.

Indeed, the vast majority of your opponents will not open shove enough. Therefore, it will generally be necessary, except against very good players, to adapt by choosing to call with fewer hands than what the tables below suggest.