• Texas Holdem Poker Rules Hands
• Holdem Poker Heads Up Rules How To Play
• Texas Holdem Poker Rules Dealing
• Holdem Poker Heads Up Rules To Play

1. Aggression is Critical in Heads-Up Poker! Aggression is an important part of any form of poker but with heads-up it's critical. You're in the blinds every hand. If you buy-in for $200 for a $1/$2 heads-up match and fold every hand, you will lose half your stack in just 66 hands.
2. Heads up (HU) poker is considered the King’s discipline of no limit Texas Holdem, and that for a reason. It is the most challenging, action-packed and honoring game format poker has to offer. Heads up poker is comparable to boxing, if you beat your opponents consistently, you become the champ, gain glory and most people would never want to.
3. Poker3 Heads-Up Hold’em Rules Poker3 Heads-Up Hold’em is an online poker game mimicking heads-up Limit Hold’em. By limit, we mean fixed limit and no NL Hold’em as is popular at many online poker rooms. If you’re familiar with how to play Texas Hold’em, then you know most of the rules already, but this game plays slightly differently.
4. Following are the rules for Heads Up Hold 'Em. For those used to the terminology in Ultimate Texas Hold 'Em, what is called the Blind there called the Odds bet here. The game is played with a single ordinary 52-card deck. The player must make an equal bet on both the Ante and Odds.

Going head-to-head in Texas Hold’em is not the same as playing against multiple opponents. One of the most challenging forms of poker in the world is, without a doubt, heads-up No-Limit Texas Hold’em. Besides a little luck, it demands players to have a set of skills that are different from those seen when playing a table full of opponents.

One of the newest casino table games popping up in casinos across the country is the 'Texas Hold'em Bonus' game. Simply, it pits each player against the dealer in heads-up hands of Texas Hold'em poker. Whoever has the best five-card poker hand at the end, wins.

As in Blackjack, you only have to beat the dealer's hand to win, not the other players at the table. If you're familiar with how to play Texas Hold'em, it should be a snap to understand & sit down and play. Here are the basic rules.

Texas Hold'em Bonus Table Game

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: 15 minutes

How to Play

1. To start playing, each player puts up an ante wager, and have the option of putting up a bonus jackpot wager as well.
2. Each player and the dealer are dealt two cards, face-down. These are the hole cards.
3. If you want to play your hand, you put down a bet that's exactly twice the amount of your ante. In other words, if your ante bet was $5 and you want to play, you have to put down exactly $10. If you decide not to play and fold, you lose your ante bet.
4. The dealer deals three cards face-up in the center of the table. This is also known as the flop. These three cards are community cards, meaning all players can (and will) use them to make their final five-card hand.
5. Players now have the option to bet again, and can only bet the same amount as the ante (so if the ante was $5, the bet is $5 this time). Or players can check, which means they don't bet. You don't have to bet -- you get to keep playing whether you bet or check.
6. A fourth community card is dealt face-up. This is also known as the turn.
7. Again, players can bet or check. The bet is again the same amount as the ante bet. This is the last opportunity for players to bet. Again, you don't have to place a bet here to keep playing.
8. A fifth and final community card is dealt face-up on the table. This is known as the river.
9. The dealer turns up his/her cards and shows what the best five-card poke hand the house can make, combining the dealer's hole cards and the community cards.
10. Player by player, the dealer will turn over each player's hole cards and determine the best five-card poker hand. To make the best five-card hand each player can use one, two, or none of his hole cards in combination with the five face-up community cards.
    The dealers are trained to pick out each player's best hand, but you should also be able to tell what your best hand is. Make sure you know what beats what in poker.
11. The dealer determines if the player's hand or the dealer's hand is higher.
12. If the player has the higher hand, he/she wins. The house pays 1-1 on all bets, and in some cases, the ante as well.
    If the player loses, the house takes all the bets & the ante, too.

Bonus Jackpot Wagers

• If players have made bonus jackpot wagers, the dealer checks to see if the player's two hole cards win a bonus. This bet is independent of the five-card poker hand, and may be a winner even if the player's hand is a loser.
• Usually, if a player has any pair in the hole, that is a winning bonus hand. Other hole card combinations that usually win bonuses are A-K, A-Q, and A-J. Each casino has slightly diffent hands that payout, which should be posted at the table.

Tips

• Don't play this game as you would a regular game of Texas Hold'em. Since you are only playing the dealer, you can play almost any two cards.
• The only hands that you should probably make a habit of folding are unsuited, unconnected low cards both below seven, such as 2-7 or 3-6.

Heads up poker is generally believed to be the most skillful variation of the game. With only two players at the table, it’s between you and your opponent. There are fewer random elements that are often present in a full ring or even in six max games. If you have a good strategy and know how to counter the other player, you’ll be winning heaps in the long run.

Doug Polk is a living example of this. Polk has reigned pretty much supreme in online high stakes heads up games for several years and during that period he was considered to be the best HU No Limit Hold’em player around. It reached the point where almost no one would play Polk because they simply didn’t think there was an edge to be had.

So, who better to deliver the course on HU play than the founder of Upswing Poker himself? Polk’s Advanced Heads Up Mastery is a top-quality, high-level course for those who really want to focus on one on one play and learn some of the skills required to succeed in the very competitive world of HU poker.

Going into it, I knew this wasn’t going to be one of those courses you can just skim through. In his blogs and forum posts, Polk has often described his meticulous approach to studying the game that helped him reach the top. So, I expected the Upswing Poker Heads Up Mastery to describe this process in detail – and I wasn’t disappointed.

Here is a summary of this review and what to expect from this course:

Advanced Heads Up Mastery is an elite level No-Limit course with over 80 How-To videos created by Doug Polk, an all-time HU great. Ideal for experienced players breaking into mid/high stakes, this course has everything needed, including exhaustive preflop ranges, high-level theory and hand reviews. Rated 8.4/10.

Note: although Doug has recently retired from poker and this course was released a while before that, we still believe this to be the best HU course you can get your hands on. This is the highest rated HU course that we have taken and one of the most highly rated courses on the market.

Advanced Heads Up Mastery at a Glance

Texas Holdem Poker Rules Hands

This in-depth course contains more than 20 hours of video materials and goes into every single aspect of heads up play. It starts with deep and detailed analysis of preflop and then moves on to the postflop segment of the HU game, covering all sorts of scenarios.

Although I had some idea of what I was getting into with Upswing’s Heads Up Mastery, I wasn’t really prepared for the level of detail provided by the videos. Using the concept of the game tree, Polk explains the decision process in different spots and shows how different decisions can lead to completely different results.

If I’m being perfectly honest, all of this isn’t easy to keep up and the best way to approach it is by taking it in small chunks and letting things sink in. When taking breaks from the lessons, you can go through your own database of hands and utilize your newly found knowledge to look for any leaks or spots where you could improve, which is what Polk suggests anyways.

Don’t expect this course to be a walk in the park. It’s very demanding and math-heavy but it’s also probably the single best course on heads up play you can get your hands on these days. It’s clearly not aimed at beginners and if you’re new to the HU format maybe you should start with an easier one before graduating to Advanced Heads Up Mastery.

So, with this intro out of the way, here’s a quick overview of what you’ll actually find inside. I won’t go into too much detail because many of these concepts will only make sense once you watch full videos and hear all surrounding explanations. But this overview should give you a solid idea of how the course is structured and what to expect.

Play in the Blinds – Preflop

First several videos cover play from the blinds in what you could call “standard” pots, i.e. in raise first in (RFI) situations. Although preflop play isn’t actually at the heart of heads up poker (as it’s not that hard to master), the course still offers a very extensive coverage of preflop spots, starting with the simplest ones and graduating to more complex spots.

You’ll learn how to handle different situations from both sides of the fence. Whether you’re sitting in the small blind and starting the action on a hand or in the big blind having to defend, Polk goes at great length to explain the math behind every decision and helps students learn how to define ranges they should be going to battle with.

Initial small blind videos mostly focus on the topic of raise sizing with Doug focusing on how to come up with the proper size that provides you with enough fold equity but doesn’t force you to risk too many of your chips. The theory is accompanied by numerous examples of actual hands from his extensive HU database

Lessons covering the big blind play touch on almost every possible scenario you can expect to face, such as:

• Limp from a small blind
• Defining small blind raise ranges
• When to 3-bet, etc.

These lessons are quite eye-opening as Polk is clearly not afraid to defend and 3-bet with a wide selection of hands from the big blind, especially when facing a smaller raise. In fact, as he explains in Upswing Poker Heads Up Mastery, it was this shift in the approach to the game that helped him climb to the top of poker food chain.

Dealing With 3-bets & 4-bets Before the Flop

More advanced lessons on the preflop play focus on tougher spots, namely 3-bet and 4-bet situations. Since this is where pots tends to get big, Polk takes a fair amount to time to focus on different aspects of these hands such as:

• How to handle 3-bets when in a small blind
• Defining your 4-bet ranges
• Figuring out best 4-bet bluff hands

These lessons don’t focus just on your hand ranges, though, but also go on to explain how to best come up with proper bet sizes to achieve the goal you want to achieve. In these spots especially it’s also important to know your opponent’s tendencies and adjust your play accordingly. Making large 4-bets with big hands can be the best strategy against some players but it can also be a costly mistake against players who’ll fold too frequently.

Learning Postflop: The Hard Part

Right at the start of the course, Polk emphasizes that the postflop play is much more important in heads up and the structure of Advanced Heads Up Mastery certainly reflects this. The postflop segment of the course is much longer, much more extensive, and this is where things may start to get difficult to follow.

While Doug hasn’t been actively playing in the recent period, he’s well aware of tendencies in modern heads up games. So, in the first few videos of the postflop section, he provides a general rundown on the state of affairs and things you need to really pay attention to. He also introduces his own strategy, which he’s tweaked for best results.

Play in Single Raised Pots

Once again, the course kicks off with the analysis of what could be dubbed as simpler spots, i.e. single raised pots. Lessons included cover play from both positions, small and big blind.

Small blind videos discuss continuation betting strategy with a special focus on having looser ranges than most of the opponents but still making it work. In some of these videos, Polk goes really deep into explaining the game tree and branching decisions to illustrate how and why this approach can be so effective even if it doesn’t appear so at first.

Videos on the big blind play in SRPs lean on the ideas discussed in previous lessons. If the small blind is likely to continue with a high frequency on the flop, it stands to reason you should be defending more on the flop. It’s on the turn that many of your crucial decisions in the hand will be made as this is where ranges become much better defined and there are new possibilities opening up.

Holdem Poker Heads Up Rules How To Play

Strategy in Inflated Pots

Like in the first part of Upswing’s Advanced Heads Up Mastery, after discussing simpler situations, the course moves on to more complex one. Final videos (quite a few of them) cover 3-bet and 4-bet pots, i.e. pots that have been inflated before the pot and where the stack to pot ratio tends to be much lower.

While Polk stipulates that these situations usually aren’t as complex exactly due to lower SPR, there are still many fine points he makes about effective strategy changes and possible adjustments. These are explained using the game tree as well as numerous examples from the database.

Play & Explain Videos

Like most Upswing courses, Heads Up Mastery wraps things up with a play and explain section. This particular one contains 11 videos of Polk himself playing four tables of $20,000 NL against another top-tier HU player, ‘Sauce123’.

In these videos, you’ll see Polk actually applying many of the strategies and ideas discussed in the theoretical part of the course and see how they play out in practice. I always find these play and explain videos very useful as visualizing things makes them much easier to understand. Plus, if you love heads up play, this is really a great watch regardless of strategy considerations.

Wrap-up: Should You Pay Money for Advanced Heads Up Mastery?

Most Upswing courses don’t come cheap and this one is no exception. If you want access to the knowledge contained inside, you’ll need to pay a fair bit of money. The question is, is it worth it? Will it be money well spent?

Texas Holdem Poker Rules Dealing

I’m not going to pretend I’m nearly anywhere the level of play required to fully understand everything that’s included in this course. So, I can’t really talk about the quality of content in there. But the fact that it was created by one of the best HU players to ever hit the virtual felt fills me with confidence that he knows what he’s talking about.

What I can say is that the amount of work that was put into putting all of this together must have been quite impressive and the course itself is very detailed. You’ll struggle to find a spot or a situation that’s not covered in detail. Whatever answers you might be looking for about HU play, you’ll find them inside.

If your goal is to graduate to high stakes heads up cash games and stand a chance, you probably need something like this to help you along and the investment will easily pay itself off. Of course, that’s only provided you take the course seriously and apply the knowledge inside to analyze your own game and deconstruct your opponents’ play.

The price of the Advanced Heads Up Mastery course is $999 ($949 using the coupon code Advanced50), but given the amount of knowledge, you will gain you are guaranteed to see a return on your investment and become the best version of yourself as a well-rounded poker player.

A lot of what you’ll find inside will only be as worth as you put it in practice so be prepared to do some serious work behind the scenes. If you aren’t, this one isn’t for you. Mastering heads up poker at the highest level isn’t something that will just happen overnight – but if you’re a serious player you probably knew that already!

To enroll in Advanced heads heads up mastery and save $50 using the coupon code Advanced50, visit the Upswing Poker course page.

Holdem Poker Heads Up Rules To Play

If you would like to learn more about the poker training options on the market, make sure you check out our post Best Poker Training Sites where we ranked Upwing poker as the 2nd best training site on the market today.