If you’ve found yourself in search of the top online poker sites for heads-up play, you’ve come to the right page. Furthermore, if you have any input, we’d love to hear from you as we do what we can to keep this page as up to date and ahead of the game as is possible.

Heads up for those that aren’t familiar is when two poker players face off against each other. Sometimes this is during the final stage of a poker tournament, and other times, players pit their skills against one another in a cash game that’s specifically dealt to two people. There are also heads up poker tournaments, such as the NBC National Heads Up Poker Challenge that’s held every year in Las Vegas during the WSOP (but independent of the World Series).

Heads up is for some players a very profitable game, as well as a tool used to teach players to tune into each other. It’s been said by many pro players that heads up poker teaches players to get to know their opponents, and  to really  tune into the game.

Heads Up Ring VS Heads Up SNGs

The biggest difference between a heads up cash table, and a sit n go game is … the rake. An SNG, as you’re probably well aware comes with a one-time fee. The fee is paid to the poker site for hosting the game from beginning to end. A ring game, or cash table, charges a fee for every single hand dealt.

Let’s say for instance that you buy into an $11 heads up turbo sit n go on Carbon Poker. You’ll pay $11 total. 52 cents out of that $11 will go back to Carbon for hosting the game. The remaining $10.48 goes into the pot to be won by the prevailing player. The rake at a heads-up cash table at Carbon is capped at .50. Depending on the size of the pot, and the stakes you’re playing at, you could pay that .50 every hand.

Let’s say you’re paying .50 for every $20 in the pot during a heads up session. Now that seems like a great deal right? A lot less than that sit n go event we talked about above.

That is until you and your opponent pass pots back and forth for 20 minutes, and hand after hand pay .25 to .50 in rake, over and over again.

The point here is that Sit n Go tournaments are a tool used by Heads Up players to control the amount of rake that they play, which of course leads to lower expenses, and in turn, increased ROI.

Recommended Reading

Both Johnny Chan and Daniel Negreanu have written books that are just plain must reads for the Heads Up Poker player in training.  Negreanu recommends a combination loose aggressive style. It can be tough to really open up your play in that way, but as we’ve seen Negreanu demonstrate, this method of taking advantage of opponents can really be quite profitable.

Heads up Poker and the Martingale Betting Strategy

The Martingale betting strategy is an old blackjack betting strategy wherein the player places a bet, and then every time he loses, he doubles that bet. So let’s say you’re playing blackjack, and you bet $5, and lose the hand. During the next hand you’ll bet $10, if you win that hand, you recoup your original $5, and you win $5, and can now go back to betting the initial $5.

If you lost the second hand though, you’d double your bet again, so your new bet would be $20, then $40, $80 and so on, until you win a hand. Then you would again revert back to that initial $5 bet.

This betting strategy can also be put into play as a method of bankroll management for heads up poker players. For instance, let’s say you start out playing low stakes heads up games buying in for no more than 2% of your bankroll. If you lose a buyin, you buy in at double that buyin during your next session.

This system can also be employed by SNG players, starting at a specific SNG stake, and then increasing. The trouble with this system is that it can get pretty expensive if you lose several games consecutively, and quite especially if a player goes on a bit of a losing streak, which can be caused by PokerTracker picking up to many of your habits, or other players getting to know you to well as a player.

Best Heads up Poker Sites

• PokerStars
• Carbon Poker
• 888 Poker
• Bet365 Poker
• Lucky Ace Poker
• Betfair Poker
• Gr88 Poker
• Everest Poker

PokerStars offers a special rake cap to cash game players whenever there are just two players in a hand. This rake cap applies at not only heads up poker tables, but at every table available on the site when there are only two players in the hand. PokerStars also recently lowered the rake for heads up Sit n Go events.

As the largest poker site in the entire world, it’s refreshing how in tune PokerStars is with the needs of all poker players, actually lowering the price of a game with increasing popularity instead of raising it. Stars also recently added  hyper turbo heads up sit n go’s, which offer a new, faster, shorter stacked structure to the lobby line up.