The Riceman said
Interested in this DDD. I understand how one might make a balanced open limp strategy…open limp every hand you play, whether it is weak or strong! But in seriousness, how do you construct your ranges <20bb’s please?

I have to be honest, I haven’t put in any rigorous work on my heads up game in a long time, so I don’t know how useful my suggestions will be. My approach when I’ve gotten heads up this year has been relatively passive and exploitative, with the exception of one game that went heads up extremely deep stacked vs. a player that was clearly miles ahead of me in short-handed play (5 handed to heads up he seemed to play nearly perfectly in every hand). In that game I reverted to making bigger bets, 3betting preflop and attacking flops wider than usual, and luckily that match ended quickly with me winning a cooler, QQ v AKs all-in preflop with each of us ~75bb deep.

Assuming 12.5% antes you can profitably shove:

20bb  42.4%: 22+,A2+,K2s+,K8+,Q5s+,Q9+,J6s+,J9+,T6s+,T9,96s+,98,85s+,75s+,65s,54s

15bb  51.1%: 22+,A2+,K2s+,K4+,Q2s+,Q8+,J4s+,J9+,T6s+,T8+,95s+,98,85s+,87,74s+,64s+,54s

10bb  63.8%: 22+,A2+,K2+,Q2s+,Q5+,J2s+,J7+,T3s+,T7+,95s+,97+,84s+,86+,74s+,76,63s+,53s+,43s

You could build a strong strategy around shoving most of those hands and limping the bottom of the ranges, many worse hands, and some big pairs/strong aces/suited broadways. You’ll be pretty unbalanced to weak hands when limping but you’re getting a great price and the match is unlikely to last long enough for villain to figure out what you’re doing and/or know how to exploit it. Limping your entire range can also be viable. Even though you’re sacrificing a lot of preflop EV with your stronger hands, you’ll get to play them in position with at least some maneuverability.

If villain is rarely raising my limps, I’ll adjust by limping ~70% of hands and making profitable shoves with some hands that can struggle to realize equity postflop. That’s just off the top of my head, heads up is an area of my game that is sorely in need of work (but ~9000th in the priority order of things I need to improve).

When adjusting this way (at 20bb), I’d shove something like: 88-22,A3s-A2s,A7s-A6s,A9-A4,K7s-K5s,KT-K9,Q7s (12.8%)

Fold: T4-T2,94-92,84-82,73-72,62,52,42,32 (13.5% – offsuit combos only)

Limp everything else.

As I get shorter I’ll move more hands into the shoving range and maybe fold a few more weak offsuit combos. Again, I’d really recommend doing some work on this yourself as I’m far, far, far away from being an expert at heads up play. Hopefully this gives you an okay starting point, or at least something for a better heads up player to get a chuckle from.