How To Play an Offsuit Ace

First hand of the heads-up hyper-turbo tournament and you get dealt Ax offsuit. You make a standard min-bet and the villain three-bet shoves instantly. What should we do? Which offsuit Aces should be folded and which not? In this article, I will teach you how to play an offsuit ace in the early levels of a heads-up hyper-turbo tournament.

It is extremely important to have thought a solid strategy on how to defend against three-bet shoves in heads-up hyper-turbo tournaments. If you play a lot of a HUHTSNGs, you will notice that you face a lot of three-bet shoves in the early stage of the tournaments. In mid-stakes (nowadays also in lower-stakes), you meet extremely aggressive opponents who have a wide 3bet-shove range and they will eat you alive if you fold too many hands early on.

The common (bad) 3bet-shove strategy

Which Ax combos should I call? Of course, the answer is opponent dependent, but the player pool has clear tendencies. One tendency which you notice is to shove all pairs and Ax hands. It is a very common 3bet-shove strategy and I’m not a big fan of it. If I know that someone shoves only Ax and pairs, it is very easy to adjust and exploit.

Now, as we know the basic (bad) strategy on population, we can make calculate what would be the worst Ax combo to call the shove. Below you can see a screenshot from Holder Resources Calculator which gives us the right answer for this question – and it is A8o. By the way, it is interesting to notice how big the difference is between A8o and A7o. Basically, the A7o would be a devastating call in long run. A8o you have to call nevertheless you’re not going make any money because otherwise, you waste two big blinds.

Now you know how to play offsuit ace. If you want to know my whole 3bet calling or shoving strategy, you can get the information from my pre-flop charts.