Heads-up push/fold charts
Short-stacked heads up, the game is just jam or fold. Pick an effective stack to see which hands the small blind moves all in with, and which hands the big blind calls with.
Small blind jams
58.9% of handsBig blind calls the jam
38.3% of hands- In the small blind
- Always jam.
- In the big blind, facing a jam
- Always call.
The rule behind the chart
When the big blind is calling every hand, the small blind's decision has a closed form. Jamming an effective stack of S big blinds with equity e wins S(2e − 1) on average; folding gives up the half blind already posted. Jamming is better whenever:
At 2bb that bar is 37.5 percent equity. The weakest starting hand, 32 offsuit, runs at 32.6 percent against a random hand by this site's own equity engine, so it stays below the bar and folds. That is why even at 2bb the small blind is not jamming literally any two cards: by this formula, that would only start below 1.44bb.
Jam and call frequencies by stack
Share of all 1,326 starting hand combinations played, at each effective stack.
| Effective stack | SB jams | BB calls |
|---|---|---|
| 2bb | 90.3% | 100.0% |
| 3bb | 78.6% | 92.8% |
| 4bb | 74.4% | 74.7% |
| 5bb | 72.0% | 63.5% |
| 6bb | 68.3% | 54.9% |
| 7bb | 66.9% | 49.0% |
| 8bb | 62.3% | 45.5% |
| 9bb | 61.1% | 41.5% |
| 10bb | 58.9% | 38.3% |
| 11bb | 55.7% | 35.7% |
| 12bb | 53.8% | 33.4% |
| 13bb | 51.9% | 31.2% |
| 14bb | 48.9% | 30.1% |
| 15bb | 46.3% | 28.8% |
Chart snapshots
The small blind's jam range at three common depths, readable without JavaScript. Salmon marks a jam; everything unshaded is a fold. Use the chart at the top of the page for the big blind's calling ranges and for every stack in between.
5bb · jams 72.0%
10bb · jams 58.9%
15bb · jams 46.3%
How these charts were solved
These ranges are not copied from a published chart. They were solved here, from this site's own equity engine: every one of the 14,365 distinct starting-hand matchups was evaluated, then a fictitious-play solver was run at each stack until both sides stopped being able to improve.
Convergence is measured, not assumed. A separate best-response check, built on a general game-tree engine that predates this feature and knows nothing about how the ranges were produced, scores every chart at under 0.001 big blinds of exploitability, and each of the 4,732 individual jam-or-call decisions is re-checked against its own expected value. Both bounds are enforced by the verification script rather than asserted here. The two checks do share the payoff arithmetic and the equity inputs with the solver, so they confirm the solve converged, not that the underlying model is a perfect picture of poker.
Which brings up the model's one real simplification: matchup equities use a single representative suit combination per hand pair rather than averaging over every suit layout. Measured across eight archetype matchups, that sits between 0.02 and 0.71 percentage points away from the true suit average. Equity errors of that size only change a decision for hands already sitting near the jam-or-fold boundary, so treat the fringes of these ranges as close calls rather than exact cutoffs.
Common questions
- What is a push/fold chart?
- A push/fold chart is the solved strategy for a heads-up pot where stacks are short enough that the only sensible options are moving all in or folding. It has two halves: the hands the small blind jams, and the hands the big blind calls that jam with. At these stack depths there is no postflop play to speak of, so the whole game collapses into those two decisions and can be solved exactly.
- When should you use push/fold?
- Push/fold applies once the effective stack is short enough that raising to anything less than all in leaves you committed anyway. The usual rule of thumb among players is about 15 big blinds and below, which is why these charts stop there; deeper than that, having room to raise and still fold gives up less than jamming, though that comparison is a matter of convention here rather than something these charts solve. At 15bb the small blind is jamming 46.3% of hands; by 5bb that widens to 72.0%, and by 2bb it reaches 90.3%.
- Which hands does the small blind jam heads up?
- It depends entirely on the stack. At 10bb effective the small blind jams 58.9% of all hands and the big blind calls with 38.3%. The ranges widen as stacks get shorter because the blinds are worth relatively more: winning them uncontested matters more, and the risk of being called costs less. Use the chart above to read any specific hand at any stack from 2bb to 15bb.
- Why does the big blind call wider than the small blind jams at 2bb?
- Because the big blind is getting overwhelming pot odds. Facing a 2bb jam it has already posted 1bb and is calling 1bb more to win a 4bb pot, so it only needs about 25 percent equity and every hand clears that bar. The small blind, risking its whole stack to win 1bb, needs more than 37.5 percent equity and so folds its worst hands. The two ranges cross over at 5bb, above which the big blind is the tighter of the two.
Push/fold tells you whether to move in. The equity calculator shows how any two hands run against each other, and the preflop charts cover the deeper-stacked opens.