Hello, everybody!

I am a poker player and fan from Greece and I am 42 years old. I have (re-)joined this forum because I am looking to advance my online poker skills to intermediate/advanced level, particularly regarding online MTT tournaments, currently at Microstakes level. I would really appreciate the help of some experienced players!

Let me tell you exactly where I am at and what I am looking for I have tried to make the information I write as specific as possible so as to give you the best possible view of what I am on about, and I appreciate your efforts to go through it. Long story short, my questions are about putting opponents on ranges, but I have written more about me in case you find something else important to discuss about there.

I currently live in Greece although I had been living in the UK for about 15 years and also lived in Luxembourg for 1 year. I actually started playing poker in the UK while I was a student there, and that was primarily online.

- My past study material: I have now been into poker for 15 years on and off. I possess about 349 poker books in digital form, which admittedly I have fully read few of, and about 10 in print, which I have read all of. However, regarding strategy, I have only found a dozen of all my books to be useful. I have also watched an innumerable amount of poker shows (WSOP, WPT, EPT, Poker after dark, High stakes poker and more), and the occasional strategy/coaching videos.

- My game and stakes: I have always played only No Limit HL, at the level of Microstakes and occasionally at Low stakes up to $11, almost exclusively online at Pokerstars. In the beginning I used to play $5 SnGs mostly where I was winning mostly, and the occasional tour. I had taken another gap for a few years and started playing poker about last year. And, for the last year I have been focusing on MTTs.

- My bankroll: My bankroll to play poker has always been $50, which is probably too little to do much but I kept it so because I hardly ever thought seriously to move up in poker, or invest more in my play because I have had poker only as a fun hobby, and I was focusing on my work.

- My profitability: I am overall a winning player. Until last year my net poker profit since the beginning was about $3,500, which I gained primarily by winning some $3 and $5 tours around 2012. Since the last year where I started playing poker frequently again I am up $400, which I gained mostly from winning a $1.10 Bounty builder tour a couple of months ago, and so, my ROI for this last year is about 230%.

- My strategy basis: I mostly learnt how to play poker from 2-3 books. I developed my style primarily from Dan Harrington's "Harrington on Holdem" series, although David Sklansky's "Small stakes hold'em" and "The theory of poker" gave me an insight into odds and probabilities. By the way, I have all these books on print.

- My current style: I have been playing TAG primarily (or that's what I think it was, I usually find that on tours I play about 28% of hands early and during the minefield stage), and I was always only considering my hand and the opponent's hand ie never possible ranges.

Also, just to make clear what I am looking for, I am not interested in learning GTO, because I find it too complex.
Besides, I think it is suitable for me right now anyway. I would learn GTO only as a second style, after I would have developed my primary style. So, I basically to keep learning to play TAG and Exploitative styles.

However, I am sometimes intrigued by the idea that with a LAG style in tournaments I could gain a big chipstack early on and thus have a good chance of winning it, although I never actually did that, nor have I found any books on how to play LAG, nor have I seen any strategy videos of people doing that. So, regarding playing a LAG style, I am at "that would be nice to have if indeed it is worth it and I had some guides to it".

- My current challenges:
1) New (for me) post-flop play: Obviously, what has changed for me since I started this quest of improving by learning to put opponents in ranges has been my post-flop play.

2) Pre-flop ranges reconsidered: I think I have a somewhat ok grasp of preflop play (however I have been playing Full Ring games almost exclusively), although after I tried learning how to put opponents on ranges I think that knowing the preflop ranges is much more crucial to have mastered. For this reason, that really challenged my existing preflop knowledge and got me back to rethinking about it too.

I actually started looking for theory and video material to study about putting opponents on ranges through Google. Luckily, I found a few articles on poker blogs, and a video from Johnathan Little.

3) New concepts introduced to me: That is where my problems begun: that theory contains SO many new for me terms and concepts, and they look SO complicated to work out. I mean, it looks to me as complicated as rocket science, or nuclear physics.

I am referring to the concepts of Range Advantage, Nut advantage, Equity denial, Value Range, Bluffing range, Overbetting range Polarized range, Polarizing overbet, Cappped & uncapped ranges and some more. That is, not their definition, but how you actually calculate and use them.

4) Counting combos: Where I am getting particularly confused as to whether I need to learn even how to count combos too. That is so damn complex!

5) Putting the new concepts together: What confuses me is particularly the point where, on one I have to consider the opponent's range, on another I have to consider combos, on another the hand I made with the board to estimate bet size. I can't find when I have to think about each, and how all those things come together.

6) Non-compatibility with my current games: To give you an idea of what kind of players play in the MTT Microstakes tournamens I play at, in one of them I played in this week, some guy called my preflop 5xBB raise with Q2o from the big blind, and kept betting on a Q high flop, whereas another called my 20xBB preflop all-in with T7o, and while 3 more players were still to play. Everything else aside about their plays, I wouldn't even consider Q2o and T7o in their ranges. They are not even in a LAG's range. I mean simply, it seems to me that putting opponents on ranges is just too much work to do for such players, and a simpler more generic style would work better.


Questions
1. Do all of you good winning players know how to put opponents on ranges and use that in your play?
2. How did you learn that (putting opponents on ranges)? Which sources, such as books, articles or videos did YOU use about learning to do that?
3. More specifically, do you actually always also calculate your opponent's combos when you put them in ranges?
4. If yes about combos, which sources did you learn that from? Which books, articles or videos did YOU use about that?
5. How do you study or practice putting opponents on ranges? Eg do you fire up Pokertracker and replay hands?
6. Is it really worth learning to put opponents on ranges for the Microstakes MTT level I am currently playing at? Or am I just making my poker play too complicated?
It seems to me I eventually will have to have 2 different strategies a different for Micro stakes and a different for higher stakes. Do you think this is what I should do?
7. Has any of you come across this situation which I am facing (started learning this part of the game about putting opponents on ranges, noticed it doesn't apply to your current level of play)? What did you do then to tackle that issue?
8. If this advanced theory of putting opponents on ranges is only useful for relatively higher stakes players eg low stakes and up, what should I do? I don't think moving up stakes ie to low stakes, is the right way to go. I think the correct move which would be consistent with doing good bankroll management would be to win my bankroll at Microstakes level first, and then move up.
9. Did anyone here actually make their bankroll to move up by playing Microstakes MTT tournaments? Or did you make it playing cash, and completely skipped Microstakes MTTs?


Thank you for taking the time to read and I appreciate all the good help!

Welcome to the forum! That is quite the first post. There is a lot to unpack.

I will first note that you are not interested in learning GTO because it is too complex. Perhaps if you simplify it down and approach it step-by-step its importance will become clear.

Game theory is merely the philosophy of making the false assumption that all players in multiplayer games will make optimal decisions. If you base your decisions on this assumption, the rational response outputs will also be optimal. Under this model, your decisions reach an unexploitable equilibrium, meaning no strategy in existence can exploit yours, while any suboptimal strategy you face will be automatically exploited. Indeed, game theory optimal strategies are too complex for humans to implement flawlessly, we can only approximate and approach them in practice.

Regarding "[your] current challenges", I think if you break down your struggles into smaller parts and tackle them one step at a time, you will get more out of the process than trying to learn everything at once. Dive in deep on one aspect, figure out where you can implement that aspect, then practice a bit until it is a part of your strategy. Then dive in deep on the next aspect, and repeat ad infinitum.

"Questions"
1. The vast majority of "good winning players" will implement hand-ranging in some fashion
2. I learned by playing a lot of turbo SNGs, ingraining optimal push-fold ranges into memory. Then I worked towards learning preflop raising ranges at various deeper stack depths at each position. Postflop, you start with the preflop range, whether that be a check in the bb facing a limp, limp, PFR, 3bet, 4bet+, and trim off the parts of the range that do not follow the actual path of the game tree. Note that you cannot possibly learn the ranges of each individual player. This is where learning GTO ranges is helpful. Once you (roughly) know GTO ranges, you can note player tendencies that indicate deviations from these ranges and devise a strategy to exploit those tendencies for a greater ROI than the GTO ranges would render.
3. Combinatorics is not easy to implement in real-time while playing. Better to practice off the tables. With some practice you can use combinatorics in certain real-time situations to better gauge whether to make a certain decision, but it is not necessary to do so for every decision.
4. None, I learned from practice on and off the table.
5. By playing and studying off the tables. Handhistory reviews as you suggest are indeed a good way. Go through a whole tournament and work through each hand street by street (even if you were not involved in the hand). Start with preflop ranges (trim away the folds, if they limp trim away the raises, if they 3bet trim away the flats, etc). Then proceed with that range to the flop, turn and river, trimming away at each street based on which hands will take which actions. You can check at showdown what the players actually showed up with, and whether that hand was still in the range you assigned. If not, did you make a ranging mistake somewhere or was the play irrational? That is one way to practice hand ranging.
6. Yes it is. I don't think having 2 different strategies for micro-stakes and higher-stakes is a good idea. Have a general strategy that is flexible/opponent dependent.
7. I disagree that hand ranging does not apply at micro-stakes.
8. See answer to 6/7. You will benefit from hand-ranging even at micro-stakes.
9. Yes, I built a sizeable bankroll from micros to high-stakes, twice in fact. You can google 'asjbaaaf $4.20 challenge' if you want to read a PGC thread I did on the second go around which may have some pointers for you, although it is quite dated at this point.

Hope some of it helped. All the best.

Thank you Asjbaaf for taking the time to read and thoroughly reply to all my questions!

I guess then I am right to be studying how to put opponents on hand ranges, and I should proceed with trying to try and apply them on Microstakes tournaments.

I am particularly relieved that I don't necessarily have to learn Poker Combinatorics at this stage.

I will have a look at your video, it sounds like an exciting challenge, and I think it will be useful for me.

You remind me of myself about 5 years ago. I had been playing recreationally for years and realized I needed to plug some big leaks, but once I started I quickly realized I had to almost completely overhaul my game. The only difference is that I wasn't having any success like you have. I'm happy to say that I'm a much better player now than I was back then, and have finally found some success too. It sounds to me like you need to modernize your study and approach to the game.

I put a ton of work into it, at least as much as I could working full time with a family. I probably had a study/play ratio of 90/10 for a while. But I managed to significantly improve my game with minimal financial investment. Here are a few strategies I used that made a big difference:

1) I started with some basic YouTube videos, and there are many good free ones available. Jonathan Little does great work in this regard. This will help you become familiar with basic strategy around things like GTO preflop ranges, bet sizing, polarized vs condensed ranges, 3-betting strategy, that kind of thing. Modern MTT poker has come a long, long way from the days of Harrington on Holdem.

2) If I had to recommend one book and one book only, it would be Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos. Maybe you've read it already, but I found it completely eye opening. It introduces game theory in a very accessible way, provides an excellent theoretical explanation for the relationship between position and bet sizing, and gives you a good framework for learning how and when to deviate from game theory.

3) The way I trained myself to think in terms of ranges was I would download a text document of my hand histories, delete any hand that didn't go to showdown, and then I would go through each hand, street by street (covering up the outcomes with a piece of paper) and make notes on the ranges of the people in the hand. Then I would uncover the showdown and see how close I was. If the player's hand wasn't in my predicted range, I would go back and see if I missed something. It was incredibly tedious but an excellent study tool.

4) I followed every tournament poker strategy podcast in existence and downloaded every previous episode. When I listened to an episode, I would do so using an active learning approach. I would sit with a pad of paper, write down the details of each hand, and pause the podcast at each decision point. I would then write down my own analysis of each decision spot - what I would do and why. Then I would un-pause and listen to the hosts analyze the spot. If my analysis was different, I would reflect on where I went wrong. Then I would pause at the next decision and continue the process. Over time I found that my own analysis matched the hosts' analysis more and more often, which was a good sign that I was making good progress. Unfortunately there are very few tournament strat podcasts still active, but there are hundreds of hours of past episodes you can download.

Good luck sir.

Hi Darth_Maul... what tournament strategy podcasts do you listen to (or did listen to--given you said most of them are no longer active) ?

I do a similar "active learning" approach with JustHands and ThinkingPoker podcasts (I subscribe to ThinkingPoker daily, and get a hand review/strategy question answer each day). I see there is an active tournament podcast --"Tournament Poker Edge" that I'm going to begin to listen to. Any others active or inactive that you recommend?