Help learning how to put opponents on a range

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!