[Study blog] Towards a more advanced poker strategy

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 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.

This thread is a personal study blog where I will be posting new strategy concepts I am learning. Feel free to add your comments, criticize, make relevant suggestions, or just learn from it in case you are at some similar situation as me.

Information about my experience and play

- 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 sofar: 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 sofar: 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 sofar: 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.

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".

At the moment, 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.

My current learning goal
My current learning goal is to move from simply putting an opponent to a set of hands, as I have been doing, to putting him properly in a range of hands. From that begins a whole new area of strategy, which includes many more concepts and tactics I haven't used previously. I started learning about doing that by 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.

That has come along with many new challenges, which sofar include the following:

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.

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, Capped & 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.