I am watching another awesome Skates video...Board Texture Pt.1. I've watched it before, but this time I'm taking serious notes. I've been watching it for two hours now.At about 34:00, Skates makes an observation about good high-stakes players..."There are a lot of players out there who are unsure how to proceed when something weird happens, that you can induce to mistakes with your actions. That's why you see such creativity among high stakes players. They know how to change your ranges through their actions. They spend more time thinking about that than you do."So this got me thinking...what is the progression of learning skills in HUsngs?As a beginner, I will of course start with ABC poker, followed by (presumably) starting to learn to adapt to general opponent types. I'm guessing this creativity Skates refers to is the last skill to mature. What comes in between? What is the progression that will allow a player to move up through the ranks? The reason that players get stuck at specific stakes is that they are for some reason unable to learn necessary important concepts. At each stakes level, what are those required skills? I mean, how far will ABC poker and a simpleton's adjustment to opponent types get someone? What are the next sets of limitations? And how many major categories of "HU poker understanding" are there?I realize many skills blend together and that's an impossible question to answer specifically, but having a list of the stages of HU poker development I think would be invaluable to give us beginners insight into what we will eventually need to learn and how all the pieces fit together.
Somehow didn't see this before, but I wouldn't try to break it down into general categories.The best way I can articulate it is that the more you learn about the game the more you can use to manipulate your opponent.It isn't necessarily a skill set learned, but a result of knowing what you can gain and accomplish with various actions from various opponents. The more experience and skills that you gain, the more likely you are to see a newly creative way to fully exploit your opponent.Here's a basic example, that is not really on the high stakes level:When I started out, even after I had found some success in beating heads up sngs, I was 3xing my button most often. Yes, I sometimes adapted to a 2.5x raise size, but that usually didn't happen until the 25-50 level. These days, I see many more situations where a minraise, particularly when we get under 50-60 bbs, is clearly the best option against my opponent.I also never raised 100% of my buttons, not against any opponents. Granted, I still had good success, but these were some skills missing from my game (among the many) that I could've benefited quite a lot from having. But I didn't realize that these actions could result in a greater edge, therefore I didn't adopt them.So think on that type of level to understand my point, the more skills you acquire and the more that you understand how taking certain actions can have differenct effects on your opponent's play, the more creative that you can get.