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1. How about a headsup bio - how you got where you are now

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I started playing poker doing 5 mans on Pacific and MTTs, it was pre-UIGEA so the games were a joke and ridiculously easy money. After the UIGEA passed I tried to switch to 6-mans and failed pretty miserably. I figured that with ~5% rake if I had any skill advantage it should show up pretty easily in my results. I started in the $22s with a $300 bankroll which in hindsight may not have been a great idea, but I ran really hot starting out with like 60% ROI over my first 75 games or so. I worked my way into 100s/200s within about a week and $2000 profit before I experienced my first real downswing. I've had a few really nasty once since but they aren't life tilting me as bad now that I'm starting to understand bankroll management and more specifically variance. I forget the exact stats, but jay-shark posted something long the lines of that if you have a ~58% winrate there is like a 30% chance that you will be down after 100 games. It took a while for me to realize that 5-20 games wasn't a significant sample size.

While starting out I considered "going pro" but I pretty quickly realized that if I force myself to mass games I start to lose the enjoyment of the game. I started coaching because it lets me deal with the parts of the game I enjoy (mostly thinking critically and fixing flaws) without having to mass games to get over the variance. I'm not putting in nearly as many hours as I was when I started out, but I suspect that being able to enjoy my college life will have more long term benefits than building my bankroll.

I've found that multi-tabling more games while over-rolled is much better for grinding out games because it beats the variance, but single tabling higher stakes is more enjoyable if I am going into it with a less serious mentality.

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2. Could you outline (some of) the key insight(s) that you came across while learning headsup?

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Probably the biggest adjustments I had to make were in adapting to the players across the spectrum from tight/passive to loose/aggressive. I found that I couldn't run over players with aggression if they were just going to go all in every hand. It was a pretty big transition to make from playing like a robot to thinking critically about my opponent's styles and finding spots where they were exploitable.

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3. What do you think is the most effective way to go about learning headsup poker? We all know the basics: play, think, study, read the forum, post to the forum, etc., but what do you recommend as being the method of greatest marginal return? what are the most important things?

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If you stick to any single thing you will be really limited in how quickly you can learn. At one point while learning I made an effort to reply to every post that had real content and it helped tremendously. I originally only replied to the ones where I felt safe and confident in my answer, but those ones weren't really improving my game. In the threads where I was probably wrong someone was usually quick to point it out and although it was embarrassing sometimes it helped me fix leaks in my game.

I also started threads every hand where I couldn't figure out what my ideal line was. It may not seem like a big deal because hands can be so different and the situations were generally unusual, but it helped to plug a LOT of those small leaks.

It took me a while to realize that taking notes could make a difference. My notes help me out where my read couldn't in about 5% of my games which isn't much, but it is significant considering the notes take about 3 seconds to type out.

Playing is a pretty obvious one. I watched some videos on Cardrunners as well, but I was kind of disappointed in their HUSNG videos. I never got into cash long term, but I did manage to pick up a few valueable tips from the videos I watched.

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4. Hand reading - can you offer any insight into how to adjust for hand ranges within a match - what factors change an opponent's range and how?

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Your estimate of your opponent's range should be based on how loose/tight they are and how aggressive/passive they are normally in comparison with the line they have taken in the hand. Your estimate of their hand range should give you rough ideas of:

a) how often your hand will win with a showdown
b) how likely you are to bet them out, as well as how much would be needed to do so
c) how likely they are to bet YOU out on later streets
d) how much they will pay you off if you end up ahead by the river

Coming up with exact numbers in each scenario is borderline impossible because there are so many factors ranging beyond their hand their hand range such as metagame and psychology. However, the more experience you have in dealing with similar situations the better your assessment will be.

The best ways to improve your hand reading are actively posting on these forums and playing a lot of games. Having friends who are actually decent at poker could help tremendously. None of my real life friends have been able to succeed long-term in poker, but there are plenty of people on these forums to chat with on AIM and share bad beats and hand histories with. The experiences of actual hands will force a lot of the information into your brain, and having friends who play regularly can help you develop different perspectives that you may not have considered.