Just a short post that hopefully someone will find helpful for where they are atm.

Hopefully most of you are familiar with the concept of thinking levels. To recap:

lvl 0: What are my cards?
lvl 1: What do I think his cards are?
lvl 2: What do I think, he thinks my cards are?
Lvl 3+: Just gets more confusing, but you get the picture.

For beginners, you mostly start with lvl 0, hopefully move to lvl 1 fairly quickly, and lvl 2 is probably all you need for a fair while. Short sidenote, but going too deep is a mistake if your opponent isnt. "What do I think, he thinks I think he has and therefore what would that bet of his mean he wants me to think?" is pretty meaningless when your opponent is thinking "Sweet, I have a pair".

I've come to the conclusion most new players go through another phase, which I'm calling 1a (because I can). This is where they think they're using level 1 thinking, but in fact they're thinking "what hands could he have that beat me?". Typically this is epitomized by asking them what range they give villian in a HH they post, and they answer with all the possible hole cards that beat them, and none that dont.

Hopefully you can see why you need to move beyond that as quickly as possible. If not you'll find yourself folding a lot of hands postflop, and wondering how your opponents get so lucky all the time. You need to think of a realistic range of hands that villian could be holding, compare the number of hands that beat you, to the number that you beat, throw in all other kinds of data such as pot size, pot odds, stack sizes, implied odds, and then come up with the best move based upon their whole range, not just the portion of their range that has you crushed.