Opponents' range of hands

[JordanIB]

After finishing SSH and beginning to apply some of the concepts to my .5/1, I often find myself trying to narrow down the opponents' possible range of hands in order to better dictate my play. However, I also often find that I am completely lost and clueless when trying to do this.

What combination of factors should one use when trying to narrow this down? The only guildline I started thinking about last night was for pre-flop raisers. Looking at their PFR%, (let's say it's 10%), I'll say to myself "Ok...so there's about 17 hands he's raising with here" and then modify that based on position and other factors, and go from there. For a 4% PFR%, I start to key in on 6 or 7 hands. I find this to just be an easy way for me to equate a PFR% to a range of hands.

But outside of this isolated case (PFR for which I have decent stats), I find it very hard to try to start reading opponents, and I fall into a "Well...it's .5/1 Party, he could have anything" type of mentality and declare it nearly impossible to narrow down a range of hands (especially after seeing some of the stuff that goes to a SD). I wonder if that sometimes leads to a tendency to just play my hand without enough consideration of what the opponent may be holding, and what that means for what actions I should take (kind of like the sports cliche of "We need to play our game and not worry about the opponent"). And I know this can't be good...

Any thoughts for how to begin getting comfortable in reading hands, or at least pegging a range of hands that you're going up against? (Which I would think would be fairly important, as it affects your calculation of outs and odds). After playing poker for the last 4 years, I'm finally deciding to try and get serious and methodical about my play, but this is one area that I know haunts me.

Thanks.