Feel free to invite me to a strategic 1v1 too

When I was a newer player such as yourself, I made sure to watch the top player's games to learn their style a bit. You need to be sure to take risks and hope they pay off, and focus a lot on every turn. Also something I have noticed about Heyheuhei, he was becoming very predictable and so he changed his style, he is also very predictable now in my opinion, if you watch or play a few games against him.

I would just try to beat the ones slightly above your level and when playing someone who is probably out of your league experiment a bit and watch history to see what they did.
(don't just take the loss or anything, there's also luck in the game and no player no matter how good can beat you 100% or close of the time)

http://warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=3964640

GMontag triple picks Scandanavia which ended up working for him, especially since I made many small mistakes in the game. This was about 4 months ago I think, I was already a top 10 ladder player at that time, but he took me completely by surprise. Sometimes it's best just to pick an option that might not be the best but will baffle your opponent.