I've been playing $1/$3 poker in my local card room for about a year and a half now, and I couldn't get to a level where I was consistently winning. I've been applying all the Jonathan Little lessons I've learned, read all the Poker Theory books, the Sklansky books (even the one specifically for the low stakes) but I still lose to loose gamblers who call with ATC and win. So I've tried a new strategy...

Literally wait until I hit the effective nuts and bet full pot. I play hands like SC and wait until I get the straight or flush. These players aren't aggressive so they let me get there and they don't pay attention so they don't know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for a couple months now and have turned into a winning player??? Poker seems so easy now. Too easy... it's making me think, am I going about it the wrong way? Could I be winning more? I just get this feeling that this can't be all there is to it. What do you guys think about this? I can't be the first person to think this way, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm wrong here but like I said I'm now winning.

Sample size and winrate? If you haven't put in a decent amount of hours, it could easily just be all noise (both before and after your strategy change).

I mean, simply waiting until you smash the flop before shoveling in money is a decent part of how you win at LLSNL. Ditto for the opposite, in that (in general) you probably shouldn't be aiming to shovel in a lot of money postflop without a huge hand (there are exceptions of course). But you also have to make sure you're not paying too much preflop for the opportunity (and if you're playing SC / etc. from every position to raises on non-large stacks, you're probably are paying too much). And of course you also have to ask yourself if you're doing things that much differently than your opponents; if you aren't, you're just going to end up losing like they are.

GIdunno,postsomehands,getsomefeedback,imoG

I read a lot of Jonathan Little, and I like him, but at low stakes Ed Miller's books are what took me to winning.

It's really hard to go wrong if you follow his rules in The Course. In particular not to pay off big bets, and to relentlessly value bet calling stations. Sounds like you've worked out the latter.

And plus one to GGs comment on sample sizes.

GG once showed his winnings by year, and you could see even with his very conservative play over large amount of hours there was still pretty high variance year to year.