I recently deposited on Ignition and started playing 5nl Zone. For the first 10 or 20k hands I thought I was just obliterating it, won over 20BI with little adversity and saw some absolutely ridiculous stuff that brought me back to the 2000s era. Lots of calling down with low pairs, and the highlight of the run, a guy calling me off in a ~500bb pot with a 3-high flush on a paired board. I knew I was running pretty good, but with the level of play I was seeing I figured I'd probably continue to crush it pretty easily.

I was wrong. I played 15k more hands and they came out breakeven. There's no doubt I've been running monstrously bad, but it's made me realize that I need to learn more about the game I'm playing in, because I've also been seeing a lot less ridiculous plays. There's no way the game rocked up in a few weeks since I started, so I realize I must just be running into the top of peoples' ranges way too often, but I also now just feel uncomfortable in hands because I don't know what to expect.

I've looked around though and have not found very much discussion at all about Zone, which I find strange because as the only truly anonymous poker game out there, I would think people would find it more interesting to talk about. So I've come here looking for answers.

Mostly I'm just looking for any resources out there anyone knows about that discusses Zone poker strategy and concepts. As I said, I'm currently struggling with trying to determine where I'm at in a a lot of hands readless. I'm often assigning people fairly tight ranges since the game plays very tight preflop with generally less than 30% average VPIP in the pool (according to the client), but then I'll get burned by a fish who had 85o. I'll overfold to 2 or more streets of heavy aggression assuming 2 pair or better, but then occasionally I'll look them up with a strong hand and see that they had nothing. I'll get overbet donked into on a blank river and fold most of my range, but then call and find that sometimes they were just overbetting with air.

I realize that some of this must just be the challenges of playing poker readless, but I would really like to read up on some other peoples' thoughts and things that they've noticed about the game. For example, one of the things that I've definitely established for myself is that when you raise pre and get called and then the guy snap clicks pot on the flop, you should just get out of the way almost always because he's very strong and will be donk bombing the turn 99% of the time as well. I've also seen that full-stacked people basically never 4bet pre unless it's aces. People also seem to be generally aware of blind vs blind play somehow, even though other positional dynamics (such as blind vs BTN) seem to escape them. Whenever I get into a pot in the blinds, my default assumption has been that the guy has a basic understanding of the situation and will call and/or raise a lot lighter than I would expect in any other situation. That's the type of thing I'd love to read about but have been able to find very little of.