Finally a winning player after 4 years of TAGFish ABC play. Leveled a few times at 30X buy in roll management.

A long time student of:

Position
Post flop play
C-Betting at the right times
Semi-Bluffing at the right times
Value betting
Reading opponents predictable betting patterns
Reading opponents stats and adjusting
Adjusting to table

Need to work on those still and plenty of other concepts but:

Stats are 22/5. I play this way for a low risk way to see a flop. I'm a risk manager in "real life" (really) and you can probably tell from the 30X buy in (self-imposed) requirement.

I read Fee's guide recently and it seems to suggest raising more - looks more like 20/15 or even higher. Could this be a step to higher win rates for me?

lol yes raise way more in position. the way you are playing now your value range of raising pf isn't getting paid off nearly enough as it should because its so tight.

by never raising pre flop (well 5% of the time) you never know where you stand, and when you do raise, good players can play completely correct against you.

so yes, raise. if you can't afford the swings play lower and you'll still make more money if you are a winning player

Thanks, and yes, my initial losing curve was sloooow, followed by a real slooooow curve toward break-even, and even still, my large winning sample is VERY shallow.

Been playing 20/17 this evening and I see a much more jagged line, but after 1000 hands, real deviation is not much different.

BB/100 is 2.60, but obviously across only a tiny sample. I'm not uncomfortable playing this way - I'm fairly confident post-flop. I used to raise more, but even in studying the game somehow the need to extract more on strong hands in position by starting with bigger pots got away from me. Not to mention making it harder on myself post-flop as per reads.

I feel ridiculous.

You haven't realized that the two most important concepts to most forms of poker are position and aggression? Raise that **** up!!

the advantages of raising instead of limping/coldcalling preflop are
a) you have fold equity preflop
b) you have fold equity on many flops when you don't hit
c) you have fold equity on some turns with a 2nd barrel if your cbet gets called
d) you get more value from your hands when you hit (for instance if you flop a set and donk into an unraised pot, it looks much stronger since you haven't raised preflop and you)
e) if you openraise only 5% of hands, your hand is so well defined that you don't get much value of your monsters and good players can outplay you postflop on non-AK boards