[BoxTree]

[ QUOTE ]
For example, I rarely found it to be a wise choice to raise pre-flop in that game because the raise was highly unlikely to drive anybody out - I noted that if I was in late position and I raised, pretty much 90% of the time, those people who were already in would call the raise.

Furthermore, I noted that once in, most of the players were very likely to stay in until the river - they would stay in on 2nd or 3rd pair, chase straights and flushes no matter what.

As such, my typical play was to call a fairly large number of pre-flop hands, but to raise on almost none - usually I would only raise on pocket pairs - and then raise occasionally on AKs or AQs - but that was about it.

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You must raise hands like AKo preflop. You have tremenouds equity (value) preflop and it will be nearly impossible to make up those bets postflop, even with half the table going to the river.

And players who limp should be calling a preflop raise 100% of the time (unless there is a 3-bet).

It seems like you've read SSHE but have selectively chosen to ignore the fact that the book was written for loose games (7-9 players preflop). Sure, SSHE is incredibly applicable online (where you generally get 3-5 players preflop), but it is masterful at a truly loose game.

And if you're calling hands like 56s UTG or J9o ever, you're making mistakes. (You said that you're limping with a fairly large number of hands. I just want to make sure you're not adding hands that aren't in the loose games section of SSHE.)