Question on hand frequencies and practice software...

[Arcturus]

Hey everyone! This is my first post at this great website.

I started playing poker at live casinos this past year and have had pretty good success at the lower-end tables. However, I know that there is much improvement to be made in my game. I picked up SSH and found it to be a great source of information. I'm looking to start playing online, but I am trying to practice up the techniques I have been reading about before "jumping into the deep end". The only software that I have access to currently is Hoyle Casino. Now, I KNOW this software is not the best to use, but like I said before, I am just practicing my preflop and postflop techniques.

What I am looking for is either a website or a possible poker simulator that I could practice on until I'm ready to play online. I have read about Wilson Turbo, but it seems rather expensive to just run out and buy it. Any good suggestions out there?

The second question I have deals with hand frequencies. According to SSH, you should only play certain hands preflop (which I agree with!) I calculated that out of the 1326 possible combinations of preflop hands that you can get, 374 (or 28.2%) of those should be considered using SSH guidelines. Now, some of those hands won't be played from early position or against very tight players. So, that percentage will naturally decrease. During my practice play, it seems like I have been only getting 1 "playable" hand per 10 deals. Even with those hands, I end up folding most of them due to multiple raises after the flop and terrible flop cards. Like I mentioned before, this is using Hoyle software, but I wanted to know if this sounds "normal" to those of you playing online or not? After reading some of the other posts on this website, I feel that I should be getting more cards to play.

Thanks for your time and good luck to all of you!