looking for an honest answer

i made a living at horse and sports handicapping for a number of years--made enough, in fact, to sit out on my porch for 10 yrs without working. lately i've been trying my hand at poker, and breaking even, basically. what has me puzzled is the claims of certain posts/threads i read here, that seem just, well, to stretch the bounds of plausibility.

there are a number of statistical hypocrisies i encountered in horse racing bulletin boards, forums, and websites i used to frequent. people would insinuate win percentages that were, frankly, impossible, and cite ROI's completely outlandish; and furthermore, villify any scepticism about their claims as symptoms of a irrational twist of mind. now, i wonder about some of material i see here. as a for instance, the thread "why you guys aren't crushing the micro-limits" has stirred some of the same "irrational scepticism" in me, as it implies that the origins of our poor results lie mostly in our "psychologies", and has little to do with the cards we hold. there were a lot of yea-saying anecdotes appended throughout this thread, swearing that by pushing the envelope of caution, the results were uniformly winning on a large scale, that the wsop was next on the agenda, and hossanah, there's a mecca for the poker player, and i done found it.

maybe this is true. but given that eighty percent of the hands one receives are unplayable; that of the remaining twenty per cent less than half of those get to the showdown; and of THOSE only fifty percent have positive outcomes--how is it possible, i wonder, to overcome the unrelenting imposts of rake and blind?

remember, we all get the same cards. we all pretty much play the same strategies. and we all pretty much suffer the same bad beats. sure, it's possible to discuss our hands, and lay them out, and comment upon them. but there are so many degrees of freedom involved in a hand of poker, that it is, i think, impossible to derive statistically sound conclusions about the play of ANY hand by looking at it extracted from the tens of thousands like it one must play to adduce some plausible conclusion about its REAL nature.

it took me something shy a week to make around a hundred dollars playing .5/1 at party poker. it took five hands--FIVE!--hands to have that profit lost to people playing 8/3o against my AA, KK, AKs, QQ, and AA again. but the recommendations all insist aggression, aggression, aggression. and if you think about this approach to the game, aggression, since it is coupled with incomplete information, MUST always run afoul of significant losses. one is committing large wagers, relatively, to events that have not just one participant but several, each of whom is motivated by standards having little to do with "the poker truths"...and who continue to play without the least regard for the money they will lose(sic) taking on my kings and aces...except that it is invariably the largest pots one loses, and loses many more times than one wins, to just those 8/2o wielding idiots.

so you get the following algorithm: you play your premium hands; you LOSE your premium hands in the largest pots; there's a levy against your wins, called a rake; and you get the blinds as the most expensive of the imposts.

now, that algorithm may or may not produce a profit over the long term. but as to running out and crushing the microlimits, well, let's just say, i have my doubts.

so my question is: are YOU winning? are YOU winning by crushing the microlimits? is there an edge in your play, significant enough, to warrant committing any sum of money in wager?