[ChickenGeorge]

After quite a long time I looked again at SSHE starting hand recommendations (the tight version, 3-5 players to the flop). I see some spots where I might loosen up and add a few more hands, but I have some questions/doubts too.

I play at 0,5/1 where most opponents are not braindead anymore. If there are 3-5 of them to the flop on average that is already a loose game (at least where I play). There are also a lot of TAGS with stats like 15-18%/7-10%/2+ so I really shouldn't add too many hands (like Bona said). There's no point in adding extra hands just to make the stats "look good" so an aim for something like 17/10 would be a good start I think.

So about SSHE recommendations:

In EP I play mostly the same, except that I fold 77, especially UTG, because many times I will just find myself headsup or 3.handed on the flop with a mediocore hand OOP. It would be different in looser games though. In MP SSHE recommends playing any pocket pair (in unraised pot) and raise only with 99 or higher. But that also means open limping from MP2 or MP3, which is a bad idea (it's the same as open limping in 6max). The same is with hands like KJ, AT, A9s. And as for the LP it's often all about battles for the blinds, but SSHE doesn't say anything about open-raisng (=stealing) with hands like A5, K8, Q9s etc. That's because it's not meant for the tougher games of course.

Fine, someone will say, read HPFAP then. I did (not just once) and AFAIK following those recommendations results in VP$IP at around 16% (read somewhere, it could be wrong).

Based on all this I guess I need to steal blinds from MP more (as bennyhana suggested) and probably do some more iso-raising too.

Thanks anyway for your answers so far, any additional comments are welcome of course - especially if you don't agree with something I wrote.