[Harv72b]

Bet/folding the turn in Hand 1 is bad. Actually, given the board I like the check/call to showdown line.

There's a fairly recent thread in Small Stakes about when to employ the "free showdown" raise in LHE, and particularly about when to employ it even when we have to call a 3bet. Hand 2 looks like the perfect example of that concept.

In answer to the broader question, LHE is a much higher variance game than NL. This is counter-intuitive to many people, because we all tend to focus too much on the short-term...in a single hand, or even session, NL can be & often is highly volatile. But over the longer run, the effects of LHE (namely often not being able to price opponents out of the pot & just as often being forced to chase draws of your own) conspire to create a very high variance game. Many, many great players on these forums have suffered through downswings that lasted into the months, 30k hands or more. So what I'm saying is not to get too discouraged over what you admit is a small sample size--keep playing solid poker & you'll start seeing profits. These hands both show that you've got the basic concepts of this game down, and at these stakes that, and maybe a little table selection, are all you really need to win.