Did theory kill my game or did I just have beginners luck?

[pothead]

First of all....Hi

I been lurking a bit it this excellent forum and finally decided to sign up.

I very new to poker and just started playing online a few months ago.
I started very carefully with reading some articles and playing freeroll tournaments and playmoney ring games.
Usually I placed quite ok in the tourneys and after winning $4 in a freeroll i used that to play microlimit ringgames and low stakes tournaments until I had a bankroll of $50.
Since things was going so well I got greedy and decided to up the stakes and entered a $10 R&A tournament.
I was extremly lucky and had a humongus stack almost 1/5 of the total chips at one stage with about 170 players left.
That did make me tilt though and I got way to frisky with my betting and had some really awful bad beats, so when I got to the final table my stack was close to average.
In the end I ended up 8th collecting $480 which got me a small bankroll and further increased my motivation to play and wanting to learn more and get really good at the game.

After reading more it seemed to me like my VP$IP was to high compared to what is recommended and I started to be more careful with what hands I entered the pot.
But the more theory i have been reading the worse my winnings seem to get.

I manage to very slowly build up my bankroll at microlimit LHE, but in tourneys and NL ringgames I quickly loose it again, although thats where I seemed most sucessful when I just started out.

The other day I entered a limit SnG at PP just to try it out.
I was expecting the game to be a bit slower and tighter than in NL, but infact it was totally the opposite.
People was entering the pot on almost every hand and following thru to the river with nothing.
I never seen so many hands won in showdown on high card before.
The idea of being conservative in the early stages and let the others battle it out unless I got a decent starting hand prooved to be useless.
I did two of them and finished 7th and 5th, both times pretty much blinded out.
Part of the problem was that the best hands during those two SnG was one 99 and one AQo, both returning nothing, so I guess you could say that bad luck was the main reason and not overly tight play.

Seeing how people was winning more with their crappy hands and extemly loose play I thought I will experiment a bit in a limit ring game to see how quickly I would win/loose.
So I started entering the pot with a lot of crap, but also got more good cards than usual and hit the flop a lot.
To me it seemed like playing like I did when I was a total beginner also gave me the beginners luck back [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
In three hours i did $25 on 0.15/0.30...something that never happened when trying to play according to what I understand should be good starting hands and trying to calculate pot odds properly.

I'm well aware of that with the little sample size I have in my experiments it's hardly conclusive in any way.
I'm sure was on a lucky roll, both when going from $4 won in a freeroll to $480 and when getting almost 100BB/hr.

But still I can't help to have the feeling that I doing something wrong when trying to play well according to what I read should be good poker.
Maybe I just haven't got the theory right and actually play better just going by feeling until I do get it.
Maybe most of the advice goes out the window when playing at really small stakes on PP.
Sometimes I even feel like when I play crazy and put my trust in the cards instead of being conservative and sceptic as to if they will hold up, fortune give me credit for that trust [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I'm a beginner and will keep experimenting until I find a style of play that is winning.
But so much of what I read on the subject seem to contradict what I experience.
And every now and then you read comments like for example Antonio Esfandiari:
[ QUOTE ]

I play A LOT of hands. Sometimes I play every hand. People often think I am nuts. I use that image to get action when I get a hand. If a squeezer (tightass) who has been sitting there for two hours and hasn’t played a pot makes a huge bet, is anyone in their right mind going to call them? I hope not! Whereas the guy who has been in the last 10 pots betting and raising will get a little more action than the squeezer.

[/ QUOTE ]

So to finish it with some kind of question:
Am I simply not yet good in applying sound advice, or should I disregard what most authorities on the subject say and just go with the advice that seems to coincide with my personal experience of the game?
Or am I just a fool letting breif experiments swing my judgement?

I'm sure there is not one answer and I will still have to see what advice fits me....but I feel a bit confused and any discussion on the subject would be much appreciated.