Sorry I can't answer everyone yet, but thank you for your ideas and I read all the posts. After reading your advices, I took them to heart and got 5th in a 1200 seat tournament to win more money than I've won online so far combined. (Would have been higher than 5th, too, but I have a leak of
bluffing too much and doubled up a low stack who should have gotten blinded out soon.)
Spaceman, to answer you question, it's about prioritizing different things I've learned and figuring out which piece to use when, and once I learned this new thing it went to the top of my stack, when that's not really where it should be prioritized in a full skillset. It turned out that position takes priority over pot odds in the
freerolls I've been playing because a lot of times, my odds can be good so far in MP to call, but then a "donk" goes all in with what are probably bad cards, which I would have seen if I had been paying attention to position and played more of later positions than earlier instead of wasting buy-in and call money trying to see a flop OOP.
Important points that helped me:
1. Position is King. It is a bit hard to learn in donkathons because players don't act rationally; they're willing to call all in in any position with sometimes really bad cards. But those moves are not +EV long term, and you should not assume they are a good move even if they win sometimes.
2. I had an incomplete understanding of pot odds. If I have a ~25% chance of getting what I need postflop, I can't just call a with 3:1 bet and assume I'll get to the showdown to see my equity, because usually if my opponent has bet against me before he will again. What I'm trying to say is that my opponents will try to deny me from seeing my showdown equity with overbets. I don't know if I'm using terms correctly, but this was an important advance I made and part of the reason I had trouble when first trying to implement my understanding of pot odds.
3. "Value betting" is more valuable to my success than scaring someone off and avoiding a showdown, even though the latter feels more satisfying, like I'm top monkey and now I get all the bananas. Moving from the emotional satisfaction of winning a scare-fight with someone instead of getting paid off has helped a lot. (I used to be always scared of showdown because many times people had things I didn't even notice, like a flush.)
3. Cash games are a completely different animal and I'm terrible at them. I took some of my winnings to play the lowest limit cash game and lost a buyin twice two days in a row before realizing that I need to learn a lot more before wasting more money on that.
Hope this is clear even though I write a lot. Got a lot of thoughts running around after this.