Ok so if you've been following, until now it's been primarily background info and what I expect to get out of this site. Now let's start making good on the goals I've laid out.

First off, I know some of you reading might not be 'hip' to the internet poker lingo that I'll often be using. I'd like to direct you to a couple links you can use as reference when I start spouting some acronyms you're unfamiliar with:

Common acronyms
Older acronyms

Ok onto the hands. I went through my Poker Tracker database of the hands I've played in the last couple weeks in order to figure out what I did good (or more likely) bad.

Here's an example of overplaying my hand out of position and making a river very poor river play that cost me 17.5BB. Sure I didn't lose my stack on this hand, but these types of leaks can really bring down a player's winrate. I basically misplayed every street.
Villain is a NL200 6max regular and plays a very similar style as me. His stats are 25/8.5 (VPIP/PFR) which are nearly identical to mine. Watch how I make a fool of myself in this medium pot.

I pick up A 4 in the CO. Villain is on the button. Effective stacks $175. Folds to me, I open limp in the CO. (first mistake, if I'm going to play this hand in this spot with no one else in front of me, I've got to come in for a raise.). CO raises to $7, SB folds, BB folds, I call $5. (should have probably just mucked here, but I've got a suited A, and Villain's button raising range is pretty wide in that spot. It's going to cost me about 3% of my stack to try to bust him)

Flop ($16) A 7 7

I check, he bets $8, I call.

My thinking here is that he's going to continuation bet nearly 100% in this spot, I've got TPNK and either way ahead or way behind.

Turn ($32) 8

I lead for $22, he calls.

Here I wanted to deny his positional advantage by leading and not allowing him to take a free card when behind. The 8 adds some more draws to the board, and his PF range contains lots of suited connector type cards. His call should have let me know that I was in trouble. This might be the only street I'm ok with my play on.

River ($74) 2

Total brick river. No draws got there. I'm still WA/WB. I decide to lead for $35. This is pretty bad. He's not calling a 2/3 pot bet on the turn with a draw, unless it's a big one like OESD + flush draw-- which in that case he's probably going to semi bluff raise me. My river bet here is a classic mistake in that all worse hands fold, and only better hands call. When he calls my turn stop-n-go, I should have realized he's got a made hand. If I really thought he was on a draw after calling the turn, then the correct river play when the draws missed is check/call, because some of the time he will bluff his busted draw, but he's obviously never calling my bet with those hands. Truly abysmal play on my part.

Needless to say, he calls my 1/2 pot river bet with AQ and scoops the pot.

Plugging these types of leaks is essential if I want to move up.