Growing pains

This has been getting on my nerves lately so I thought I'd ask here for opinions, as well as just to vent a little.

I haven't been playing very long but I'm already addicted to hold'em...it's not even really the chance to make money (although that's a nice added benefit), it's more the satisfaction of outhinking and outplaying my opponents that I enjoy. I just bought The Theory of Poker a couple days ago and am almost finished reading it through for the first time.

Now, here's my problem...common sense would dictate that in order to get better you need to play against tough competition so you can get that experience under your belt...but how in the hell do you get experience when your current financial situation won't allow you to play anything more than freerolls that are swarming with fish and people that don't give two shits about the finer nuances of play?

I'm learning how to calculate pot odds and implied odds, the art of the semi-bluff and the like, but what good is trying to put these things into practice when someone is going to chase you down to the river no matter what you do? What good is a check-raise when your opponents don't even know what that is, or what it implies about my hand strength, etc.?

I know that against weaker opponents/fish, playing ABC poker is a good way to beat them most of the time, but I don't want to have to just play ABC poker...I want to be able to employ different strategies and actually have to think about more than just "do I have my opponent beat here."

How can I expect my play to improve at all when the strategies I'm trying to employ are completely lost on my opponents and I can never count on them to think even once, let alone twice, about what I'm doing.

I'm guessing the only answer to this question is "save up some money to start a bankroll and play in some real money games." Unfortunately that's not in the cards (no pun intended) for me at the moment. Is there any other way to get experience against other serious players without having to throw down a bunch of money to play?

...or am I just screwed for the time being.

for the time being you're screwed.

if you wanna use the skills in ToP, keep playing those freerolls. the 90% that lose will suck, but the remaining 10% that wanna get into the money and everyone at the final table will be very good poker players, where your tactics will actually have an effect, instead of them just calling everything.

fish are easy to get money off of. they might take your entire stack once in a while from a bad beat, but you can take their stacks way more often. just don't try any advanced tactics on them. they don't understand nor care. they are here to gamble.

if you're decent, just by playing fish you can easily double your money every couple of hours....when you first start out. then your profits will go down, variance goes down too. then when you're ready, you can move up the limits.

I completely sympathize. I don't have an answer; have spent a couple weeks playing freerolls only and I have $5 to show for it. Which incidentally was gone about 10 minutes after I won it.

Do as many freerolls as you can. Sit out the first half hour -- no sense getting mentally tired when the primary factor is still just dumb luck. The quality of players involved climbs steadily, for the most part.

I kinda like practicing at single-table play-money tournaments. You can get a feel for the nutty crap that freerollers do without investing multiple hours.