Push, push or pussy?

So I feel like I'm playing pretty well, and my results are okay, and I know I think much better about poker than I did a year ago, say. (I cringed with embarrassment when reading an old thread in which I argued fiercely for a play I wouldn't go near today.)

But I'm not feeling confident. The problem is, I feel I'm playing the bubble all wrong. When I'm shortstacked, I'm pretty aggressive. Probably not as aggressive as I should be, but still putting in my chips fairly often. However, when I have a bigger stack, a/ I'm not choosing my spots well and b/ I don't feel like I'm aggressive enough.*

These seem like contradictions but I think they are both true. The first is truer when I have 10-15 BB; the second truer when I have bigger stacks than that. Can that be right though?

STTs are not the same now as they were before UIGEA. The tight early, get aggro later strategy still works, but now there seem to be slightly more players with something approaching a clue. Well, not so much, but they are clueless in ways that it's harder for me to pick up if I'm not paying attention. Here's an example. I am holding K6 in the big blind and some guy much shorter than me pushes. I am being offered a bit shy of 2 to 1 to call, so I call, obv. This is routine and folding here is rubbish. I catch a king and bust the guy. He had ace-rag. He starts berating me in chat -- in German, to make it worse -- about how I'm such a donkey calling with K6. Unfortunately, his avatar had disappeared so I couldn't make a note about this, because this is a guy I want to push into with ATC on the bubble, he'll be calling so tight. But I only realise he's this clueless after the play. In case anyone reading this -- if anyone reads this -- doesn't get why I think the guy's clueless, it's because he clearly has no concept of pot odds, and/or no ability to realise that a shortstacked pusher is not going to be better than 2 to 1 to beat K6, and/or no ability if he does get that to understand that I can bear the risk because I am still chipleader or close to it even if he wins. All he sees is that I called with a weak hand.

But that's the thing. A lot of these guys are completely level one. They only look at their own hands. On the bubble, they do not understand that calling an allin from a guy who covers or nearly covers you is a disaster and that they should fold *everything*. They see KJ and think, that's a big hand, I call. When I'm pushing with AK, that's okay (until they flop a J), but when I'm pushing with T7o, it's not so good.

The players being a bit better means that they are not always willing to stack off too lightly. Yes, they'll call pushes with top pair early, and any pair late, and many think that a bare flush draw is worth risking all your chips on, but they select their hands quite carefully, and tend not to go too far with weaker draws and small pairs. The default player on PokerRoom is not a clueless donkey who will play any two, although they do exist. He plays reasonably tight (I don't have stats on PR but I'd guess the average is about 25/5, something like that, tightening up on the bubble), cannot resist slowplaying a decent hand (turnraiseaholics, every last man of them), often willing to bluff quite transparently (it really hurts to have to fold to minbets on flops that you feel definitely didn't hit your rival, but you have to, because a/ sometimes you get it wrong and throw away your whole tourney to some guy who called PF with K4 and will call a push with bottom pair and b/ sometimes they'll call with overs and you're fucked). Some will call a lot with any pair, so you can't bluff them, regardless how many chips you throw at them (because they are only looking at the hand they hold, not their position in the tourney/stack size/anything else that you or I might think about), and others will pride themselves on big laydowns on scary boards. You need to have played them to figure out which of those they are! The latter tend to think like this: I would call with a pair or decent draw on that flop; the board paired/draw came in... so he must have it when he bets. Which would be fine if I *never* floated you with crap draws and the intention to steal it from you down the track. There are other types: LAGtards who can do damage with a bigger stack, ultrapassive players who will not bet the nuts, let alone anything short of it, rocks who make it to the bubble often but are too tight to win much, and a few players who clearly know the score.

Anyway, the point is that when shorter I need to take more care thinking about what range they are calling with, and I definitely need to stop assuming they will be able to figure out that they're going to make the money if they simply fold their QJo to my push and let the shortstack get busted. But I need to be more aggro with a big stack and highish blinds because the extra chips increase your cushion when you *do* get called and lose, and if you push often enough, you can get enough chips that others are simply scared of tangling with you. The benefits are clear: they walk your blind more; they give up on the flop more; they consider you already in the money and don't think it's worth trying to knock you out. This last is, I think, why the two ideas are not contradictory. They'll call me when I have 12BB and they have 13BB because they knock me out when they win. When I have 25BB, they are the only guy whose tourney is at risk, so they have to tighten up a bit.

Before I started thinking much about STTs, I was pretty good on the bubble, but probably only a slightly more aggro version of the rocks, although I played more loosely early than I do now. I just pushed when I felt it was a good spot, and I was often right. Now I might be overthinking it without doing the legwork. So what I need is push/fold tables to give me the basic idea, while I do the hard work of Wizzing hands and looking at charts to work out what exactly is +$EV and what isn't. There are some in Collin Moshman's book, but I really doubt they're as good for the PokerRoom game of now as they were for the Party game of five years ago.

*I mustn't be too hard on myself, because I've had quite a streak of losing allins with my money in good. It's going to feel like a mistake when that happens, even if your play was okay.