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Notes -
More or less, yes. Good players try to exploit situations where they have a biased informational advantage. After learning the basics of poker, Poker 102 is learning about what's called "position play" (you can google it). A lot of professional level players pretty much follow the same first line strategy; be patient and wait for strong hands when you're in position, and then bet in a way that signal some but not crazy strength. This is sometimes referred to as "slow playing."
In poker, every action you take reveals some level of information. You can try to be coy and attempt to signal false information (i.e. bluffing) but that's hard to do well over the long term. People have tells and, moreover, eventually someone will call your bluff. Instead, you try to signal with some ambiguity, some noise, and then try to get the other player(s) in the hand to reveal too much true information. A good fold before having to bet a lot of money is just as smart a decision as calling when someone has preemptively revealed too much.
The difficult emerges when we consider scale. Professional poker players are just that - professionals. They will play poker 40+ hours per week, often exceeding 12, 14 hours in a single day. Nate Silver writes his annual guide to the world series of poker and remarks how, if you make it to the third (?) day, you should be prepared for up 20+ hours of being awake. This is where people crack. Sleep deprivation and cognitive impairment is real. Add on top of that that you need to start tracking betting habits and patterns in multiple other players and often the difference between winning and losing is just who can keep their shit together longer.
I'm oversimplifying - though not by much - to make the point. If you're interested, you should look up what changed in professional poker after Chris Moneymaker. Before, poker was still somewhat a cowboyish, colorful character world. Guys (and ladies) would play tight, but also gamble, and would have fun. Learning the game, at a deep level, was almost an apprenticeship situation. There wasn't a bunch of Game Theoretic Optimal betting guides online. After the explosion of online poker (of which Chris Monkeymaker was the poster boy), it's (de)volved to a bunch of turbo autists who crunch probability in realm time for 20+ hours. Board and people reading is still a thing, but the default, now, is to play so close to the numbers that mostly it's just a grind. The saving grace is that it's still a random deck of cards and bad beats happen. The joy of poker is that you can make all of the best possible decisions all of the time - and still lose.
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