Keyword Research Question

In your experience, if you can rank #1 for the phrase and exact match versions of a keyword, do your odds of ranking well (not necessarily #1, but on page one) improve? I've been able to rank #1 for all kinds of keywords with phrase and exact match, and some of them on page one for the broad match version. However, some of my more competitive keywords rank #1 for phrase and exact match, but don't seem to rank yet in the regular, broad match results.

Granted, it's only been about two days since the content was published, so I may be jumping the gun a bit here.

Google's search results also seem skewed across semantic layers, moreso than they usually are. For instance, I see that they think the words "about" and "interpretation of" mean the exact same thing, and they highlight those words in bold in their results as if it is a match to what I searched for. If this is going to be the case, would this render long-tail keywords less useful in the future if variations of those words mean the same thing?