Strategies playing early in tournaments?

[fo0od]

I'd like to know what's the best way of play early in tournaments. I use to play loose/agressive before (with some success, best record was 3rd on a field of about 4000. playing about 20-25%), but over time i've learned how precious every chip i have, and thus have tightened up considerably (playing about 15%-20%). I've made the money quite often with my tight/aggressive playstyle, though never succeeded in entering final table yet.

I find that this tight/aggressive playstyle puts me at a disadvantage, with my table image, i find it difficult to win large pots. I slowly build my chips through stealing blinds in position, and c-betting in position. This usually ends up with people folding and thus my small win. Now as blinds increase the relative size of my stack isnt big enough to play aggressive and steal pots. Im forced to play very tight, and usually end up in 50-50 showdowns. While neccessary, i hate to enter a 50-50 against a larger stack, as that would spell the end for me.

So I'm curious to know, am i playing right? Is playing tight the way to go?

[only_bridge]

Interestingly enough there are several routes to sucess.
Some really good players like playing LAG early on, whilst others prefer playing TAG and taking advantage of their opponents misstakes, without risking too much.

[Kijjo]

I'm taggy by nature and in practice, but it does bring you into the situation you expressed unless you have enough good hands to get some play going. The thing that limits you as well is since people are switching tables, your image might only last for an orbit or two and then you have little image to work with again, so it's not like you can steal, steal, steal at any point to make up for the small pot factor.
When the cards are not helping and you find yourself getting low, you have to be well prepared to go push/fold at the right time and make sure you're forcing your opponents to make tough decisions with that, hoping they screw up enough and your hands hold up.

[Arjonius]

What level of tournament are you talking about? At low levels, there's nothing wrong with TAG as a starting approach, but you want to look at how the table as a whole as well as your individual opponents are playing. Then, while staying within your personal comfort zone, you can ramp your aggression up or down to try to take advantage.

And yes, to the extent that your opponents actually form table images, you can tend toward smaller pots. If you think this hurts your stack too much too often, you can try working some re-steals into your repertoire.

LAG can work too. One pitfall is that the starting stacks and structure can mean you have limited wiggle room in terms of being able to lose chips without changing up your game.

[Sprayed]

Tight is the way to go early but you also want to see flops with scs and pps when IP against bad players. Chip accumulation early is important in large field MTTs, but mid game play might be even more important for accumilating chips.

[drmcboy]

Is playing tight the way to go?

yes until you figure out why it isn't.