A couple of days ago I decided that every other action besides a fold preflop deserves at least like 3 seconds to review the situation at hand. I have found myself sometimes making rather weird plays I would not have made had I spent a quick thought on it. So thinking about every hand a couple of seconds should certainly help avoid that.

Another great poker forum discussion for those who might be challenged with early and middle stage poker tournament strategy. Here Coop and Phaedrus exchange some interesting thoughts about playing tight early, and then opening up your game.  I still need a heck of a lot more experience in the middle and late phases of MTTs but I also need to work on my postflop-play. As I am certainly looking for some advice as well you should feel free to comment on or criticize anything I post here.

I had a nice hand lately where someone limped and a tight guy isolated to 4x. I was on the button with QQ. As this was early I decided to play them cautiously and just called the raise. Flop was rainbow with low cards. He bet out half the pot and I called. Turn was another lowcard. He bet out and I called. River another low card. Check-check and my QQ loses to his AA. My 3k starting stack went only down to 2k and I was pretty satisfied and decided to play QQ more often this cautiously early in a tournament.

A big stack early doesn't necessarily turn into a big stack in the middle or late stages so there's not a much bigger reward to following a higher risk approach early on. I think the goal should be to reach the middle-late stages pretty often and to then really open up the game to build a stack to win the tournament. That being said: I still don't think one should stay away from gambles early if one has a clear and significant edge with poker odds. Like if I "know" someone has AK I will call with QQ.

I have obv more things to discuss but right now I will end this. I am playing one tournament at the moment, a $22 buy-in with 108 players and 18 places paid. I have only one goal: win the poker tournament. I will keep you posted and might add some key or bustout hands.

Now I absolutely agree with your comment about not taking big gambles early, but to make it to the middle / late stages and win it from there.

I played a $22 deep stack MTT last night with 108 starters. I finished 20th ITM. In the early stages I folded a low set to an all-in shove on the river. The river brought the flush scare card. I had pot bet the turn. I was thinking that villain probably did not call the turn with ONLY a flush draw, but he might have had a combo draw. Anyway, I checked the River out of position and villain shoves about 120BBs I insta fold. Someone else in the hand who folded on the turn said "I folded Qh9sh on the turn (which would have been the 2nd nut flush). I said "so you should have, you didn't have odds to call". Villain who shoved said "I didn't have the flush either, I just knew you thought I did". I said "well played".

However despite my read being reasonably accurate that villain did not have the flush, I don't think folding a set on the river was a mistake. I managed to get a pretty big stack by the middle stages anyway, despite being consistently short(ish) for quite a long time.

I got sucked out on by a short stack re-shoving my AK with A8 with the blinds much higher. A few hands later I made my very very big mistake. That same short stack shoved and I called with AJs. He flipped over AQo and doubled through me again. After that I was the short stack and in fact did pretty well to make the money at all.

The point is that the big decisions and the critical results occur late in the tournament, not early.