Early stages of an MTT
Play very tight, our aim right now is too survive not to make any 'sick' plays and try to win the tournament. We are mainly going to be opening up from the SB - Hijack postitions unless we have a top 10% hand, and calling and open from the BB vs Sb-hijack with a hand that can flop well.
For example dont call from the BB with K9o vs an UTG raise.
Blind levels are small making the pots small so unless we have a big hand preflop and we flop well we are not trying to double up in these stages. Play it cool and just survive.
Mid stages
Now we can open up are range a little bit and play a few more hands opening up from mid positions more happily, we are will find our stack dropping below/ playing against players with -20bb frequently, again don't panic and make some stupid flip decision to try and chip up be patient and play the cards you get, we are not wanting to flip our way to the final table when we can make much more profitable plays without risking our stack with 77 vs AK 8x in a row we wan't to play as little variance poker as we can. We aso want to be taking advantage of stealing the blinds from the SB and Button with a decent range.
Know your push/fold strat at different stack depths knowing what you can call from the big blind -10bb vs a known fish.
Late stages
This is where your knowledge of push/fold for different bb's will help a lot as we will find ourselves below or vs below 10bb frequently. We will be pushing all in from the button and SB frequently to steal blinds but don't do this with any 2 cards, know your ranges and when to play them. This is still a patients game until the final 3-5 players at the FT but we have less time to be patient so will need to know when you can shove certain hands profitably when we are shorter stacked/ vs short stacks.
This is a very rough explanation of how your mindset 'should' be throughout the different stages of an MTT, obviously lots of variable factors come into play whether you're playing a turbo,hyper,bounty etc..