Early tight is right
Hi
From my experience, you'd be better off playing very little hands early on.
Typically I think you want to keep away from troublesome hands the likes of small ball type hands like suited connectors - even though these are well playable at these blind levels since you are effectively deep stacked at this stage. Dominated type hands are killers. KQ, KJ, K10 etc since they slightly better hands like kq, look nice and are like a red rag to bull to a lot of players who will play them no matter what. And as for ax, those hands could bring tears to a glass eye. AJ is quite dodgy if you're out of position never mind the aces below those.
At these levels you're going to have a lot of people who believe they have to double up early to get ahead of the crowd. So people will be pushing with a wide range of hands. Two callers who push you all in could easily crush your premiums, aces or whatever else.
I think you're better off playing
cheap hands like pairs and hoping to trip, or premiums but be prepared to let go if the flop looks drawy and the going gets heavy. In some live tourneys I've played, I even know players that let the tourney run for 20 mins and play a cash game instead before they join the tourney because of their bad experiences. Although thats not something I'd personally do.
I'd recommend 1st just sitting back, see who the idiots are, see if they bust out, if not what position they have over you, and look more for opportunities where you can get some value as opposed to having a locked horns fight against an over zealous player trying out a few moves. Typically I'd look for
cheap flops if possible,
position preferred obviously. If you only have a pair or small value hand, try to get to the river as cheap as possible and not
bluff - simply because an idiot with bottom pair will not appreciate what you're attempting to do.
Infact a lot of players will not initially even watch what you are doing, period. And guess what, you'll not even know you are the idiot players and who are the decent players early on. As an example, I was in the big B in Vegas not so long ago and a guy in late position raised allin with a bluff of $300 on a 1/2 game on the river. He had Q high, missed his draw. A young lady utg called it after some thought and mucked. The guy was lucky because he threw his hards down and said ' Yeah, you got me' and they both landed facing up! I'm sure to he tried to muck them!!! But my point is this: who would ever
call an allin bet for that money with a hand that doesn't even beat Q high. Well there are people who'll do it. So basically bluffing these people will simply not work - unless like this guy you can find a caller with a hand less than a Q. (By the way, the very next hand, I lost a $200 pot next hand with someone who caught a 2 outer river; after I put him in on the turn - ho ho. Poker is ssssoooo unkind.)