from my experience as a tournament big stack, you have to identify how long your stack is going to big considered big. for example, if you have 10x starting chips in a tourney with over 1000 players in it, you'll have a mid size stack by the time you reach the money, but by no means does that guarantee you a big cash, or final table. but, if you have 10x starting stack in a tournament with around 200 players to start, then you are in good shape to make a big score. your intentions should be to win it, not pick up a big stack and wait for things to flatten out, and at the same time you don't want to play over aggressively, but it doesn't hurt to try to pick up a few pots here and there. you just have to remember that it is okay to shut down after you've been called on the flop "To me, the benefit of being large stacked is that you can pick off short stacks by calling them with a greater range of hands. They are likely to be pushing with a wider range, so you even stand a good chance still of being ahead when the cards are flipped. And if you lose, you aren't crippled. I am talking about a situation where you have 20K and are looking at picking off opponents in the 3K range." This isn't the kind of thing I'd want to be doing. I don't want to get into the long explanation here, but calling off a big stack is definitely one of the last things you want to be doing 3K out of 20K is bigger than it seems. Especially when the 3K player could be really tight and you are calling KJ against AK. Hope my post helps, I've been in these situations with some very experienced players and I've found this to work.