Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Pushing
Pushing I am actually a pretty big fan of having a short stack because it is tough to make a huge mistake if are not too tight. Ironically, folding too many hands will give you much worse results than pushing often because the blinds and antes will quickly eat away your stack. Suppose you have a 10BB stack and are on the button with 9-7. If everyone folds to you, this should be an easy push. If you decide to fold for an entire orbit until your next big blind though, your 10BB stack, which would have still been 10BBs if you had pushed and taken the blinds, will diminish to around 7BBs, assuming there antes in play. Speaking of antes, for the rest of this section, I will assume antes are in play. Just waiting one orbit is enough to take away a lot of your fold equity and require you to double up just to get back to where you were one quick orbit ago. You must be very willing to push any time your opponents fold to you, especially in late position when the blinds are tight.
One added benefit of pushing with a wide range of hands
One added benefit of pushing with a wide range of hands is that it creates variance. Earlier in the tournament, when stacks were large, you wanted to keep variance fairly low by pot-controlling with your weaker made hands, but now you want variance, especially if you are in a profitable situation every time. If you can get hold of 50BBs while everyone else has only 10BBs, you will be in great shape to win the tournament, which is your ultimate goal.