Tight vs Loose Play
 

I am wondering if I could pick everyone’s brain. I have been thinking about the early stages of a MTT (say the first 3 levels) both online and live, in particular what makes someone a tight player vs. a loose player.

I understand some givens such as position and how the rest of the table is playing; plays a big part in ones hand selection. I am curious, however, with different lengths in blind levels and the smaller chip stacks in online play how much of a difference it make in your starting requirements/aggression level.

Does online play cause you to play tighter and wait for a big hand and then loosen up, or to play less strict hands and hope to get lucky.
I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts.

Re: Tight vs Loose Play
 

IMO Online MTT may seem to play a bit tighter because a player knows he won't have to wait another 5 min for another hand or wait 7 min for a dealer change. Also a lot of online players multi table(I know I do)so they may have a stronger hand on another table and may decide to throw that KQs UTG away instead of playing a pot. Me personaly I never try to "get lucky" I make plays according to the situation.

Re: Tight vs Loose Play
 

I have a lot of things I can say about this, but none of your questions are really answer-able without following them with and "except", "however", "but"...

meh, i can try to make a few generalized comments:

The length of blind levels shouldn't really affect your starting requirements too much. What is much more important, is your stack compared to the blinds. If you start with 1000 chips and 10/20 blinds, you should be opening pots a bit looser. If you start with 10,000 chips and the same 10/20 blinds, you'll want to be much tighter than the previous example in opening pots. However, in the 10k starting stack example, you can be more liberal with seeing flops in position (esp with good drawing hands such as 87s). So this is one of many exceptions of when you'll play looser with a deepstack.

Once the 10k starting stack tournament hits the 100/200 blind levels, your strategy should be very similar to how you started the 1000 tournament at 10/20 blinds (assuming most of your opponents still have a stack close to 10k).

Theoretically the length between blind increases shouldn't affect your strategy much, although a faster structure should lean towards loosening a bit compared to a slower structure.