Age Old question about early tourney strategy

[oaktoon]

Play fast(and/or trap)early to build a stack? Play tight to get in position to get cards/lucky at end? Gavin smith vs. TJ Cloutier, in other words.

I play in a weekly $60 buy-in live game. 70-80 players. Pretty good talent. it's Madison, WI, so we have some of the Hellmuth/UB crowd. (one of our guys finished 3rd in the UB Aruba tournament recently) 1800 starting chips. Blinds are 16 minutes-- basically after two hours, there are usually three-four tables left and it's an all-in fest. Last night I made final two tables-- blinds at 500-1000-- and not more than 2 or 3 players had 10,000+ chips with most of us under 5000. I pushed with A2 just before the blinds swallowed me-- 6 other players, one had AA. So it goes.

So the question is: do you take real risk in order to become one of those 10,000+ chip people who can withstand a beat and still play on at the end? Or do you simply do what is necessary (which i can usually do) to get to end game and then hope you catch at the right time and are smart/judicious about when to push and when to call someone else who has pushed, since most are in short stack land then?