$50 Tourney again tonight...

In the past week, I've been swamped by work so I only played the $20 NLHE game on Friday.  I won half a buy-in but it was just basic play -- nothing special.  

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I've got the $50 tournament again tonight.  I feel like I should write something, just because it is a decent amount of money involved and I promised myself that I would collect my thoughts before the big games on the blog.

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I do have a few notes from the last $50 tourney...  Overall, I'd say the tourney played a lot more aggressively than I expected; it seems like many players tighten up in a tournament, but there were a number of players playing it more like a cash game.  I have a few hands that bothered me -- I'll post them in the next few days.

Early on, I played it a little too much like a cash game and did not threaten stacks as much as I could have.  I played quite a few pots (good), limping in most of the time (not as good), and didn't raise in a number of spots where raising would probably be good.

At one point there was a hand that went UTG limp, I limped with 77, another limp, then a raise 5x with 14x behind (about half my stack) from a short-stacked small blind who had been pretty active.  I read him for weak, thinking I might get a fold, but in hindsight, especially when it was still in the rebuy period, he would be calling in that spot a lot.  He ended up having something like QT and winning, but I don't think I was getting enough of an overlay to make that play profitable considering it would hurt my stack quite a bit if I lost.

Other than that, I did a lot of folding, pushed my good hands once the blinds got pretty big, and didn't play a lot of pots.  Not sure if that is the right thing to do, but I eventually ran AJ into JJ and was out.  I still believe a very good strategy for these kinds of SnGs is to play pretty tight until it gets to the money bubble and then start stealing at every opportunity.  That's what I'll do tonight, with the added intention of mixing it up a bit more early on during the rebuy period when stacks are decent size.  I have a few people in mind that I can three-bet with almost any two cards profitably because they probably won't call a raise with anything but QQ+, AK...

Edit: let me add a list of goals:

1. Tight early
2. A few spots of out of the ordinary aggression... like pushing on a bunch of limpers out of the blind (if I have 10-15x BB), three-betting tight players early.
3. LAG near money bubble