Recently, I've been playing a lot of $2.20 and $3.30 buy-in Tournaments on PokerStars, and I've held myself pretty well. I've been making the final 150-250 players every time.

This is where the problem lies.

Durning early stages of the tournament, I tend to play pretty TAG, and really sit on my hands until I find something fairly strong.

Middle stages I adapt with a more loose style as I accumulate chips.

Late stage - I completely fall apart.

I have a hard time really playing poker at the stages of 500/1000 blinds when the average stacks are around 14-16k.

The All-In or Fold game really drives me to play REALLY conservatively, watching my stack dwindle with every hand I fold because I lack the confidence to call an early position raise with my K-Jo.

I know my post may seem a bit disorganized, but I think people may know where I'm coming from with this...

Any late stage tips?

You probably need to start opening up earlier.. taking more chances early on in the mtt to build a stack.

Don't let allin/fold game make you more conservative.. pay attention to who is shoving wider than normal and adjust your calling range.. conversely.. see who is tightening up and shove on them really wide.

What does this mean? How large was the starting field? Doesn't look like you're ITM, so I wouldn't say "I've held myself pretty well". Anyone can get this far just by playing tight. I'm not saying this to put you down, but I think it points to a possible weakness. You may be too tight.

Tightening up at this point is a mistake. If you're sitting on 15K, then your M is 10. You have to loosen up and play more aggressive. You're not in panic mode, but if you don't learn to up your aggression, you will be soon. This doesn't mean you should call with hands like KJo (though there are situations where you should). You need to look for good situations to steal and re-steal. Getting your share of the blinds is much more important now. When you do end up playing a hand you want hands that can win without improvement like ace high and pairs.

If you have a problem playing aggressive and can't raise with ATC if the situation is right, think about this: If you're not making it ITM now, you can't do worse.

Be the bettor, not the caller.

Basically St Bernardino explained it well..i had a similiar problem not long ago, i seemed to have no problem running deep into the field but i somehow always managed to donk the chips away. Then i watched some videos and read some stuff in here and realized that i was too tight and scared, you really need to get some aggression going in the later phases and steal the blinds/antes and resteal raises to maintain comfortable stack and you don't necessarily have to wait for AK to steal

You need to make aggressive moves with the 10-20BB stack.

When you are in the blinds, you need to identify players who are stealing a lot and take any decent hand and shove back over them. When you are in the SB folded to you, you need to raise a lot depending on the BB. And when you get a call and hit the flop in any way, you need to shove.

Again in the blinds, say you have a 20BB stack. Mid player limps, CO and button limp, SB completes. If you have an utter trash hand like 83off, consider a raise here to around 7BBs. If you get re-raised you need to give up. If you get a call, you might have to shove any flop that you even partially hit. However, unless these players are extremely loose, this play will work very often by taking down the pot pf. It does also depend on your image. However, I wouldn't do this with a nice drawing hand like J9s, 44, etc. Just see a flop and hope for hard hit. But with 83off in a multiway pot, most of the time you are not going to put in another chip so the hand is basically worthless, except for that steal raise.

Some hands are tough to play early in a tourney like TT, JJ, AQ, AJs. Later on, you need to attack with these hands. That means if you have some fold equity pf and something like 15BBs, you need to crush a pf raise with a shove (unless the raise comes from a nit).

Watch which players give up their blinds easily when you are on the button, in the CO and sometimes the hijack as long as button and CO are reasonably tight.

If the table is very active, I may consider open-limping AA and shoving at the first sign of action. It especially good if there is an aggressive big stack behind you who you can set your watch to his raises. However, if there are already some limpers in the pot, then you need to go for the pot right away.

Anyways, all of these types of plays are risky but that's what needs to be done to go deep in tourneys. Notice that none of these plays involve calling anything other than a possible AA call.

Level? This is really bad in a lot of ways. Raising roughly half your stack with complete trash is terrible. Raise/folding half your stack is an abomination. In situations where you are riding a 15-20bb stack its much better to shove over limpers with a hand that has some sort of equity against their ranges than to spew with rags.

Most players in these tournaments dont pay any attention to stack sizes so you can get away with a little more but for the most part dont open with a hand you wont call/shove over a 3bet with when you have <20bbs.

Okay, I'll do this with a 20-30BB stack maybe not less than 20BB. I try this at least once per tournament and have about a 80-90% success rate. I do pick my spots carefully though.

I have to respectfully disagree with this advice. In a $3 tourney this type of play is massively -EV. In a higher buy-in MTT with the appropriate image - I don't have a problem with it. But at the micro limits you're not getting all 4 players to fold PF. And playing 83o OOP in a big pot is utterly spewtastic imo

Glad the OP asked this today. I am in the same situation with MTT's.

It's hard to find a good spot to steal the blinds when people are raising and re-raising from every position. UTG goes all in and gets 2 or 3 callers with KTs or A9s or similar. You raise to steal the blind and one or more of the limpers goes AI.

Had this last night in a Stars Freeroll, I got into the money but finally just went all in with any face card just so I could get away from the frustration of it all. I was relieved to get knocked out, the table was unbelievably aggressive.

Are SnG's better for Tight players than MTT's?

(sorry, don't mean to hijack thread)

That is the problem right there. Freerolls don't count as actual tournaments IMO. They're mostly LAGtard shove fests. Do something more constructive with your time like cleaning out your ear wax or checking for navel lint.

+1

I would rather hit myself in the head with a hammer repeatedly that play free rolls

Horses for courses

OP you could try some SNG maybe to get a feel for things.

NO you have the sense to not call an ep raise with your KJo. Unless it's the right thing to do of course
Not sure how that squares with jam-or-fold anyway

It sounds like you have a good strategy down but need some more help. If this hasn't been said yet, join pokerxfactor or cardrunners. PXF is more tournament focused and cardrunners has more of a cash game selection, but ActionJeff's videos on cardrunners are great.