Would playing looser than normal building up a big stack in order to go deep be best at trying to win a MTT?

I'm aiming to finish first rather than winning cash. Winning cash is just part of playing a mtt but not my main goal of finishing first.

Yes, aggressively building stacks and trying to play for chips will increase the percentage you win mtts.

This will make you less money over time than playing solid mtt poker and accounting for icm implications in your play. And you still won't win very often.

It takes a lot more luck to actually win an MTT than most people realize (or want to admit). I have done an admittedly oversimplified calculation to show this. Suppose you are in a 128 player MTT. To win all the chips you must end up with a stack that is 128x your starting stack. To simplify things, this represents seven double ups. What are the chances that you would survive seven all in spots and double up seven times?

Well letÂ’s assume that you are the greatest MTT player ever; you are GodÂ’s gift to poker. As such you will always get it in with an 80/20 edge (approximately equal to a larger pocket pair vs a smaller one all in preflop). With that assumption the odds of winning all seven all ins to win the tournament is (0.8)^7 = 20.9%. The field of ordinary mortals is about a 4-1 favorite to beat the greatest poker player ever!

Now obviously this calculation isnÂ’t how tournaments work, but to win you still must win all the chips; you just do it over more hands with less at stake on each, thereby reducing variance. On the other hand, you arenÂ’t going to be averaging anywhere close to an 80/20 edge when you do get it in. This isnÂ’t meant to be in any way accurate, but rather to show that even a great player vs a bunch of fish in an MTT needs to get lucky to win it all.

Realistically I suspect that for a strong player vs a bunch of recs, your chances of winning the MTT are indeed much lower than 21%. They would be significantly higher than the average of 1/128; thatÂ’s what it means to be a good MTT player, but it still isnÂ’t going to happen all that often even for the best players

Remember this basic reality of MTT play.

Weak players play very loose when stack sizes are large in comparison to the blinds and tighten up when stacksget smaller in relation to the blinds.

Winning players do the exact opposite.