Is playing the rock tight, and aggressive game in tournaments really still the best way to play? I do believe yes, at least for the very early stages.
Professional players may have a different opinion about this, but they don't play the low level buy-ins online which are altogether different games than they are used to.
You see, it's all about the math of how many tournaments you enter and how often this strategy can pay off.
However, when executing a tight strategy more often than not, your worst enemy is yourself.
That is because it can be quite difficult to watch other players donk up on hand that you would have won, had you been there at the river.
There may frequently be long streaks between in-the-money finishes based on the very familiar situation such as this: you play it rock tight, have maybe one or two hands where you stay only slightly ahead of the blinds leaving you with a low to medium stack after the first break.
This can happen time and again leaving you to really question your overall strategy.
Before you go all radical and start looking for new aggressive solutions consider these points: 1- You are playing book solid tournament poker.
Online that remains an advantage in itself, especially in the lower buy-in levels.
Specifically, it's the Dan Harrington style and that is a profitable way to play tournament poker - at least long term.
You will start to make the money (at least) between 10%-20% of the time playing like this and inching up your bankroll.
2- As you enter near-the-money stage in tournaments, many short stack players tend to panic and big stack players tend to get over-aggressive without tracking how short and desperate their opponents really are.
Therefore it becomes a much looser, crazy game where a hand like top pair, top kicker is good enough to let your tournament ride on.
It really doesn't matter how big or small your stack is in this stage because invariably opportunities are going to land in your seat where it's not unusual to double, triple up, or even better, in this volatile tournament stage.
In a single hand, yes you can be out, but contrarily, in a few hands you could be in the top ten chip stacks based on the ridonkulous moves of your opponents.
Ask this of anyone who has made a final table more than a couple times, if this has happened to them.
3- If your stack is disadvantaged too, you need to know and adjust for Game Critical Intersects.
These are hands that can actually be calculated using a combination of your hole card strength, pot size, MZone and opponent profiling.
This can give you a very strong backbone in your decision making in certain stages of the tournament.
Once the GCI concept is completely understood, you will rarely have to ask anyone else if you made the right move or not.