Hey - it's just a buck

Entered a $1/$1k guaranteed tourney @ UB night before last. 1239 entrants. Finished 9th. Fairly pleased. Made $17 whole dollars for four hours work. They had 90 places paying out, which kinda sucked. It was a very good learning experience, though. I really changed my style after the 2nd hour break. I had been playing very tight, which works great early in these sort of things, and had quintupled up to ~ $7500 chips by then playing nothing but facecard top pairs up. But, I found myself at a very tight table with ~ 200 players left and the blinds up around 400/800. I began playing quite a bit more aggressive that I normally did, and executing quite a few semi-bluffs successfully. I kept ratcheting up the pressure, and by the time we were under 100 players, and into the money, I had ~ $50k in chips and was in 5th place. I even took one bad beat for about half my stack, and climbed right back after it. Folks at my table were openly commenting on my 'stealing', but not doing anything about it. In actuality, I was stealing very few pots, but betting any strong draw or midpair largely and aggressively, particularly post-flop. I had beaten enough of the 'f*ck it I'm going to call' him folks that everyone was quite wary.

It was a very, very eye-opening experience. I gues I kept saying 'it's just a dollar' when thinking about how to play, and opened things up. If I could just carry that mentality over to larger $ tourneys, I think it would pay dividends ($$$). I've always played good tight/aggressive poker early in tourneys, but often find myself surviving into the 2nd hour and beyond only to be short-stacked and having to push it all in on marginal coin-flips eventually.

On a related topic, everyone always talks about how hard it is to beat a 1,000 person field than say a 100 person field in a MTT. I wish I was better @ math so I could figure it out, but I would think that the odds of winning a 1k-person tourney aren't exponential or logarithmic, since each set of tables is playing in parallel. Seems like the odds aren't that much worse, as players fall out from every table at approx. the same rate. Maybe the total chips in play creates an insurmountable advantage for the chip leaders in the late stages, I dunno. If anyone has any thoughts on this, let me know - I'd love to drill down a couple of levels.