In the early stages of a tournament you are looking to see about 15% of flops. More if you get good cards but this is a general good starting point.

If you stick to playing AA, KK, AK then you won't go far wrong. Everything else is junk.

Playing 10,10 - QQ in late position is acceptable and limping with smaller pairs to hit a set is also the way to play.

The fact of the matter is that you won't be able to play many hands. Your goal is to win every single one of the pots you play, you really don't have much margin for error.

Being serious about tournament play means being serious about your starting hand selection. If you play with trash then you will bust out often and early. It takes a lot of luck to win a big tournament and you need to stack the odds in your favour from the very beginning.

The idea is to double up early on and from there you can relax your starting hand requirements slightly. The problem with donking off chips on a draw early on is that often you need a double up just to get back to your starting chip count.

Playing very tight is the way to amass chips in the early stages, of course you need to get the cards to play and the other good players are playing the same way.

To win a freezeout tournament you don't need to play many hands. You need your hands to hold up when playing big pots.

Don't try and play drawing hands as when you catch a bit of the flop you can easily be tempted into drawing to the flush or straight and it is this temptation that the good player is able to resist, both in playing the drawing hand in the first place and being able to fight off the impulse to call to the flush on the river.

If you stick to playing the above hands you won't go far wrong. Tight? Of course it's tight! Playing loose will just get you into a lot of hot water.