Tournament poker is all about patience and not making silly mistakes. Mistakes are OK but not silly ones.

As you get more experienced you realise that hoping to hit flops is not the way to play. You need a made hand to re raise with or come in raising with AK to play this game. Sure you will get outdrawn many times but you need everything to come together for you to make a big cash and hoping to get lucky on the flop consistently is not going to do it for you.

Unless you are going to play shove poker like my friend here.

Tournaments are not won with one hand. They are not won in the first hour. They are won over a long period of time and you have to be prepared for long spells of inactivity to be a good player.

This is why the average stack stat is useful to you.

It's not an important statistic  - most statistics are pretty useless in this game but it's a good barometer of where you are in the game and what you need to do.

If you have a good stack you don't need to take needless risks to grow it. If you have double the average stack then you have a lot of time to pick and choose your spots to play in. There is no need to rush.

If you have below the average stack then you know that whatever hand you play next is going to be putting you all in. You will not win by continually growing your stack with small pot victories. It just doesn't work like that. At larger stakes then this is the appraoch you want to take - and your opponents are going to minimising their risk also but at the $20 level and below you need to make your hands count when you play them.

Don't obsess about the average stack figure. A lot of the time your stack can be dwindling and when the blinds are high and you have a small stack it can dwindle fast! When you pick up a hand you need to double up to keep yourself alive in the game.

I like to be very aggressive with the hands that I do play but I tend not to play many hands. I don't play any junk and probably over play my AK occasionally and this leads to me busting out of more tournaments early. I like to play for a big cash and I'm not content to just make the money. Once you become a reasonable tournament player it is very easy to make the money consistently simply because there are so many players prepared to overplay their hands and bust out - including me!

You only need to worry about what the average stack is when you are short stacked. In all other situations when you are ahead the cards pretty much play themselves and you don't need to worry what the average stack is - you just play what's in front of you without any care to it.

Once you start getting short stacked then you'll know you are behind anyway by the size of the blinds.

Take this situation:

The average stack is 8,000 chips. You have 4,000. The blinds are 800/1600 and you are under the gun with KQ.

Normally I would fold this hand easily in this position. Raising with this is going to get you into a lot of trouble in this position and you need to let it go.

However in this situation you are pretty much obligated to play it all in. If you don't then the blinds are coming through you and you'll have next to nothing left anyway. If you double you'll be closer to the average stack and have a bit of breathing space but if you bust out - you bust out.

It doesn't really matter to you what the average stack is because you can only play the cards you are dealt. If you are card dead then you are card dead.

In a "live" tournament there is a tendency to bluff more and attempt to steal the blinds more but in online poker the majority of players just play the cards they are dealt - the problem with most players is they don't have the patience to wait for something better when they are ahead of the game and try to force the issue.

So don't worry about what the average stack is until you get short stacked - but by that time you know it already because you are feeling the heat from the blinds!