when to take it easy?

I often find myself sometime within the first half hour of a multi table tourney to be well out in front, in the top five with hundreds of players still remaining and with double or triple the average players stack.
Inevitably i get bored after an hour or so and the impatience leads to offensive mistakes and i end up giving all my chips away instead of defending them for the many hours still remaining.
is there some guide as to calculating when to sit back and play super cautiously?

I recommend that you play cautiously all the time. If you ever want to be at the final table, you need to be disciplined and patient player.

Being in the front, you want to be a bully, but not call everything down having nothing.

The people that fight you will nearly always have something on the board. And you should raise, but never call reraises without having TP

hemlok said:

I often find myself sometime within the first half hour of a multi table tourney to be well out in front, in the top five with hundreds of players still remaining and with double or triple the average players stack.
Inevitably i get bored after an hour or so and the impatience leads to offensive mistakes and i end up giving all my chips away instead of defending them for the many hours still remaining.
is there some guide as to calculating when to sit back and play super cautiously?

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I fully agree with
infonazar, you need a lot of patience to play in tournaments and it takes about 2-3-4-5-6-7 hours, you should be ready for such long tournaments to try to win and take good prizes!

To win good tournaments with good prize pools you will absolutely need patience. Starting off hot almost all the time is great, its because most of your loose players are still in and you can get them to put in their money bad - take advantage of that and run your stack up while you can without getting too crazy.

I know ALOT of people will tell you be careful and play cautious - i agree to some extend but if you are sitting there all day long waiting for the top 15% of hands you are going to miss out on some good sized pots. I start off aggressive and i constantly switch gears in these things. I either start off building a big stack or im done early.

I feel like to do well in any MTT you need to amass chips early so as the blind structure goes up you arnt sitting there looking to make a move with the rest of the field. I feel like this happens around levels 6 - 8 and of course more as they get higher. A bigger stack gives you the freedom to pick and choose your battles in that spot - and especially in freerolls of i know my player HAS to make a move, and its only costing me 15% if my stack or less, i call them light alot. Hands like QJ, 9-10, 78s, 44 or better, etc. I call with to try and knock them out, hands i would never call a tight opponent with in a higher buy in event. Anyhow, you would be surprised how many chips you can pick up like that and it gives an image to your table that you are calling down pretty light so chances are if you're betting you have something.

Anyhow, enough rambling lol i think a good mixed strategy between playing smart and some controlled aggression is by far the best MTT strategy to run deep. Good luck to you at the tables

my calculation

my idea as to when to relax a bit is to add up the total number of chips in play and divide by ten to ensure that i will be in top ten.