Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington and many more have advised about presenting some weak cards in tournaments along the way so nobody will know what type of hands you ordinarily play. The concept behind this is that you’re kind of setting the stage for a deep pot at a later level when somebody thinks you have nothing but in fact you have aces full or something just as strong.
Building an image of a weak player can be very profitable in the right situation, because your antagonists will choose to play weaker hands against you, allowing you to reap huge pots because of their misplays. There is nothing at all defective with that strategy for cash games and big stack tournaments, however most internet tourneys that begin with only a fifteen hundred or two thousand chips chips and that makes your image budget extremely small qq online.
You could even say that there is no image budget in the starting levels of a tournament and although this may sound a safe route, it is likely the most reasonable, so as to avoid spending chips where you really don’t need. One of the reasons you don’t need to build an image in online tournaments, is because there are so many stupid players who truly wouldn’t be paying attention to your strategies in any event.
Those same weak players will also think nothing of re-raising you to the point where pots are just too big to play to the river, and that is exactly where you need to show your weak hand to build that image. The fact of the matter is with so many horrible players in every tournament, even if you are tighter than spandex you are very likely to still get activity on your winners. It is not extraordinary to move past the first hour of a tournament after running only a few rounds showing big pairs each time.
It is much more profitable to become predatory and present yourself as a risk taker type of player in the middle and near the money stages of the tournament, when your tournament stack can afford it, your adversaries are actually paying attention, and the players that persist are are critical and really want to make the final table. This is the time when you should start making an aggressive image.