Playing your position
If you sit and wait for good cards to come during a poker tournament several things will happen.
You'll most likely get blinded out - your chips just get spent on putting in the blinds. This can happen quickly during the later levels when the blinds are high.
If you get to the later stages, you don't have the luxury of scaring people off a pot since you don't have much 'chip power', or presence, to threaten the other players with.
Your tight game means the other players have sussed out you only play strong hands. As soon as you make a move everyone will fold.
As soon as your chip stack dwindles, other more aggressive players will see you as a soft target and try to push you out of the tournament.
Most importantly, you'll end up getting knocked out, moaning about how you just didn't get dealt any decent cards and you won't have enjoyed your game at all.
So what can you do? If you don't get dealt good hands you're not going to win, right?
Well, one thing you can do is play your position. The dealer position is the strongest since you get to see what everyone else does before your turn. You can work this to your advantage even if you don't have great cards.
If everyone checks then everyone has told you they don't have particularly strong cards. Throwing in a cheeky raise and representing a stronger hand can push people out and bring in the pot. If the blinds are large it’s definitely worth closing down a hand and stealing the blinds to pay for your next blinds.
When you are the dealer you can spend more time watching the other players, looking for tells which may reveal something about the strength of their hand. You don't even need to look at your own cards until everyone else has acted, just observe how everyone else reacts to their cards.
It seems to be easier to spot when someone is chasing a straight or flush when you are the dealer, perhaps because you are watching other players more. You'll have the betting power to sniff them out and see if they react to a raise.
It's not only the dealer position where you have the advantage, any late position will afford you more time and give you more information about everyone else's hands before you need to act.
The opposite is true about early positions; you get less information and less time to act in a hand so you are at a disadvantage. If you are going to represent a bigger hand - or bluff, early position is often not the best time to do it.
Now you have this information, you also have something else to look out for, is the dealer seat trying to represent a larger hand and steal the blinds?