Help with late stage tournament play

[RandomFluke]

Hi all. I'm kind of new to tournaments, but I have done very well in the sit n goes I've played so I decided to try some MTT and see how I'd do. Well to get my feet wet I played a $3+ rebuys satellite with the winner getting entry into the $350, 000 guaranteed tourney on pstars. Out of 756 players I remained in the top five for most of the tourney and finished second in chips. So with that confidence boost I decided to use the $200 to try some $11 rebuys instead of the 350k. the first $11 rebuy i busted out of. The second one though is why I'm writing this post. I stuck to my game plan, and though I took a number of bad beats I also managed to win my fair share of coin flips. I felt pretty good about my play and was in the top 5 out of 1224 players for most of the the 4 hours following the rebuy. during the rebuy period i actually did pretty poorly and ended the rebuy with just the chips i had bought + the add on.

But later in the tournament, when there were 40 players of 1224 left, and I was #3 out of 40, my game started to fall apart. The entire dynamic of the tournament changed, and while I felt that it had changed and could see it had changed I didnt have the time to adjust my strategy. I was starting to feel the pressure and with the huge blinds I wasnt sure what to do.

My problem was, where as before people respected my preflop raises and the somewhat tight but agressive image I had cultivated, every single time I made a preflop raise someone pushed in on me. Actually it wasn't just me, whether I made a bet that hand or not, someone was always all in preflop. Suddenly it had become coin flip after coin-flip and at the worst possible time I went card-dead. I had been card dead for periods before during the 5 hours of the tourney, but I had managed to still accumulate chips using my tight image and large stack to my advantage.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but I guess my question is what do you do here? In the late stages of a tourney where it has suddenly turned into a bunch of very desperate people fighting against the rising blinds, you have a decent stack but most of the others dont and are just pushing and pushing all in. I got this far in the tournament by avoiding marginal situations, and avoiding coin-flips... but my first thought is at this stage I should have just sucked it up and started gambling. Is there a better way than just pushing all in with any ace? I hope so, because I hate that it seemed a game of skill had suddenly turned into a coin-flipping contest. Any Advice appreciated,


--Fluke

[tiger7210]

My opinion is that in that tourny when the field narrows from ~40 to 18 it does become a push fest where there is very little post flop play. I believe there is a great deal of luck involved at this stage but it is a point in the tourny where you do have to push your small edges aggressively to get to the final table with chips. Generally 1/2 the field is in the push zone so you have to be careful with the kinds of hands you steal with and the opponent as many of your raises do tend to get played back at.