[beenben]

Your goal should be to get to about 4-5x the buy-in by the break. ie at the pokerstars 10+1 you want at leat 8k in chips, but if you get to 12k or more, you don't want to risk them unless you've got a real premium situation or outstanding pot odds. The reason is 8-12k is enough to survive the first hour and not be in push or fold mode. But if you've only got 5k, it's too easy to get pushed around by bigger stacks. You don't need 20k.

Take a look at the lobby during the break of a rebuy and note who the leaders are. somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of them will not even make the money, and usually it is not one of them who wins it. only 2 or 3 of the top 25 will be at the FT.

You need to be willing to rebuy, but you must also have a stopping point. If you double rebuy more than six or seven times, you have to make it really deep into the tourney to break even and even having a big stack after the first hour is not going to help you in the third hour and later.