I just think The Big Game presents a much more accurate representation of real cash games. The basic format (although there are variations) of High Stakes Poker isn’t very realistic; give six professional players some chips and tell them that whoever wins all the chips in a very fast tournament format gets $120,000 and you get a game that has nothing at all to do with the real world. Compare that to The Big Game format; five pros use their own money to play against an amateur who has $100,000 – that is what cash games are all about.
RE: Going all-in preflop early in a tournament. Like Superhal says, there are (at least) two schools of thought here; some players have winning the tournament as their only objective and will push any advantage to the max to try to do so … other players have maximizing their expectation as their goal and tend to attempt to minimize risk in the early stages, looking for opportunities to move up the pay scale rather than go for all or nothing.
For weak players the high variance mode is probably their best shot; if they get all-in preflop the pros can’t out-maneuver them later in the hand. Since there are so many tournaments these days and so much money up for grabs it makes sense that some of the high variance style players are going to win a lot of money that they really aren’t good enough to win; in other words, there are so many bad players that a few of them are going to get very very lucky because of the constraints of tournament play … if they were to play in a cash game without ever-increasing blinds they would certainly eventually go broke to the better players.
Early in a tournament the blinds are low compared to the stack sizes – this situation compares to a cash game in some ways but lots of pros don’t want to risk all their chips preflop because if they lose they are out of the tournament, whereas in a cash game they could simply rebuy and continue to play. So, rather than simply push all-in with AA, they make a normal sized raise, preparing to play a big pot IF the situation looks good after the flop … but, having little invested, they can still easily fold the hand if their black aces see a flop of 789 of hearts and the other guy makes a huge bet – his big stack is preserved for a better situation.
Later in a tournament blinds become high compared to stack sizes. When you only have a small number of blinds left you must go into high variance mode; you don’t have much time left to work your skill or to wait for a situation where you have the nuts and the other guy has a big enough hand to play for all his chips – you have to just take a shot and push all-in, mostly being happy to just win the blinds and give yourself a little more time to move up the pay scale.
Personally, in online tournaments (excluding SitnGo) the only hands I play during the first hour are AA, KK, and AKs and I don’t go all-in with them … I’ll wait and hope to make the nuts somewhere down the road. In the days when I was playing a lot of low buy-in tournaments at the same time, I would usually just sit out the first hour and never even see the hands on those tables.
If there are 2,000 players each with 2,000 chips, it doesn’t mean as much as to double up as it does when there are 20 players each with 200,000 chips. If I’m going to take a big risk (my tournament life), I want to be able to win a big reward. In my opinion (and experience), those who are willing to take big risks for small rewards can sometimes get lucky and have huge wins but if they continue in that style they will eventually give it all back to those who have a more conservative approach to risk management.