Is it the norm that most of the small live tournaments in local cardrooms are without antes? Maybe it's because I only play small stakes – $20-$50 or $5-$20 rebuy, usually under 40 people. I have never played a large tournament in a casino.

A question about min raising in these.  Online I have experimented with min raise, I've seen you guys do it in videos and I think it works – gotten some good folds and been paid off with min raise.  It looks like an important staple of the game once the blinds get big and at the final table.  But I don't think the min raising I've done live has been very effective, especially midway in the tournament, like 300/600 blinds, no ante with starting stacks of 12,000 in a freezeout.  (Since I have only played live tournaments that have been ante free, I also cannot decipher about some live/ante-free moments which made the difference (or the mistake) more – the live elements or ante free elements). It seems to me that when I min raise open from early position, I may frequently get 2-4 callers around.

When the blinds are 300/600 in these games, no antes, what might you use as your open raising size? There's the popular online choice to use small amounts above min raise, like 2.09x or 2.2x.  I feel in live/ante free games that has sometimes gotten the job done, but still people are probably calling and raising too often.  Should we do more 3-4x opens when playing these games even when it gets to be 1000/2000 blinds, and in an online game there would definitely be ante – people would definitely be incorporating their 2.12x or min raise plays?

Maybe it shifts slowly from 3-4x opens when it's 200/400 to 2.12x types when it's 1000/2000, (because at some point the size of the blinds themselves makes the pot big enough to take stabs at with good stacks?), and 4,200 would be a much easier commitment than 8,000?