The key to advancing deep in tournaments is to minimize risk.  However avoiding risk altogether won't get you deep in a tournament because you have to seek out reward as well, or at the very least maintain your chip stack. 

And anytime you enter a pot there is some risk involved.  Despite that fact, I have discovered that the best way to minimize risk over time is by using Daniel Negreanu's Power Holdem Strategy.

Originally I thought that the best way to minimize risk was to fold a lot.  Because obviously the best way to avoid risk on any given hand is to fold.    You cant lose chips if you don't enter a pot, right? Wrong.

Every hand you don't play is about 1/6th of a big blind.  And as the big blinds get higher and higher, your chips dwindle faster and faster.
Throughout the course of a tournament, you're going to have to take some risks to stay alive at some point anyways.

So then you might say, ok well then I'll just wait for premium hands, Aces, Kings and Queens. Then I'll double up and be back in it.  That must be the way to avoid risk. 

Although that used to be my line of thinking, I know now that is simply not true.  Not only are there better safer ways to accumulate chips, but if you don't play a hand in ages, people are gonna stay away from you unless they have something big. 

Which means all the waiting got you was the blinds. And they'll have much more chips then you by that point so they'll be able to force you to risk a large portion of your chips.  And in order to get back in the game to the big stacks, at this point you'll almost have to go all in.

Which might not be a bad thing, but by doing all this waiting, even if you double up you probably won't be the big stack, and you'll dwindle down again and be left with less chips then most.

While going all in with a premium hand isn't super risky; not getting yourself in a position where you have to go all in is a much safer solution.  And that means Daniel Negreanu's Power Holdem Strategy...  Accumulating chips, and grinding away...  Picking up small uncontested pots without having to risk large percentage of your chipstack.  And that usually means playing a lot of hands.

I've been mixing this style into my game and it really helps me to move up in chips consistantly throughout tournaments.  My old habits still make me tend to want to take risks that I don't have to and call an all in or go all in with a hand that I could easily fold and wait for a better situation.  The more I use Power Holdem, the more foolish it becomes to put all my chips on the line preflop. 

Really with this strategy you don't need to take as many chances, and you don't need to call all your chips off as less than a 60% favorite, and as you use to learn it you don't even need to be doing that as a 70% favorite. 

That's why you see some very successful pros lay down hands as good as Queens to bets that would put them all in.  As good as Jacks, Queens or AK might look... (Espcially against some maniac) it should be a fairly easy fold if you have to put a significant amount of your chips on the line.

There's simply more value in risking 80 chips to get 200 over and over again, then risking all your chips to double up.  If you get reraised 10 times in a row you still will have plenty of chips left, (and obviously if that was the case you would adapt before then anyways). 

If you catch a hand a couple times when you get reraised, you can often make a large portion of that lost money back quickly.  On the other hand, if you lose just once when all in, you're done, and there's no way you can ever earn it back.

You could even have Aces, but after about 3 all ins you're 50/50 to be knocked out of the tounrament from one of those.  Of course hopefully by then you'll have enough chips to cover you, but even then you'd still be greatly crippled unless you had some other way of accumulating chips. 

So that doesn't change the fact that if you can gain chips by chipping away and winning small pots,(and you're at much less risk that way), you probably have a much greater chance of advancing deep into the tournament than if you sit around and wait for aces.

That's the beauty of Daniel Negreanus Power Holdem Strategy, it allows you to accumulate chips gradually at low risk, and in the meantime it's unpredictable, allowing you to make big plays when your opponents least expect it.  if you want to take your game to the next level, and consistantly advance in tournaments, (and have the chips to do a lot of damage when you get there), I urge you to buy

I'm not gonna do a book review just yet, but rather a little review on the strategy as a whole. 
If you've ever seen Daniel Negreanu's power holdem strategy in action, you know that he tends to play a lot of pots and he like to mix his game up.  Many people bring up Gus Hansen when they mention his style of play, or a Gavin Smith type style.  Obviously when you play more pots you have more chances for your opponents to make mistakes against you, but you are also more prone to mistakes. 
Which is why if you intend on adapting this style, you're going to need to know a lot about holdem, or at least be good at making those tough decisions. 
Of course the idea is to force your opponent to as many tough decisions as possible, (and as Doyle Brunson says put your opponent on a decision for all of his chips), but you want to avoid those situations yourself.  So that's why you want to be the aggressor,  it's much easier to make a bet then it is to call a bet. 
If you just call you have to worry about the opponent raising on the turn or river, and if you raise you're putting more chips at risk when you don't know what your opponent has.

The best part about this strategy is not only that you get a chance to gradually chip up as you take small pots, and not that it seems to give you control over the table, but that once you learn this power strategy you'll be unpredictable, and able to disguise your monster hands and really get paid off.  Especially when you have something like T9 and the flop comes 8JQ.

It's also a strategy that you can use almost regardless of what kind of table you're at. 
If you have a bunch of people playing tight preflop, you can steal a lot of pots, if they play tight post flop, you can outplay them on the flop.
If you have a bunch of people around you playing loose preflop, you can afford to play a lot of hands with it and look to get paid off pretty decent if you have strength, especially if they're loose after the flop.
If they play tight after the flop you can really represent the flop, and have some profitable situations even if you don't win every other hand.

So if with you and 3 loose players in the flop comes AA8 and you bet half the pot, you would only have to take down the pot 1 out of 3 times to break even.  After 2 turns you'd lose a whole pot size worth of chips, after the 3rd you'd win the whole pot and more or less would be back where you started.  That's ignoring the times that they'll just check/call and say you catch a flush or something. 
But the best part about this is NOT that you'll probably win more than you lose, because even if you lose more chips than you win here, it's still profitable... The best part about it is your IMAGE...

Here's why, lets say next time you have pocket 77s and get an AA7 flop, well you've just flopped a boat and now you come out betting just like you always have.  Someone could have JJ and think it's good against a player like you.  Against a tight player they wouldn't dream about raising with Jacks, but they've seen people play over the top of you, and they've seen you dump hands to reraises, and they think there hand is good against you.

Now rather than folding, they play back over the top and you get much more chips than you would... or even better yet they just call thinking you'll fire another bet with nothing, and THEN they'll play over the top of you.
Well, now you go over the top again and take down a huge pot or you end up against AK or he feels pot committed and you get the entire stack. Something you obviously wouldn't have been able to do if you had been playing tight and passive.

No limit holdem has and will always be a people game.  The best way to set up your opponent is to keep them guessing, and wait until they guess wrong then BAM their chips are yours.  An excellent way to create an image and set opponents up and keep them guessing is to use...