So, you’re playing in a multi-table No-Limit Hold ’em tournament and you have had the benefit of busting out of the gate in a big way, wiping out a couple of players early and taking down a few other nice-sized pots to give you a significant chip advantage at your table.

Congratulations on being the early chip leader. Know what that earns you? Zip.

While it’s nice to be on top at any point in a tournament, the goal is to be there when one player remains. One of the most difficult things to do in tournament poker is play from ahead, especially when you get that big edge early.

Oftentimes if you have picked up a massive advantage early in a tournament, you have done so by taking some sort of a risk that paid off. Maybe you called that big pre-flop raise with 5-5, caught your set on the flop and used it to cripple the guy with K-K. Maybe you made a big move on a flush draw and hit it for a huge pot.

Regardless of the specifics, there is a common theme to sprinting out of the gate -- the cards fell your way. But the law of averages means that the cards probably will dry up at some point. It isn’t always easy to remember that when you are running hot, but it’s important that you do.

Despite what you saw from Jamie Gold in this year’s World Series of Poker main event, I wouldn’t advise taking the super-aggressive, even reckless, approach to playing with a massive stack. It might have worked for Gold, but it mainly worked because he benefited from some ridiculously good flops while making and calling a lot of pre-flop raises with ridiculously lousy hole cards. If not for extraordinary luck, Gold’s stack could have evaporated quickly and easily.

When I have the pleasure of holding at least twice as many chips as anyone else at my table, my method of play is usually this: 1) Play hands, but at a reasonable pace, and 2) do your pushing before the flop.

What the power of the big stack allows you to do is force the rest of the table to tip their hands before any cards are on the table. When you have twice as many chips as anyone else, suddenly a pre-flop raise of six times the blind for you is the equivalent of tripling the blind for anyone else.

So, why not force the rest of the table call bets at your level? Let’s say the blinds are 50-100, and you have 7,500 chips, while the rest of the table has between 1,800 and 3,500 chips. You are at the dealer button and have J-Q suited, with one player limping in behind you. You’re in position, with a lot of chips and an interesting hand. Whereas a standard-issue raise would be to 300 chips, in this case I might make it 600 to call.

That type of raise put the onus on the remaining three players. Do they feel good enough about their hand to call a raise that represents at least 20 percent of their remaining stack? And if they are going to call off that much of their stack before the flop, wouldn’t they prefer to just put all of their chips in the pot?

Either way, it works for you. If your opponent calls, you significantly narrow the possibilities of what they are holding. If they re-raise all-in, you can easily muck the hand without a serious hit to your stack. More times than not, the other three players are going to fold and you are going to supplement your stack.

The key to using a big stack to its optimum is to fill the rest of the table with concern that you are waiting for big hands. And the best way to do that is, well, to wait for big hands. Of course, if you go a dozen or so hands without seeing a high-quality hand, your patience can be rewarded and you can fire out a raise with a J-9.

The bottom line is that the big stack can be a bully, but not the bully with all brawn and no brains. If you’re a thinking man’s bully, you can make moves that potentially will fatten your stack while steering clear of bluffs gone bad.