Dealing with high raises and re-entry tournaments.

Hi,

First post here, hope this is the right place. Apologises if this is a bit lengthy;

So, I'm a new player, I started last year as some acquaintences dragged me into a pub league, which I finished 2nd in my first season and won by a mile in the second season. I'm not with that league anymore at the moment.

I've played in casinos and certain special tournaments. My record in casinos is around 8 freezeout formats, 8 final tables, 2 ITM (3rd and 2nd place) though I was one place off twice (prizes usually were 1-4th or 1-5th). My record outside of freezeouts is abysmal though, which I'll get to in a second.

I've competed in two Deaf Poker Tournaments, one private 4 table tournament which I got to the final table and finished 5th and cashed. One in London, which was my first proper big tournament format, an International game, I think it was over 80-90 players, and I cashed in 11th, though I should have gone further, I made a terrible mistake on my final hand due to inexperience and tiredness. I tend to regularly cash at least once a month from say, 4-6 games depending on my budget for the month, whether from pub games or if I can, the casino games.

Where I struggle is in tournaments that offer rebuys/re-entries, what I find is that most of the theory I've studied seems to go out of the window for two reasons;

1. The standard opening raise deviates massively. Most study materials I've read suggest 2-2.5x opening raises, but it isn't unusual in my regular local casino for 100/100 (100 ante) level 1 to have opening raises of anywhere from 1-5,000 chips, so an opening of 50bb. It is also fairly common for such raises to get 2-5 callers. I find it isn't until the cut-off period (level 6-8 usually) that suddenly, everyone sits down and plays somewhat sensibly with their raises etc as they can't rebuy, and less people will come along to see the flop. (In the above example; stack size was 50,000, but have also seen such raises when the starting stack is 20-30,000. In one satellite tournament I went to, starting stack was 20,000 and we had an UTG raise of 15k with A9o, that got called by two better hands (pocket Kings and whatever the other one was) but eventually ran out the winner as the Ace hit. )

2. People seem happy to jam all-in with any reasonably decent hand (A9+ probably) and simply rebuy/re-enter repeatedly until they double-triple up.

I have asked for advice from people I know and got mixed replies, some people say 'oh you should be beating these guys easy, just call/re-raise them with good hands' ~ which I think, is easy enough to say, but doesn't always work in practice and is particularly painful if you miss the flop and they hit it, as my A9o example above indicates. I've had others say that they're playing silly poker and you just have to tighten up and go on premiums, others have said to call wider and play more connected hands instead.

I haven't really come across study material that deals with this sort of thing, short of saying that open-raising so high is usually a net loss/mistake.

So, I guess what I'm asking is, how do I navigate these high opening raises in casino tournament games? My aim is to try and consistently get to more final tables in these games but without having to use re-entries myself where possible, but also to give myself a better understanding of how to apply theory to these type of games, if that makes sense?

Hope the above made sense, English isn't my first language, so please do ask for clarification if I've made something sound confusing.