I think you can win with any cards, it is all about playing a game against some other people and adapting your strategy to what is necessary. On each hand you need to make decisions based on position, stack sizes, playing styles of opponents, your own cards, and so on. Getting a starting hand like AA is nice, but it is just a guaranteed top pair on the flop with no overcards. Sometimes you want to push everyone off the pot preflop, other times you want to slow play it and see what happens. When you have AA and the flop comes A high and is checked around, you will probably still win a big pot and can pick off any bluffs.
My tournament strategy recently has been to play smallball poker, get into pots with hands that play well in multiway pots, get out of pots if the flop comes single suited or with two cards of a suit that I do not have, make relatively small bets and raises when I have good hands, and let the opponents hang themselves and each other as much as possible.
I was playing 100,000 buy-in tournament with this strategy a couple of days ago and was leading or in second place most of the first hour until I made a gross mistake and threw it all away through not concentrating.
On another tournament I was running well until I made a Ten high flush in diamonds with the Ace and Jack on the board and called an all-in from an opponent who had the Queen high flush,. (This is always the problem with playing suboptimal hands.) However this tournament also seemed to pay bonuses for eliminating opponents, so my actually loss was less than half the 100,00 buy-in.
Last night I came 4th in a tournament of 123 entrants with a low buy-in (5000 chips) for a net profit of 46,000 chips after more than 2 hours of play. I am not sure if I should regard this result as a success or a failure. Probably a failure, because on my last hand when in second place I lost concentration a bit during the 3rd hour of play and called a river all-in from a player who had been making massive bluffs and all-in flop bets with top pair no kicker all through the tournament with amazing luck. Anyway he had made a straight with his junk hand to beat my pocket Queens, and that was it for me.
This took me over 14 million chips for the first time and to an all time high in the rankings too, so that is an average monthly gain of more than 1.5 million chips over 9 months of playing on the site, exclusively in tournaments and sit-n-gos, with just a few hands occasionally in a ring game to pass a few minutes when there was no time for a tournament.
If the sit’n’gos are hard going, which they will be since you have to beat the house cut, the multitable tournaments may be more profitable as some tournaments have various kinds of bonuses and when you win the multiple relative to the buy in is much greater than in the sit’n’go. In a 9-seater sit’n’go, even if you finish third, you really only get your entry refunded. In a tournament like Ruthies Roundup which is 250,000 to enter, and has small fields, you could finish 3rd and still make a profit of 500,000 chips.