Suited connectors in tournaments

Suited connectors are generally regarded as great implied odds hands and most players play them whenever they happen over such a pocket hand. Given that it is indeed a starting hand which carries good implied odds, most people limp to the flop with this hand to see what they hit.
Suited connectors are indeed worth to play in deep-stacked cash games, no doubt about it. Whether you should limp to the flop with them or put in a preflop raise on them is something that the circumstances will dictate. The optimal preflop action on such a hand is largely dependent on the type of players you’re faced with and the general table mood. The bottom line is, suited connectors alongside suited one-gappers and small pocket pairs are indeed excellent implied odds hands and you should definitely play them in deep stacked cash game situations.

I suppose I needn’t tell though that there are significant differences between cash and tournament play. Most people are well aware of this fact, though it’s quite surprising that so few of them actually consider it when making strategically important decisions. This is the reason why you’ll often see people play suited connectors in tournaments, the same way they play them in cash games.
Due to the difference in nature between poker tournament and poker cash play (differences caused mainly by the finite tournament stacks and the ever escalating blinds) suited connectors lose a lot of value in tournaments.
In tournaments in general and in SNGs in particular, you are never actually deep-stacked. Well, maybe close to deep stacked at the beginning of a massive MTT. What this means is that you’ll lose value playing your suited connectors on several fronts. First of all, in a cash game, you need to have a deep stack all the time in order to be able to fully exploit the edge given to you by the implied odds on suited connectors and other such hands. You stack is a tool there: the bigger it is, the more money you can get into the pot, which means your opponents will have to match it if they want to see a showdown. If you’re playing on a short-stack (like you always are in a STT), the weapon which is your stack falls seriously short: it will not allow you to exploit your implied odds to the maximum.
The short stacks of your opponents represent another limitation: they can’t call more than they have so you can’t really make a lot of chips off them regardless what you do. In a cash game, the two variables which ultimately determine the profitability of your implied odds are the losses you incur on your missed hands and the winnings you take down on the made hands. The losses can be limited with the proper tools both in a cash game and in a tournament, however the winnings cannot be maximized in tourneys, which means that ultimately, your implied odds may not come through for you.
Does that mean that you should never play these babies in a SNG? Not by a longshot. Just stop granting them more value than they actually have and you’ll be OK. You should still limp to the flop on your suited connectors if a cheap flop is in the works, and you should even attempt to steal some blinds with them. The key factor here is position. You can only achieve any of the above moves when you’re in late position (on the button or in the cut-off). Never attempt to limp from early position as it’s almost like offering your chips as a gift to your opponents.
Your suited connectors will retain bigger value in the beginning of the tournament when you are still relatively deep-stacked. That’s when you should limp along from late position to possibly hit a hand which could send one of your opponents to the rail.
As the blinds escalate, blinds-stealing gradually comes into the picture. As your suited connectors lose their implied odds value, they’ll gain a blinds-stealing edge. That’s because as the stacks become shorter and shorter compared to the size of the blinds, the implied odds value dies off completely.