ITH Poker Forum

[philhux]

I've got another question for Ed and any other experts.

The stop and go is a play that I want to incorporate into my tourney game as I've never really used it.

Firstly let me define what I mean - If I am reasonably short and in the blinds, I call a raise with the intention of pushing all in on the flop regardless of my cards and the flop.

So do people think the stop and go a good and viable strategy? when is best time to use it? and when is it better than simply just reraising all in preflop?

I'm thinking about my stack size and that of the opponent - what should I be looking for?

Also I'm guessing I should be thinking about the type of opponent I want to do this against and the stage of the tourney.

Finally do my cards matter in this spot or are they completely irrelevant?

[Ed Miller]

It's too general a question for me to give a great answer to. But here are the basics. Stop and go is often a good alternative to pushing preflop. It works especially well against amateur players who don't understand when they are pot-committed, and therefore who (a) won't understand that you're pushing 100% of the time, and (b) will tend to treat it as a binary "Fit or fold" decision for themselves.

Big pairs you often just want to move in preflop with, since they tend to have such strong preflop equity. You don't mind your opponent calling preflop. When you're more likely to be in a "coinflip" type situation, though, then stop-and-go can be better if you're going to trick your opponent into folding the 2/3 of the time they miss the flop.

That's not the whole story, though, because it depends on the remaining stack sizes. If you have enough chips left to make a big all-in preflop reraise that your opponent will usually fold to, that might be better. And obviously you don't want to move in with pairs and stop-and-go with non-pairs, since that would make you ridiculously readable.