The Stop and Go play is an effective tournament hold’em tactic that is used by short stacked players over the pre-flop and flop betting rounds.
The stop and go is employed when in a tournament you are short stacked and an opponent in earlier position has made a raise. Normally, if you have a hand you’re willing to try to double up with you would just shove all your chips in over the top of the initial raiser. However, let’s say you only have seven or so big blinds and the opponent has made a fairly standard 3x the big blind raise. In that situation, your opponent probably has odds to call and get his money so he’ll get to see an entire board of five cards to see if he can make the best hand, so it’s quite unlikely he’ll fold to your all-in.
Alternatively, you can make use of the stop and go tactic. This entails merely calling your opponent’s pre-flop raise with a view to getting all of the money in on the flop irrespective of how the cards may come. The idea behind such a play is basically that at that point, your opponent needs to call your bet if he wants to see the rest of the cards, and as a whole two thirds of the time he won’t have improved his hand at that point, he has poorer odds to call with just two cards to come to improve. At this point, we have much more fold equity and have two ways of winning the pot; we can of course have the best hand at this point, or we can fold out the opponent and pick up the pot there. It’s pretty important whether our opponent happens to make a better hand on the flop as the alternative play is just to move all-in over the top of the initial pre-flop raise and in such a case, our opponent is going to improve anyway and at all times our intention is to get the rest of our money into the middle.
Ok, so let’s take a look at an example, let’s say we have something like 1700 chips when the blinds in a tournament are 125/250, giving us a little under seven big blinds and we have pocket nines and an opponent has raised to 750 in early position. It’s folded to us in the blinds and we can either move all-in (99 being a more than reasonable hand to go to war with) or we can decide to just call our opponent’s bet and employ the stop and go. A good portion of the time, our opponent has two overcards and it’s going to be a pretty standard coin-flip situation so the stop and go gives us an extra way to pick up the pot when we would likely be an even money shot.
We elect to call the 750, leaving us with 950, and the flop comes 2s9hQ, and in accordance with the strategy we duly make the all-in bet. Suppose now that our opponent has AJ, AK or similar. He probably has six outs to make the best hand and this position. The pot is laying him only 1.5 to 1 or so on his money so clearly calling with a maximum of a 25% shot is not a positive EV play and with the pot odds not being there, the opponent should fold. Had we moved all-in pre-flop, then our opponent probably will figure he is flipping a whole bunch of the time and call our raise and he’d get to see five cards, while the stop and go means we pick the pot up right there a lot. Conversely, if he happens to have AQ or KK there, then we were probably going broke whichever tactic we employed as we just can’t fold 99 with such a small stack.
The stop and go play is really aimed at getting the best use out of what little fold equity you have in tournament poker when you are severely short stacked. You give yourself the maximum chance to pick up the pot, which can surely not be a bad thing. So, the next time you’re enjoying a hand or two in a tournament and find yourself repping the short stack why not put this article to good use and attempt the stop and go strategy for fun and profit!
This article was written by meshuganater.
Tags: Key Concepts, poker strategy, stop and go, strategy, tactics, tournaments
Nice concept, hadn’t thought about it that way.