Firstly we have to understand what the stop and go is! Secondly we have to understand what it does.

The stop and go is a short stacked strategy and involves calling a raise short stacked to shove any flop instead of just shoving pre flop, for example when the hand starts you have 6BB’s left in your stack and are on the BB (blinds 100-200), it folds to the cut-off who raise’s to 600 and it folds to you, you look down at Ah Qs and shove for your remaining 1000 chips, your opponent now needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot (3/1) with 5 cards to come it’s an easy call with cards he was prepared to raise with, with 5 cards to come you have very little fold equity shoving pre flop, so playing the stop and go here could improve your chances as it will give a much harder decision to your opponent on the flop.

So to understand that lets look at the example again but this time we will stop and go.

When the hand starts you have 6BB’s left in your stack and are on the BB (blinds 100-200), it folds to the cut-off who raise’s to 600 and it folds to you, you look down at Ah Qs and decide this is the hand to make your stand with, but instead of shoving here and now you just call the raise, the flop comes Kd 7c 4h and you shove your remaining 600 chips into the pot, you have played the stop and go but what have you achieved?

In example 1 your opponent needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot with 5 cards to come, he is getting 3/1 pre flop against an all in range and should be making the call if his hand was big enough to raise a short stack with.

In example 2 your opponent still needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot so is still getting 3/1, but now there are only 2 cards to come, and you may have just hit this flop or slow played a monster, it’s a much tougher decision for him and he may just fold if he’s missed or was playing a PP below Kings or an AQ AJ hand, and don’t forget statistically you only hit 1 in 3 flops!

So by playing the stop and go here we have given our opponent a much tougher decision on the flop than we would have pre-flop, and it really doesn’t matter what he does now as we identified this hand as the one we were going to make a stand with, and that is what we have done! If he calls and we lose we had decided we were all in pre flop anyway so it really doesn’t matter, but by making his decision that much harder of the flop we gave ourselves some fold equity as he might just fold and look for another spot

As with all strategies of this type overuse will soon see you being called more often as people expect it from you, so use it sparingly, you should also only use it in heads up hands as with more than 1 opponent in the hand your fold equity decreases again