Tournament players will probably be familiar with the “stop ‘n go” technique, named by none other than Greg Raymer back before he won the WSOP and was just a 2+2 poster called Fossilman. What he envisioned was a situation with the following conditions:
1. you are out of position, usually in the blinds, though theoretically a limper could do this as well;
2. someone has raised your blind;
3. you want to take your hand to showdown;
4. you figure to be a coin flip against your opponent’s range (ie you have 88 and figure your opponent will usually have overcards);
5. you don’t think your opponent will fold to a pre-flop all-in move.
Given these conditions, you might consider just calling the raise and then moving all in on any flop. If you’re called, you’re no worse off than you were if you’d moved in preflop, and if you generate some additional fold equity, then something good came of the move.
This isn’t something you see often in cash games simply because there aren’t as many spots where you’d be putting your money in preflop on a coin flip. In the aggressive mid-high stakes internet games of today, however, such situations do come up. In fact, I had someone run a stop ‘n go against me at a 10/25 NL game on UB the other day.
I don’t have the HH, but I opened on the button to $75 (ie less than pot, because the big blind was short stacked) with AKo, and the SB re-raised to $250. I made it $750, hoping to create the illusion of fold equity so that my opponent might shove a hand like AQ. Instead, he just called the reraise.
The flop came QTT, and he moved all in for my remaining $1750. As someone with a lot of tournament experience, I recognized the move immediately. I assumed he almost certainly had a pair smaller than T’s, though there was some chance he was on something like AJ that I really dominated. Even against a pair, I have a ton of outs: any J, Q, K, or A would give me the best hand. So, I called, and he did indeed have 77. He won the coin flip, but that’s beside the point.
If he’s going to play 77 against my 4-bet, this is a good way to do it. I’m not sure he ought to be playing 77 against my 4-betting range, particularly given that we had no history together at the time, but that’s another story.