Uhm, when did this thread become a NL tourney thread? Last two posts are about them.

I think there are times where you might want to donk the turn based on the card, but otherwise, reraising flop or going for turn check raise are probably better.

When you are playing o8

Wait, am I like so far gone. Stop and go = donking???

The way they talk in mtt community, it seems like half the kids under 25 use it.

Ironically, it seems like my fellow old geezers seem to take 14-16 hours in the daily deepstacks in stride.

I thought a stop and go was not reshipping pre flop in order to donk ship the flop, a donkament strategy. You have the flop information to decide on ranges and you let the villain have a chance to miss the flop vs his having a shrug and get it in pre.

I saw that definition also, but in LHE, I believe it was betting the flop, getting raised, and just calling with the intention of donking the turn. Seemed to be mostly a play to avoid getting free carded. I don't see many people advocating for it these days, so I guess it didn't stand the test of time.

You are correct Doug, but with a lot less sarcasm than I was using.

Here's one that I thought was pretty good:

holdem round of some mixed game:

I raise on the button, small blind folds, big blind calls.

J96r

big blind donks, I raise, he calls.

To

big blind donks, I call.

x

big blind bets, I call. He shows T9o.

Then he says "Yeah, I just pulled the double stop n go." gg nh wp etc etc.

Yes this is the definition, which is why I think it is generally a bad play. I can see it being justified in rare instances where the turn card is going to massively change your equity in the hand but seems generally bad.

I've played over 150 nl tourneys in the past month and haven't used this play once in hu pots. I don't think I'm missing much value, if any.

If I can't shove preflop, that means that my opponent has too many overpairs in his range, otherwise I could shove preflop with a hand like 66 for max profit. Then the flop comes and guess what? He still has all those overpairs in range and will not fold them with rare exception. May as well check and decide imo.

This is poor logic. Assuming that you're maximizing profit just because you're getting it in preflop is likely an error. The underlined is a bad assumption about how your opponent will play.

If you shove 66 preflop, you might get called by 77 because of the immediate pot odds and equity. But if you just call and then shove on the flop, there's a reasonable chance that a hand like 77 will fold, especially if the flop is something like QJx. And that's a huge profit boost for you because you've just stolen all of his equity.

There's no obvious reason that your opponent is automatically committed to showing down a hand that they would have called an all-in preflop with. (Yes, stack sizes matter.)

Edit: And this doesn't even take into account ICM stuff, which I think increases the value of this play because now villain is making a decision with fewer chips so that each chip is now more valuable. This increases the pain of calling off his chips after seeing a bad flop.

Or Villains have changed.

It's not hard to come up with an ideal scenario - someone raises the flop with a draw heavy range but won't 4-bet if you 3-bet, and will take a free card often on the turn. The question is how often you meet Villains like that. Maybe they were really common in the past. Or maybe they're really common in one regional area.

Papi? Is that you?

I think this would be pretty bad.

I disagree that it's a bad assumption but I would agree that I was lazy with my incomplete wording.

If I can't shove preflop for max profit, that means that there is a lack of underpairs, and too many overpairs, and or not enough unpaired hands in my opponent's stack off range for shoving to be the best play.

Here is an example. Crazy good 20 game, players as follows:
- UTG - solid TAG but probably too weak tight to be a big winner in this game long term
- UTG +1 - terrible LAG, pays off with anything, game basically built around him
- UTG + 2 - thinking LAG
- MP1 - loose passive old man, calls any two suited preflop and with any draw to the river
- Button - solid TAG, best player in the game
- SB - loose passive, non thinking player

UTG raises red KK, everyone listed above calls. All of this is pretty standard but a couple alarm bells go off about the button. He has a pretty narrow range to cold call here PF. Also somewhat surprising that one of the LAGs didn't three bet. Flop is 554ssc, UTG bets, UTG + 1 calls, UTG + 2 raises, MP folds, button calls (more alarm bells), SB calls.

UTG decides to just call and donk "safe" turns.

That is what I would call a stop and go.

I would hate to be UTG in this spot.

This has nothing to Do with anything. The equity gained in a stop and go is basically taking a hand you were going to flip with and shoving reasonable boards. We're basically 50-50 66 vs AQ but much better equity if we get almost of that in on dry flop (and they fold away their equity). If we get stacked by TT we would have getting stacked anyways. There's a chance we check fold enst had on some flop (like they shove KT on JQ etc) but we're a huge dog can their range and we more than make up for that when they fold 2 overs + bd.

I've def used it in some tourney spots and you may be leaving some money on table if you have never done it in 200 tourneys.

Some people actually think this is the best play? I find that surprising

I'm not saying I never donk flops, but I never donk QJ2. If I was to devise a donking strategy on QJ2 vs someone that either folds too much or checks too much, 66 would not be in it.

Sure, and this is all stack-size dependent. When the blinds get big (or your stack gets small), there are situations where you look at your cards and you are basically committed to the hand. In those spots, you can either shove and flip preflop or call and then shove on the flop, regardless of what comes.

I have to admit to not having run the simulations/scenarios to know the precise frequency of different types of flops, but since getting your opponent to fold bigger pocket pairs is a big steal, it might be better to play the hand this way and get those extra wins.

Now, if you think shoving preflop will make your opponent fold some hands (your stack is big enough that he has a real decision), then shoving preflop with 66 is probably better.

I think this is backwards. Your value shoving range should shrink as the size of your investment increases. So if you're shoving over a 3x raise with 11 big blinds, your value range should be wider than it would be if you were shoving over that same 3x raise with 20 big blinds.

Then as the size of your investment increases, you get to add more hands through polarization; these hands benefit from fold equity as you explained, but I wouldn't polarize with pairs; typically A2s-A5s, and suited connectors make for much better hands to do this with.

Let's get into the details of this, because I can't tell if you've just got a completely different perspective or if you're addressing the wrong scenario.

Let's say that there's a late position open-raise to 3x. You're sitting on 11 BB in the small blind. You believe that your opponent's open-raising range is big enough that 66 is ahead.

If you play this hand, you're pretty much committed to showing this down, aren't you? Calling to see the flop and giving up leaves you with only 8 BB and you're pretty deep in push-fold territory.

If you shove preflop, your opponent will be looking at a pot size of 15 and needing 8 BB to call. That's about 2:1 and, especially since it's an all-in, he's just got to estimate your pushing range. Overall, the price isn't that bad. It's an all-in with no reverse implied odds against a short stack, so he might call a good amount of the time, even with somewhat weaker hands. (Of course, this becomes more true as his stack gets larger, making the relative risk smaller.)

But let's say you call the raise and push every flop. After your flop call, the pot size is 7 BB. Your push is a pot sized bet. The unpaired hands in his range are likely to have missed the flop (roughly 2/3 of the time), and you were almost certainly flipping against those hands preflop. But I don't think he's calling a pot sized bet with nothing. So you've now managed to win a fair number of pots you would have otherwise lost. You will *still* lose to most of the other hands as well as hands that paired up on the flop, but you would have lost to those in a preflop shove scenario anyway.

I'll admit to not having seen a lot of numbers on these types of scenarios. I don't have enough tournament experience to have a good sense of the types of opening ranges you might be facing at these times. So here are the places I could be wrong:

* 66 is ahead of villain's range.
* 66 is a hand to be committed with with an 11 BB stack.
* Villain will call a preflop push with a wide range of hands.
* Villain will not call a pot-sized push with a wide range of hands on the flop.

With 11 BB in your stack, your M is less than 4, and your stack is on life support. You pretty much should be shoving any hand you play, and you should be playing fairly wide.

Right. I picked Bob's low end value to ensure this type of scenario. I want to force commitment based on the strength of the hand. I could have picked too low here. I don't know for certain.

And that's kind of the underlying question. Do you do better by just calling preflop and pushing the flop, or do you do better by pushing now? Which hands call you preflop if you push now, and which ones do you steal equity from with a stop-and-go (and is it enough to justify it)?

At a theoretical level, I "know" (aka, I would be surprised if it's false) that there's a cutoff point for this, but I don't have enough experience to have an intuitive sense for where that is.