After reviewing a few hands in tournaments the other day, a question arose regarding the stop-and-go.

Are there pre-requisites for a stop-and-go concerning your position? Technically, if you call a raise with the intention of shoving no matter what the flop, this is a stop-and-go. However, I wonder if for the technique to be effective, one must be specifically defending the blind from a late position raise (steal) or not.

I don’t recall this being explicit in texts, but I checked a few hand examples here and there and they all show someone in the blinds short-stacked doing a stop-and-go.

So at least two pre-requisites appear to be: if you’re short-stacked and desperate, and if it’s a Heads-up Pot then you can consider a stop-and-go.

Would you say being in the big blind, ‘defending’ against a late position steal is a pre-requisite for stop-and-gos?

If you check in your DB, is the stop-and-go effective when you’re not in the BB? Is it effective if it’s against an early raiser when you are in the BB?