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In response to Megabet and tigerite:

The use of stop'n'go, when it should be used, is usually pretty much unquestionably the best play, and can easily be proven so.

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Indeed. It's also best not to stop-and-go with strong hands like AK, because you don't want them to fold.

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Nothing personal, but this is just so awfully wrong that it hurts. Come on, you "agree" with Megabet's "poker is beautiful cuz there are so many situations" message with a blanket statement that doesn't even apply into most situations.

Say you're heads up against an opponent with 250/500 blinds and stacks of 4000 for the both of you. The opponent, now in small blind, has raised every hand to 4BB. So they raise to T2000 again. You know for a fact that they will call your possible reraise with any two, as they should, since they're getting 3:1 odds for the call. You hold AK, so you decide to push because it's so cool to be such a leet dominator, even though you know there's a possibility for the opponent to fold to stop'n'go, since you did it with a crappier hand earlier in an identical situation.

AK against a random hand is a 65% favorite. By pushing preflop, knowing that they will call, you win

0,65 * 8000 - 4000 = 1200

chips on average, if we treat your BB as part of your stack just to make the numbers neater.

Now, if you reckon that the villain will fold x% of the time to a stop'n'go, you win 100% - x% of the time the previously calculated sum, and x% of the time you steal villains 2000 chips uncontested. Thus, you win

1-x * 1200 + x * 2000

chips on average. It's easy to see that if villain folds to the stop'n'go at any time, it's profitable, and if they never fold, it's no worse than pushing preflop. The bigger x is, the more stop'n'go pwns over pushing preflop.

Ok, now you can complain how my example sucks because villain is pushing air and AK is so great because it has the possibility to dominate Ax and Kx. Let's say villain pushes top 30%, and calls the reraise preflop every time.

AK against Ax, K5, Q9, JT, 22 (30,4%) is again a 65% favorite. AK against the unrealistic range of Ax, Kx, 22 is only a 67% favorite. (Numbers courtesy of Poker Calculator.) I won't bother redoing the numbers with AK being a +2% fave.

If you still have doubts and think that I especially planned some kind of an unrealistic or especially rare example to prove my point, you can easily calculate other situations like this.

If my math is incorrect, please point that out too.

I think I should actually thank you guys for forcing me to do this! TY [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Beat me to it.