you always have to plan ahead for these things.  do a risk assessment and see if the reward is enough to even bother thinking about different methods of claiming these airdrops.

for example so far i have only participated in a handful of airdrops so far simply because the rest of them are too time consuming and i prefer using my time more constructively.

as for bitcoin gold the way to claim it was to deposit your coins on exchanges. i used Yobit for that matter. the risks were obvious for me so i did it with a small amount of my stash, you know because it was Yobit and they are shady as hell. but the reward was good since the price of BTG went to the moon in the first couple of hours but i had to keep my bitcoins there for a couple of days since they disabled their withdrawals.

now you will have to wait until the release. good news is that by that time the price may have another pump which may even be as big as the first one (0.19BTC)