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Playing Against a Maniac

In holdem, there sometimes will be a “maniac” at your poker table.

A maniac is a person who not only plays much more than his appropriate share of hands, but also constantly raises and reraises, even though the hand he holds does not warrant it.

Although the maniac eventually will go broke, he does pose a set of problems for you.

Note that the best type of opponent is a loose, passive player, as he will call your bets when he shouldn’t, and since he rarely bluffs, you almost always know where he stands.

That is, you often can safely throw away your hand in spots where you would have to pay off other players, particularly the miniac.

In addition, as pointed out earlier in the text, you can successfully play more hands against this type of opponent.

Maniacs make it a little tougher to get their money.)

So how do you play online poker against a loose, wild, and extremely aggressive player? If he acts after you do, you must be very selective of the hands you play.

Also realize that drawing hands, such as that require high implied odds go down in value, since you can expect the maniac to raise and thus limit the number of opponents that will see the flop.

In other words, you should only play hands made up of high cards and medium or big pairs, unless several people have already called in front of you.

If you act after a maniac, the situation has changed somewhat.

This is because when he raises, his standard raising hand is generally much weaker than the average raising hand of a typical opponent.

Consequently, if you are going to play against the maniac, be prepared to reraise to punish him for his extra aggressive tendencies.

A second benefit of reraising is that you increase your chance of getting the pot heads-up fifth street against him.

You usually want to sit to the left of the maniac unless there are some wise players in the game who will not tolerate your strategy and will play or even make it four bets with many hands behind you.

But if the other players are going to allow you to reraise him with hands like and they still won’t try to interfere unless they have a legitimate three bet hand, then you definitely want to be on his left.

If there are other players who will interfere, then it might be best to be on the maniac’s right so that you first get a chance to see what they do.

Being on his right gives you the opportunity to limp in before the flop or check to him on the later poker streets.

It puts everyone in the middle and then you will have the option to raise. This has many advantages.

The only reason to be on his left is to try to isolate him.

Again, if you have a maniac in the game you want to be on his left if the rest of the table will allow you to constantly get him heads-up.

If you can’t isolate him, you prefer to be on his right because you want to check, and after he bets you can put them in the middle. (If you are heads-up it really doesn’t matter since you will almost always check to the maniac if you are first to act.)

So let’s assume that a maniac is in your game, he’s raising almost every hand, and you are seated to his left.

What hands do you play? The answer is that you should play those hands that can win showdowns without improving.

This includes hands like A9 and KT, and you’ll reraise with them providing that your reraise will almost always get you heads-up.

If you do, you should see most of these poker hands to the end unless it “comes down real bad.”

Now you may say that it will be obvious to some of the other players at the table what you are doing.

But it still puts them in a bad position when you make it three bets.

Unless they are comfortable with trying to interfere with what you are doing –and very few players are – you may be able to play as much as 25 percent of your hands in this fashion provided that you are in a late position and there is no one else (except the maniac) in the pot.

If 25 percent seems high, remember the maniac will be playing close to 100 percent of his hands.