I was having a bit of a debate about this and I want to see if I can some input. I don't think I want to say which side of the debate I was on, I don't wanna skew the responses and I don't wanna feel dumb if I'm wrong

What is the best way to exploit a maniacal opponent given the following reads; plays too many hands, is overly aggro with opens and 3 bets, bets too frequently post flop (bluffs too much and value bets too thin) and tends to use larger bet sizes on average.

We are just adjusting to "opens wide, 3 bets often, aggressive post flop with high c-bet, barrel, and triple barrel %'s, and tends to use larger than standard sizings for his aggressive actions. We are not speculating about how he may respond to donk bets or if he will spazz shove vs raises post flop.. we simply don't know that yet, or how he responds to 3 and 4 bets pre-flop)
.

There were, pretty much, 2 distinct camps among my little group of poker buddies. Everyone seemed convinced they were right and the other group was wrong.

Here are the two "camps"

1) The only adjustments we can and should make based on the info we have are;
Fold less often, call more often, bet/raise less often. Basically become more "stationy" with more of our ranges.
Be more inclined to call with marginal hands, bluff catch more often
Be less inclined to raise for thin value
Be more inclined to slow play monster hands
*"fight fire with water"


2) Don't become more stationy;
tighten our pre-flop opening ranges
3 bet more hands vs his opens
raise more often for value and raise more often as a bluff (like check raising wide and polarized range vs villains c-bets)
value bet thinner
*basically don't be a little b!$h
*"fight fire with fire"


Adjustment set 1 looks to keep villains ranges wide and allow him to bluff off a lot to us, value own himself, and not end up coolering ourselves the once in a while villain actually has it by trying to raise thinner and stack off lighter against villain's wide ranges. The idea here is that we actually don't want villain to stop playing this way. We actually prefer that he continues to play overly aggressive and make betting and raising mistakes against us. (fight fire with water)

Adjustment set 2 looks to make villain pay for his light opens and big bets by way of frequent 3 bets and looks to have a higher % of strong hands in our open ranges that can punish him for 3 betting too wide. This idea also looks to take advantage of villains wider ranges post flop by value betting thinner against a weak range and bluffing more often and not being afraid to go broke with a hand we would never stack against a more passive opponent. And if nothing else we want to send a clear message that "you can beat up on the fish but you are not going to be walking over us or running us over" (fight fire with fire)


What's the right way to think?

Which camp do you belong to?

Any rationales for thinking/playing that way that I skipped here?

I think probably a mix. You'd like to get heads up with the guy. If you have position on him, you raise. If you're before him, you limp-reraise.

Posts flop you're going to want to be pretty stationy, imo. Call light, raise the river with your good hands. Even these aggro players will slow down if you start raising them. If he'll be for you (and bet big) then let him.

Some of these guys are bluffable, some are not. It probably won't take you long to figure out which. Some of them can read hands, some can not. Ditto.

Wow really good thread

Hmmm rusty your strategy doesn't really make sense. If we're the aggressor preflop we will come into the flop attacking and if we then start checking all our medium and strong hands we will probably lose loads of value etc etc. It doesn't really work, but you seem to have the right idea.

We do want our strategy to remain as hidden as possible. And we also want to create a dynamic with the opponent which enables us to take all his chips when we have the nuts. We want him to make his crazy bluffs against us and not against someone else. We want to be his rival.

So we do want to mix up our plays to some degree. If we only go aggro or only go passive we make it easy for him to readjust. Instead we want to scope out his mistakes and then exploit them hard. To do this we need to see what he's doing and how he reacts to our different plays.

All we know about this guy so far is that he bets too light, and so the adjustment we make based on this information is that we continue lighter. We shouldn't tighten our preflop range. This adjustment is for the yellow bellies out there. We want to widen our range whether we end up going for a passive or aggressive approach.

Simply saying raise the river while strong is too rigid. I would often do it when weak depending on the opponents reaction. Raising pre-flop again is too rigid. And again, before we make this assumption we need to have a guess as to how he will react. I would advise limp calling reasonably often too, but again, that depends on everything.

Aswel as seeing how he reacts we have to consider how future cards will effect our situation. For instance. We probably won't want to be calling him down on 69T with 67. The future will bring all kinds of horrible cards and so a raise now might well be the best option. Again though, we need to have some understanding of how he reacts to different types of cards.

Haven't read responses ...


I like 1 more than 2, but I'd modify 1 by:

(a) Incorporate a part of 2: I probably would tighten my pre-flop range somewhat in some spots, but not too much. Basically, I think I'd eliminate some of the low suited connectors and suited gapper and would prefer hands that can make better pairs; and

(b) I wouldn't necessarily be less inclined to raise for thin value, particularly on the river. On the flop and turn, yes, in a lot of spots given that we should expect him to barrel himself on later streets with a lot of bluffs, but not necessarily all spots, particularly spots where he can have a lot of draws.

Without knowing one way or the other, I would think that this villain probably won't fold much so I suspect that trying to bluff raise him a lot as set forth in 2 is a bad idea. Obviously, if you start seeing him fold to pre-flop 3bets and post-flop raises a lot you can start to adjust this.

I would never limp first in.

I would eliminate the weaker semibluffs from my betting range.

I would build big pots with dominating draws.

I would eliminate bet folding thin value hands.

I would build big pots with strong value hands.

I would call down lighter than I normally would.

Position matters. Raising to isolate makes sense if you are sitting directly the the left of a LAG. Limping and letting him put in the first preflop raise makes sense if you are sitting directly to his right. Then, you can trap people and limp-reraise if people just call his raise if your hands strength warrants it. Otherwise, if it goes multi-way, you have good relative position if you can count on his betting the flop.

If you have a seat change, should you move to his right or his left, given the opportunity? I think that is a matter of personal style. I am the kind of player who would be better off sitting to his right. Other players can't play my style (and I can't play theirs) and would be better off moving to his left. If you move to his left to isolate him and see me to his left, you should consider not 3betting light if you see me limp in ahead of the maniac.

If he c-bets big on the flop and often fires a second and third barrel, this means that he is offering you very good implied odds. This could be an argument for keeping the pot small preflop with speculative hands, since you can often win a big pot if you hit. Your preflop range should probably expand to include more high card hands that would normally result in reverse implied odds against regular players but tighten to leave out more hands like small suited connectors which rely on semibluffing potential to maximize value. You should still consider dumping those high card hands like KJo if the rest of the table is also trying to play a lot of hands with this guy and you can't isolate.

There is a saying in poker: why do the pushing if the donkey will do the pulling? We have an opponent who bets too much and too big. The general exploit to this behavior is to turn value hands into bluff-catchers. We shouldn't worry too much about being counter-exploited. Players like this often have only one gear and won't change speeds on you before they go broke unless they luckbox into a stack big enough that they start to think about tightening up to preserve at least some of their win. Go for maximum exploitation until he shows signs of adjusting.

Haha Lego, yeah, right, course you 'haven't read the responses'!

Lol, they loosen up and you guys tighten up. You're mad! Haha I'm crying laughing over here.

"What do we know Harrison?"

"He bets weak sir"

"Tighten up, raise him damn it!."

"He folded sir"

"Phew, that was close Harrison"

... (20 minutes later)...

"Here's a similar guy, quick Harrison!! Tighten up! Prepare to raise!"

Hahaha sorry gents, but we have no reason what so ever to take any cards from our range. We add to our range.

BTW, Kudos Bob.

I'll go ahead and respond to this entire post, since your last post made little sense.

Against an over-aggressive opponent, you lose value by attacking too much because he starts folding hands that he would bluff with, but wouldn't call a bet with. This could be an argument for rarely raising preflop.

You are not waiting for the nuts against this opponent. You are looking to make hands with showdown value that can catch his bluffs. The danger in trying to monopolize this opponent is that he can run you into everyone else who is waiting to trap him. I am okay with other players playing pots with him. I am not entitled to his stack. I do not feel anything personal about this game. If I am the best player at the table, I can extract his chips from other players if he dumps it to them. If he gets lucky, he may set the rest of the table on tilt. Some of my best sessions have been from victimizing the other players who are tilted by a maniac running good. They start making the mistake of widening their range, thinking that if they hit just once, they can stack the donkey. That's a bad strategy against a maniac.

These players rarely readjust. His biggest mistake is pretty obvious. He bets too often and too big. The exploit is to let him bet and call him down with a lighter range than you would against another player.

We should change the shape of our range. We want hands that have good showdown value if they connect with the flop. We want to play fewer speculative hands that are often going to be in the position of facing a pot-sized turn bet when we have bottom pair or a draw with no other outs like an overcard kicker. I might fold ATo on the button against an EP raise from a regular player, but I will call with it against an EP raise from a maniac. I might decide to raise or fold if the blinds are loose and call almost any preflop raise from this player.

Widening our preflop range is too rigid.

This is why you should consider folding a hand like 76s preflop against a maniac when you wouldn't against a more predictable player.

I don't see why it can't be a mix. Like if we have a medium PP, then we're working off of implied odds so no reason to 3bet pre and if we flop a set, maybe we want to slow play and raise rivers on good run outs. Otoh, we can possibly go to war with hands where we're a bit more concerned about protecting our equity - like AJ on a J82 two toned flop - instead of stationing here, maybe better to raise or x/r flops like this more often. Trying to be a station with one pair is where we'll start making mistakes IMO, so better to just raise when we're much more confident we're ahead of his range. Similarly - preflop, you'll make his life difficult if you widen your 3bet value range, but be prepared for light 4bets and 4bet bluffs from some of them.

If he bluffs the turn a lot, especially on scare cards, you are better off letting him bluff. Trap, but have the balls to stick to the plan when a non-ideal card comes.

Against a true maniac, you should usually decide on the flop if you are calling down on all but the worst run outs or abandoning ship right there. The guys who do poorly against maniacs are the ones who call the flop with no plan on what they are doing beyond that, so they act surprised that they are facing another big bet on the turn.

I did not read the responses before posting my first post in this thread. Not sure why that is funny.

I didn't mean to significantly tighten our range. I meant that in some spots I'd rather weight our range more toward high cards than low suited connectors. Vs. this opponent higher cards that can make better pairs like K9 or QT increase in value and hands like 54s or 64s decrease in value.

I didn't say we were waiting for the nuts... And I'm not just looking for showdown value either. We don't know how often he folds.

Unless 'everyone else' is better than us they help more than they hinder. You can often use them to build the pot, and can take their money too.

Lol Harrison, you then argue that you make money from regs who are tilting after losing to the fish! Hahaha u crack me up.

These opponents, and I presume your still talking about fish, don't adjust anything. They just react. I was simply using your terminology in a vain attempt to teach you something. If you are playing less hands, they will presume you stronger, and then it will be far harder for you to get bluffs or value from them. Their reaction will be to fold.

A good LAG will quickly readjust.

WE DONT KNOW HOW OFTEN HE FOLDS!! Mate, this is a memorised strategy of yours and it makes no logical sense. Why would you ever want to get rid of speculative hands? Who says we can't bluff him loads???

Widening our range allows us to play our hand either aggressively or passively. While rusty wrongly selected the one sided aggressive raise.

You guys...

We can play more value hands when the villain is playing more hands. If he plays AT+ we play AJ+.

This has nothing to do with our bluffs. We bluff based on how often he folds.

... Guys a beginner knows this. Do you not see that GTO and CogD are messing with your minds!?

Most LAGs aren't good.

So what... come on... can't you guys just accept that you don't understand the most basic of exploitative theory. Lets have an normal conversation for a change.

Start making sense and we can have a normal conversation.

The biggest mistake that players make in trying to exploit a bad player is overestimating how much they can outplay the fish and widening their range too much because they think they can overcome the hand quality deficit with their post-flop play.

With your comment about how we should play AJ+ vs someone who plays AT+, I think you are making the mistake of thinking that you should play all hands that beat the worst hand in your opponent's range because that gives you a (slight) range advantage. It feels like you make the common mistake of basing your hand selection on preflop action, when a stronger method is to consider what you want your range to be on the turn and river and work backwards to figure out what your preflop range should be to give you a better range on later streets. You showed some capacity to understand this when you pointed out that having 67 on a T96 board puts you in a difficult spot. Because of situations like this, I would argue that you should have less 76-type hands in your range against this type of player than you should have against other players.

Since this player is very predictable, I would argue that there is less need to go for thin value and that you should pass up uncertain gambles that might be mildly +EV because he is likely to offer you future opportunities where you have a bigger edge. If waiting leads to him dumping money to someone else, then so be it. Poker shouldn't be personal. If you have a sense of entitlement towards another player's stack, that is an ego leak. I tend to exploit players who feel that way by using the bad player to trap them or by capitalizing on their inevitable tilt if they suffer the perceived injustice of the universe of not getting the bad player's money or, worse, getting stacked by him.

great conversation, appreciate all the responses but I was hoping to get something more like an answer. Maybe it just is not as black and white as I think it is. I am pretty confident that my adjustments to this type of play are right.

If villain is overly aggressive, plays too many hands, bets and raises too large and at too high a frequency then it seems just as simple as can be to me personally that the correct adjustment is simply to call more often and raise less often.
What about when we have a really strong hand on the flop? Call more often raise less often
What if our hand is marginal like some kind of pure bluff catcher? Call more often raise less often
What about a mediocre hand pre-flop? Call more raise less often
Super strong hand on the turn? Call more raise less.
Draw? Call more often raise less often.

Now, I do understand that you could be missing chances to make really profitable light 3 bets but that would depend on how villain continues vs 3 bets. He may play very well against 3 bets, maybe he opens a light 4 bet range, balances it perfectly, and folds about the right number of hands and calls with the rest. Is 3 betting still great? Probably not if we know how he's going to make mistakes post flop.
What about raising him post flop so we can set up a dynamic that lets us get it in against him often when we induce spazz outs?? Well, yeah, I mean that COULD be ok but we don't know that based strictly on the reads i gave in OP.

What about tightening up our range pre-flop? Well, I think that's just silly. Let's say we were playing heads up. If our opponent was a perfect GTO bot and we knew exactly the range of hands we should play at equilibrium then GTO bot started playing more hands there is no way that can cause us to SUBTRACT hands to our ranges. Anything a fish does in a bad way makes it more not less profitable for us to play and there is no way that can do anything but add hands to our ranges. Now, we if we mean that we should play a tighter range than we would against a player with the same LAG style but who used smaller bet sizings then, well, sure.. we can tighten up in the face of bigger bets but relative to someone playing an otherwise good strategy with big bets and raises we should be playing more hands not less and we should be doing that by adding hands to our calling range not our raising range.

So, yeah, if our opponent is making maniacal mistakes it COULD be we can figure out some other stuff he does poorly and make some other adjustments. And you could maybe make an argument for mixing it up still so you don't let him adjust to your exploits but, again, not exactly what the debate was about.

So.. I am FIRMLY in camp one.

If you guys HAD TO chose one camp or the other?? one or two?

And what would you change about this "paradigm 1"?

What do I have wrong?

I think its great to just "avoid the virtual coolers" and keep villains bluffing range in tact, let him value own himself, and slow play big hands until the river and then i would even check to him more than usual and look to check raise my strongest hands.

I think one is correct and two just kinda sounds good.

Yay?

Nay?

Whatcha think between the two?


Of course any further discussion is great too but I thought it was maybe a good time to just say where I come down on the issue.

It did make for a hell of a debate and was intersting to hear players of ~ equal skill levels and with aprox the same win rates playing the same stakes for about the same amount of time disagree so feircely on this topic.

Everyone was SOO confident and argumentitive in my little group and we RARELY disagree and NEVER actually get heated,.. things on this topic got a bit heated.

And, of course, I still believe i'm right and they're wrong

But ready to be corrected..

Which part of this doesn't make sense...

"If the opponent is playing too many hands we can play more hands profitably"

... or the way it should be written ..

"If the opponent is playing lots of hands you can play almost as many for value."

I am taking the future into consideration, but I don't need to work backwards and create an actual range for myself on all streets! That calculation is very complicated and is not needed. Instead of that, I just consider the future and make a guess as to whether my hand will make profit in the end.

... which is so, so much easier to do...

Look, I'm trying to help you. Your subconscious mind is making up ridiculous excuses to stop you seeing how to calculate these simple exploitative sums. What was the one you just said? "players make the mistake of over estimating how much they can beat the fish" !!! Dude, you tighten up!! That's what you might want to do against a great player, not a fish. Your making absolutely no sense and your subconscious is switching it around and blaming me for the exact thing that you are guilty of... I make perfect sense.

Out of these two... Camp 1 clearly takes it for me

One.

In some spots, weight pre-flop range more toward high card hands that can make good pairs that I can station down with rather than small suited connector or suited gapper hands.

If I start to notice that he does fold a good amount to 3bets and post-flop raises, then throw some light 3bets and post-flop bluffs back in, in good spots for them.

1) The only adjustments we can and should make based on the info we have are;
Fold less often, call or bet/raise more often. Basically expand our value range.
Be more inclined to call or raise with marginal hands, bluff catch more often

*"fight fire with expandable foam"

...That's how I think it should read

Let's look at a hypothetical situation. If your opponent has a range of AT+/99+, AJo has 38.75% equity. Playing hands that are only slightly better than the bottom of your opponent's range isn't really that good of a strategy. You can play more hands against an opponent with a wider range, but you shouldn't overdo it.

That's just more nonsense arguments mate, you work it out yourself, it's pretty straight forward

Against overly LAG players I'm going to have to side with paradigm 1. I'm going to open my range slightly and let said player take himself to value town and bluff catch. If the LAG player adjusts obviously we adjust accordingly. As to the argument between tightening up against the player I'd have to agree that we would lose a lot of value by doing so over any decent length session. Obviously by widening our range we give him a slight increase in his chance to luck box, but overtime he is going to bury himself more often than not.

thanks a lot everyone, I have a couple guys I'm going to have take a look at this thread. Yadoula8, I really appreciate your first comment about this being a great thread. I'm happy it was so well received.

And, Yadoula, I think we actually agree for the most part, maybe entirely but we have more of a semantics problem than anything. I didn't mean to say that you can play more hands than your maniac opponent, I just meant you could play more hands than you would play at equilibrium.

"Play more hands" THAN YOU NORMALLY WOULD, not "PLAY MORE HANDS" than your maniacal villain.


At the risk of derailing my own thread. I would like to add a question about playing against maniacs in six max games online and in MTT's online. ( I play mostly $1-$3 live cash games and nl20 HUSnG's, sometimes even microstakes HUSnG's and I play as high as nl50 HUSnG's but I haven't played much six max regular speed online cash games and have not played a ton of online MTT's either but I want to start playing these formats.)

Should we expect most maniacal opponents or even decent LAGs or winning LAGs to respond to our 3 bets by;
Folding a lot because they have such wide and weak open ranges?
4 betting a lot because, afterall, they do seem to be prone to aggression
or
Is this a total non starter? Is there no solid correlation? I could see this being an utterly different/seperate question all together.

Thoughts?

I expect them to call a lot so they can try to outplay me postflop until they prove me otherwise.