Personally, I usually don't like the stress of playing high variance games like PLO, or NL when there's a maniac. Nonetheless, I understand the proper strategy of playing against maniacs, and if I'm not in the mood to gambol with marginal hands then my best options are to table-change or go home.

The whole appeal of a no limit game is your opponent can put in however many chips they have with a worse hand and maniac players might do that multiple times in one orbit just in response to a check.

This is totally fine. I'd argue leaving a table with a maniac is hurting your EV big time, but obviously not wanting to deal with the high variance is totally fine.

What I actually find more annoying is a situation which happened recently, where someone sat at a 1-2, 400max table (5-6 handed at the time), and loudly announced he wanted to gamble. After more than doubling up with some lucky flips, he began to straddle or blind raise $25-$50 most hands, essentially turning the game into a short-stack flipathon. I'm sure it was a +ev situation, but not a game I really wanted to play. I don't even understand why a room would allow uncapped straddles and blind raises in a game without a "match the stack" option.

Of course, anyone who is playing poker to support themselves lives for these situations. For some of us--it's not how we want to spend the handful of free hours we may have to play cards.

Very bizarre that people are conflating someone being a maniac with having a 100% 4bet range.

His 3b, 4b and 5b range does seem to be ATC. So no, not that bizarre to think that going off what OP has given as reads.

His 4bet range probably looks similar to an optimal CO RFI range here, very wide.

Might want to keep reading, to get the most recent update on what V seems to be doing when this hand starts...

So...yeah, maybe several hours ago, V was aggressively 3B'ing and 4B'ing pre with ATC. Now, not so much.

If he was out of line with his 4B'ing range here, he was probably be hoping hero folds. But hero didn't fold. Hero called. So obviously hero has some sort of hand. V would more than likely dial it back and check flop, or bet small, if he was bluffing.

But V bet pot on the flop anyway. He's got all the Jx, Tx, and JT in his range. Maybe we don't want to punt off with AK. Even a maniac is going to have it sometimes, and probably pretty often when he opens, gets 3B to 4x, puts in a 4B, and gets called, then bets pot.

Pre, sure, I'm willing to 5B this guy with AK. Post-flop, after we call his 4B, I don't think he's frequently going to be bluffing here. In fact, when he takes this line, I think he's rarely bluffing. He almost certainly has AK crushed, I'd expect him to snap us off if we jam, and I'd be expecting him to jam any turn card if we call.

Has a history with villain, stacked off something resembling Q7o.

Not to mention that the bolded is not actual logic people use......

Hero called my 4b, he ''obviously has some sort of hand'' so I am going to stop bluffing are the words no Maniac has ever had cross his mind.

Doesn't 4b ATC but has ALL the Jx, Tx and JT in his range but no Ax, Kx, Qx, 56s, 84o etc etc etc. Range construction is taking a serious hit today.

Anyways, we're obviously NEVER going to agree so I'll leave it at this. I think flop is a snap call, never a fold and the way you advocate to play against maniacs is a very good way to watch everyone else win their money, just not you.

So you think the maniac is under cbetting on this flop, so we should overfold AK as an exploit?

why would we flat AK to fold every flop that isn't A high or K high because "villain can have any two cards so he has to have two pair here and be value betting"

VPIP'ing nearly 100% of hands isn't the same thing as 4B'ing 100% of hands. No one actually got a good look at V's cards in the Q7 hand. OP *THINKS* V had Q7, and apparently that was hours ago, before V dialed back on his pre-flop aggression.

I don't think he's 4B'ing ATC, but I think JTs, AJs, and ATs are easily within his 4B range, when he bets pot on the flop.

Advocating for a snap call is an awesome way to gift-wrap your stack for V.

Yes, pretty much. I think this is an easy fold, judging from what I've seen from maniacs, and what I've read from OP.

Not what I said, so...your words, not mine.

We wouldn't flat AK pre. Or at least, I wouldn't. Once again, I said we should have 5B pre. But I'm not OP, so I wasn't there to push his chips in for him. I don't like how we got to the flop, at all, but now that we're here, I really don't like the idea of compounding our pre-flop mistake by calling this ridiculous c-bet without even having a pair.

I think it's a trivial fold. But, like I said, if you guys want to call with AK, or jam with AK, okay, next time you're in a spot like this with a V like this, by all means do it.

This specific situation doesn't matter.

What's YOUR plan to get money from this type of player.

I want to play with a short/medium/deep stack in small/medium/large pots where I play aggressively/passively/et when in/out of position and I want to be in one on one/multi-way pots and I plan to win small/medium/large pots.

You don't have a strategy here. That's your real issue.

Enjoying reading all of the new responses to this thread.

I wanted to argue with you, but you are probably right to some extent. I said multiple times throughout the thread that my goal was to get a lot of money in the middle against this guy with my good hands, but obviously I flatted pre-flop here with one of my best hands and tossed away a ton of equity. I also said that I was trying to play HU and in-position as much as possible, but the very next hand I flatted his limp-raise w AQo and ended up 4 ways.

Also absolutely willing to concede that I played this hand "scared" and that 400bb is muuuch deeper than I am comfortable playing. In an ideal world, I probably would have ratholed $300 prior to the hand and gotten my stack to a place where I was more than comfortable putting it all-in pre, as I did earlier in the session. This was a really unique spot for me given my relative inexperience and the player pool of short-stack nits and loose passives that I typically play in.

Well put.

Sure, so we can put him on, lets say, a GTO 4 betting range. GTO calls or ships in this spot, so if we put him on a GTO 4 betting range, the only way we should fold is if V is underbluffing on the flop.

This is what i dont particularly like about your response. Its fine to disagree, but when a group of several respected winning players on these forums disagree with you, being so confident that you are right is just pure arrogance.

Like, at minimum, the chorus of opinions opposing your own ought to make you think “hmm, maybe its closer than i think, but i still think its a fold” but instead youre just digging in further, and each time around the merry go round your opinion has become even more intense than the previous time.

Im trying to understand your experience with maniacs that makes you think this. Because the defining feature of a maniac is that he bets too often postflop, so to say that a maniac is underbluffing in a spot would mean that theres something special about THIS spot where he wont overbluff.

My experience with maniacs is that they certainly come in all shapes and sizes, and most of them dont 4 bet bluff pre very often at all, so normally that would be alarm bells for me, but clearly this one 4 bet bluffs some, so against some maniacs, id agree that the 4 bet is suspicious of strength, but not this one.

My experience with maniacs also is that their sizing runs almost contrary to the strength of their hand. Big bet is weakness, small bet is strength, check is extreme strength (or just some air they decided to give up on).

Ive also felt that maniacs love to bet dynamic spots, and the flop is always dynamic of course. And they love to bet in spots where scared money loses their will.

All of this lines up with a classic maniac overbluff spot. Its on the flop, he bet almost suspiciously too large, its in some big spot where scared money overfolds. Im just not understanding what about this spot specifically makes you think the maniac is shutting down with the vast majority of his hands.



I feel like you are saying this as if the people who disagree with you are talking out of our ass about a hypothetical that involves someone elses money when we wouldnt have the balls to actually do it. Its just more weird and unnecessary arrogance at the idea that the people who are responding to you are inexperienced players talking about situations we have never been in. Its simply not true, and I have plenty of experience playing against maniacs, as im sure you have, and most of the others on here, and i definitely practice what I preach, and id expect most of the other players on these forums do as well.

My last trip to vegas I won maybe my biggest pot of the trip in a spot where i was stronger than ace high but to some degree it mightve been just a pure bluff since the AK had outs when called. Cant remember the exact details but this is about how I remember it.

2/5, someone straddled to $10 $2800 effective against a maniac, ive probably taken $1k off of him this session and he still has a $5k stack.

Maniac blind raises $25 utg before being dealt cards.

I go $75 with red 88, call call, maniac goes $500, I call, fold fold

Flop (~$1100) K75ss, he bets $1000, i jam $2300, he folds, picks up his remaining chips and leaves.

And if he had the K or AA or whatever, well, thats poker. Ive had that happen too.

Figured there's already enough viewpoints brought up on preflop and flop strategy vs. maniacs, but I think one main factor causing this discourse is whether we actually want to choose this spot to make a stand against V. Sure, AK does beat out a lot of bluffs vs a maniac, but even if we think he's four-betting wide and c-betting at 100% frequency for this size, our equity is at best around 55%. Would we rather take this spot, or would we rather hold off until we hit the board with at least 65-75% equity?

With maniacs, there are no shortage of opportunities, so why not be patient and take advantage of that?

I agree with this. Also if we lose this hand we sacrifice the ability to play 400bb deep against this guy, since the game has a capped buy in of 200bb.

It's fine to not want to gamble here, but let's not rationalize it with a variant of the classic TAGfish line,"let's wait for a better spot."

Ok lets just ignore FE and all that and say we get it in with 55% equity. Putting $750 more in with 55% equity with a $150 pot already built is worth $1650*.55-750 = $157 of EV. At 1/2 where rhe biggest winners make $20/hr. So youre forfeiting a mere 8 hours of profit (assuming youre one of the biggest winners in the entire casino) to wait for a hypothetical even better spot.

This. Totally fine to say you want to avoid a high variance spot but no reason to make up new maniac definitions to justify your answer.

this cuts both ways. if the next hand he dusts off 200bb and we folded pre because we got dealt j3o we also lose the ability to play 400bb deep against this guy.