Maniac raises UTG. Hes been back raising and 4 betting anything he 2 bets pre. I 3! button JTo. Meh BB calls. Hes not good, but hes not horrid. UTG caps as expected.
Flop KsQs9h. UTG bets I 2! BB calls UTG 3! I cap.
Turn 5s UTG bet I 2! BB call UTG call. I have no spade
River 3d checks to me I bet

Sure. Preflop is still probably a fold though

This all looks good to me. I am slightly annoyed that BB cold-called the turn raise, but we still get to print on the river against the maniac and BB has to make some unpleasant calls.

JTo is beast against a maniac from the BTN imo. Maniacs usually don't care about position... they just kind of spam raise the same goofy range from wherever, whenever.

If I thought the UTG would just call the 3 bet I like the raise. The fact that we know it's gonna go 4 bets concerns me. I suppose our hand is still decent against a maniacs range and we are just gonna have to deal with some variance.

Mongidig, your strat posts have consistently monkey tilted me for years now. It continues to hurt my soul to see a player who had a high winrate in the PTR era allow himself to just get worse and worse at poker every year because he plays in ultra-soft live games where being a bad reg is still quite sufficient to make money.

But this time Mongidig, you finally did it. You finally made the worst strat post that I have ever seen in my 17ish years of posting in this forum. I am not exaggerating. This is literally the worst strat post I have ever seen. It makes me want to curl up in the fetal position under a hot shower and just scream and cry.

Please, please, please try to channel the old PTR era Mongidig for a few minutes and think rationally about this spot. Cepheus 3bets all sorts of trash that is way worse than JTo from out of position against an opponent that is going to play perfectly postflop. We are in position against a player with a similar opening range who is literally in the top 1% of the most horrible players in the world postflop. It does not even remotely matter that this maniac is going to cap us with 85o. How do such thoughts even enter one's mind?

back in *my* ptr days, my 3! here would probably even be a bit wider than my button open range. Even thinking about preflop range equity is kind of missing the point...

I agree that not wanting it to be 4 bet (if it says nothing about villain's hand quality) makes no sense here.

I am wondering about the Cepheus comment here though. Why would it be 3-betting trash OOP?

For me, it would mainly depend on how much I expect the blinds to put up with my bs. If I have a great read on the maniac's postflop play and the blinds are the cooperative types, I just go bonkers.

If you are wondering if I am telling the truth, Cepheus' pre-flop chart is on their website. You can just hover over it and see that it 3bets stuff as bad as J5o a tiny % of the time. Polaris did similar stuff back in the day.

I don't actually know why Cepheus thinks it is so awesome to 3bet a bunch of offsuit trash at a tiny %. The only thing I know for sure is that when it mixes with a hand, it expects both options to have the same EV at equilibrium.

Cepheus is a HU bot. UG is pointing out that it is 3b junk OOP (heads up) against an in position opener (the button/sb). In OP's example, we are multiway, but UG is just using this as a point of reference for how we play wide range spots.

My understanding is that Cepheus three bets a very wide range because the button opens an incredibly wide range, so even junky hands are ahead or at least not doing that badly equity wise, and it needs to construct balanced calling and 3b ranges. When button is opening hands like Q2o, J3o, 95o, 32s, etc., we don't need much to battle.

That said, Cepheus's 3b with junky offsuit stuff is at a very low frequency. Even a hand like Q9o is getting 3b less than 25% of the time. Cepheus likes to 3b suited connectors and one gappers as well as some big suited hands (like K5s, but even hands like J4s), which makes sense for us humans too becuase their equity is a lot easier to realize.

My head exploded in this thread, then in a surprising turn of events it re-exploded