Playing Against a Maniac - Preflop Adjustments

A maniac is hard to miss. He’s in more pots than anyone else and he’s raising like crazy. He’s making moves you rarely see (for good reason!). There is nothing more profitable and nothing more dangerous than a maniac sitting at your table.  A quiet, tight, passive game can turn into a string of huge pots and crazy raising, just by adding a single maniac. There are obvious reasons to want to be in a game where there’s a maniac. He’ll lose everything he puts on the table a good majority of the time. That money has got to go somewhere, so there’s a profit to made. However, if you’re going to make the most of the opportunity you’ll have to play a lot looser and more aggressively in some situations. Your long-term profit goes up with a maniac, but so do your short-term swings, so buckle up.

The first thing to take into account against a manaic is your position. There’s a huge difference between acting after (being to the left of) a maniac and acting before him. When you act before the maniac there’s only so much you can do. Against a maniac, hands often go to showdown, and there’s hardly ever a good opportunity to bluff. So don’t try to steal the blinds by raising any speculative hands like connected suiters. With hands that have OK showdown value, but play poorly against good players, you may raise where you would have folded before. Some examples would be lower and middle pockets pairs and decent aces, like AT or A9. You’re hoping the maniac will reraise and you two will go heads up to the flop, where you will usually call him down. Only make these marginal raises when you and the maniac are in late position, however.

If you are seated to the left of the maniac in an online poker room, especially the next seat or two, you’re in a great position. Your main weapon will be the isolation raise, which is the perfect money extractor against a maniac. When the maniac enters the pot with a raise, which will be most of the time, you reraise with any decent hand. You’ll usually be ahead of him, you’ll have position throughout the hand, which means cheap showdowns when you miss and expensive ones when you hit, and you’ll force anyone else who wants to play with him to call three bets instead of two, a perfect situation.

A word of warning: other good players will recognize what you’re doing and reraise your isolation play with some hands they would normally fold against a three bet. That’s the price you pay to try and get the maniac’s money. Bigger risk, bigger swings, but bigger rewards.