(This post valid for limit hold ‘em)

It seems obvious to me that a lot of players select tables based on opposition, which is smart. I say it’s obvious, because it seems that it’s always the loose tables with big pots that fill up first and even have waiting lists, meanwhile tight tables with small pots remain 4-handed. Did you notice this phenomenon? Do you perhaps yourself use this method to select tables? Chances are you do. Now, a table with big pots and a high share of players who see the pot is, in essence, a loose-aggressive table and the epitome of a loose-aggressive player is commonly referred to as “the maniac.” You’ve all played him, I’m sure. He likes to bet, raise and re-raise often. He sees an average amount of flops, but when he’s in the hand, he will fight to defend his right to win it.

A player who raises and re-raises seemingly any time he enters a hand? Wow, this guy must be easy to beat! Right? Right..?

A loose-aggressive player is never “easy” to beat, because his actions don’t really tell you much about his hand. It’s a completely different story when a tight-passive player raises, of course - you know he’s got something. Raising is not what he normally does. Conversely, a loose-aggressive player who folds - something HE doesn’t do often - probably doesn’t have anything, but by the time you gain that information you can’t use it anymore; he’s already folded. The tight-passive supplied you with information you can use to your advantage, the loose-aggressive didn’t. So you’re sitting in a guessing game with a loose-aggressive player. Did he re-raise you with ace-high? With an inside straight draw? With a set?

The most common change in players’ styles in reaction to a maniac is that they, too, start to raise and re-raise, seemingly saying “you’re not going to run me over, you bully!” And then you can spot what only a few minutes ago seemed like a semi-tight-aggressive player capping preflop with ace-jack offsuit and checkraising the turn unimproved. What the hell? What’s that supposed to accomplish? “If you can’t beat them, join them” is not a good mantra for playing maniacs. Don’t play their game, they’re probably better at it than you.

Another common way of playing the maniacs is to wait for premium hands and then hit him where it hurts. This is a decent strategy, and potentially profitable in the long run, depending on your variety of maniac. I warn you now not to presume that your opponents are blind, deaf and stupid, though. Aggressive players, as opposed to passive players, are rarely on autopilot. They’re watching the table and they tend to hold grudges. They will remember when someone beat them, and likely exactly how it happened. You won’t get a good chance to smack him with the nuts twice, because he remembers you from last time. (For the same reason, he doesn’t buy it when you bluff, because he knows how you play the nuts.) He can now beat you because you’re playing predictably.

Before I go on to explain how to beat a maniac, let me explain why it is that they’re hard to play at all. They clearly spend a lot of time raising with the worst hand, so how can they ever be winning money? Because it’s (usually) better to raise with the worst hand than folding with the best one! This is especially true in big pots and pots tend to be big with a maniac around. You have to act on the information you have, and with an unpredictable player that mostly raises when he doesn’t fold, you simply won’t have a lot to base your decisions on, so you’ll do the wrong thing a lot, like raising when he actually has a hand, or fold when he has nothing. It’s especially the latter mistake that’s costly for you, because folding a winner is really expensive.

So what should you do?

Play your usual game preflop, first and foremost. Don’t suddenly start to cap with KJ just because you know there’s a chance he has a worse hand than you. There are a lot of better hands he could have, too. Easy, tiger.

Secondly, bluff less. It’s true that he will have air a lot of the time, but his reaction to you checkraising him isn’t necessarily folding just because he has nothing. There’s a decent chance he’ll re-raise you, and if you then fold you may have folded the best hand. His nothing may well be worse than your nothing.

Thirdly, if you hold a mediocre holding, let’s say K-9 on a Q-9-5 board and you checkraise the flop, and then he 3-bets, you should mostly go into call-down mode. He will 3-bet with a lot of hands you can beat, and there’s a very good chance that you’re still ahead, probably greater than 50%. So why shouldn’t you raise, then? Because of title of this article: Reverse implied odds. If you cap with K-9 on this board, you’re making it very clear that you have something. Your checkraise didn’t really have to mean “I have something,” because you could have been making a move. Capping the betting, however, is a bet that expects to be called. So now he knows you have something, and you’ve told him that you’re serious about playing this something.

Given that he knows that you have a hand, and that you’ve more or less written him a contract with your signature on it that you won’t fold, no sir, what consequence will that have for the rest of the hand? Two things:

A) He won’t pay you off when he doesn’t have it.
B) You will pay him off when he has it.

Doesn’t that just suck? By being aggressive back at him, you’re playing your cards face-up on the table more or less. It’s a bit unfair, perhaps, since his raises and re-raises doesn’t reveal his hand to you, but yours do to him. But you’re not him and the way you act is not his way. So what should you do?

Deny him the opportunity of superior decision making. In essence, the strategy I’m suggesting boils down to becoming a calling station with your decent hands:

Play preflop normally. Re-raise your strong hands. You can raise to isolate him, but don’t lower your standards too much.

If you have a hand that stands a reasonable - but not great - chance of winning, call him down. He’ll bet every street for you. Sometimes you’ll lose, sometimes you’ll win. Stick with your regular starting hand requirements, and your hands will on average be better than his anyway, so you’ll win more than you lose.

Re-raise your strong hands post-flop. It doesn’t have to be a lock, but it has to have a solid chance of winning. Flopping K-9-7 with a hand like KQ qualifies.

Call-down your mediocre hands, e.g. the K-9 hand above, where you flopped middle pair.

Re-raise some of your weakest hands, the hands that stand no chance of winning unless he folds. Unlike doing this with a mediocre hand, you haven’t lost much if you actually fold, because you don’t run at all as big of a risk to fold the best hand. For instance, you can raise with a hand like 9-8 on a A-7-4 board. It’s quite likely that he doesn’t have an ace, and he may actually give up if you represent having it. If he comes over the top and manages to “bluff you out” with a K-high hand, you’ve folded the worst hand and it’s not a big deal. However, if you had raised with 9-7 (a pair of sevens) and he manages to push you out of the pot, that’s very expensive for you.

The reason to raise not only the strongest hands but also the weakest is to balance what you’re doing. If he catches on that you only raise with really strong hands, he’ll start folding when you do it. If he thinks you’re only raising with air, you’ll make a ton of money on your power houses.

Having said all this, I want to urge you to stay cool, calm and collected with one of these guys at your table. They thrive on making you tilt, and you would do well not to give them that satisfaction. Stay focused on what your goal is. If you play correctly against these highly profitable opponents, you’ll win a lot of money. If you easily tilt and/or try to outmaneuver them by playing “their” game, you’ll find yourself in a world of fluctuation where you just might end up having gotten the worst of it, after all.