Win Money From A Maniac In Real Money Poker Games
Greetings poker lovers! You know in online poker dealing with ‘maniacs’ – means players with wildly aggressive, unpredictable playing styles – is one of the more difficult things you’ll face in poker cash games. If you don’t know how to play accurately against these kinds of players, you might very well lose a game.
To win against ‘maniac’ players you need to think a few things. Most significantly position, starting hand selection and how to play post flop.
Tighten Your Starting Hand Selection
The first thing to do when you are playing best online poker against a maniac is tighten up your starting hand selection. A maniac will raise roughly all hands, despite of position, and carry on to fire bets on the flop, turn and river. This means that you just have not to play many weak hands. You want to play big cards.
If you’re in position you can widen up your range and you might get away with playing suited and connected cards. But you should flat call with most of these hands.
Many people consider that the best way to handle a maniac is to apply the same style of aggression. The problem with this is that some maniacs will back off or will simply shove over you. This increases your variance.
Flat Call Pre-flop
Maniacs are so used to seeing people either fold or call pre-flop that they frequently expect a big hand when someone raises them. When you raise them pre-flop you are giving them extra information. They are unlikely to fold but they often will play you on a range of hands. So you’ll want to flat call with a lot of hands pre-flop. The natural exceptions are when you want to get all your chips in with aces or kings.
Trickle Around Effect
The maniac is not the only player you need to be aware of. Other players at the table will now play online poker India differently as well. It’s usual for many players to tighten up when dealing with a maniac. This means that you need to be careful when other players come into a hand where you’re trying to trap a maniac.
Think the following example of a trapping situation. A maniac opens to 5x the blind in early position. It folds to someone in middle position. This person has been playing very tight. He decides to flat-call the raise. If you have a hand like pocket tens you’re well ahead of the Maniac’s range and might think to raise for value. But this is a tricky spot. The tight player might have flatted with a bigger pair. If you put in a raise the maniac will likely call but when the action returns to him the tight player will often three-bet.
This puts you in a bad spot. If you call you’re committing a lot of chips and the maniac has yet to act. If the maniac decides to shove you’ll have to fold if the tight player also moves in to play online poker real money. It would be better to simply flat the raise pre-flop.
Happy playing!