How to defend against a Crazy Fabsoul situation
Ok, I'm not sure if you guys have a lot of experience playing Fabsoul. Don't get me wrong, he is (sometimes) a very good player, and he has a very good metagame - he plays like a super-maniac from time to time, and then sits back and reaps the benefits by letting others overplay their hands against him.
Anyway, one day he was in "Crazy Fabsoul" mode, and we were ending up in pot after pot. We were playing 3-6, and I'd won a $1400 pot off of him on a paired board where I called him down with a straight and he had been bluffing the whole way. This put him a bit on "tilt" and he really started to go after me. Any pot I was in, he would raise, and any time I raised, he would re-raise. If I re-raised him, he would re-raise me back. Basically any flop that came, and he would bet the pot.
Now, the strategy I used in this situation was simple - I would tighten up and try to catch him with aces or other premium hands. However, this day aces just weren't coming. So what I thought was "I want to play good hands against him for a reraise," so I started raising hands like 789T for value, knowing that he would reraise, and we would be putting in a large chunk of our stacks where I had the "best" of it. The problem with this strategy, however, was that I couldn't hit enough flops! Time after time, he would reraise, I would call, and the flop would come T high. Then he bets the pot and I have 9TJQ -- What should I do there? I kept reluctantly folding -- heck, my tens might have been boss, but I didn't have the guts to put in $600 bucks on that bet, particularly since he had been getting lucky in some pots and now had a pretty big stack. Ultimately, during this "Crazy Fabrice" period, he probably won a good $3-400 off of me from reraise-bet-folds alone.
Anyway, I told a pretty poker-saavy friend of mine about this situation, and he said I should have just grabbed my balls and re-reraised before the flop with marginal all-in hands, like 789T and TJQQ, knowing that he would probably be playing Q972, etc -- but even I was a bit risk averse to do that.
I think this shows how difficult it can be to deal with aggression.
Thoughts?
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