AA hand - 2 maniacs - enormous pot

[sweetjazz]

With the board as it is, I think you win over 50% of the time here. Given your reads, folding at any point in this hand would be a HUGE mistake.

Tonight, I saw a guy raise the flop, cap the turn and river on a flop of QQQ with 42 in his hand. Surprisingly enough, he wasn't able to get Q7 to fold his hand at any point. I suspect his thinking (if you want to call it that) was that he wanted to knock everyone out if nobody filled up by the river. Notice that the biggest mistake would be calling him down to the river looking to fill up and folding on the river unimproved. (This is assuming that nobody else is raising, as obviously happened when Mr. Flopped Quads came to life.)

When people get real maniacal, you often have to decide early in the hand (preflop or on the flop) whether you want to continue and then see things to the bloody end. The reason being that the pot is so bloated and the probability that the maniac has garbage is so high that it's a mistake to fold. There are some maniacs who I would 3-bet with Ah 2d and call down on a Kc Qc 9c board. This is an extreme, but I mention to illustrate how radically you have to adjust your play to a maniac. (Contrast this with the fact that I will raise preflop with Ac Kd and sometimes fold to a single flop bet on a 7c 2d 2c board from a sufficiently passive player.) You *must* adjust to the range of hands that your opponent will have when he makes a given action. If someone will ram and jam the board with any draw or any pair or better, then you must accept this fact and decide how best to proceed. (BTW, this knowledge should greatly influence your overall preflop play.)