Extreme preflop conditions

[Tilt]

Yesterday I found myself in a 200 PLO game with crazy conditions. There was a maniac at the table who raised the pot preflop on every hand. There were several loose aggressives on tilt that called these bets, making for huge preflop pots on every hand. Usually there were 7 to the flop for a full pot raise. And on every hand, at least one player pushed all-in and most pots wound up as 3 way all-ins or more.

Players were pushing the flop with lower 2 pair and all kinds of weak draws. The situation had me wondering about the following questions:

1) What would you call preflop with in this situation, keeping in mind that you are committing at 5-10% of your stack preflop and must go all-in on the flop or fold?

I varied my usual starting hand requirements by requiring that hands had to have a decent pair in them generally. With my only decision point coming on the flop, a decent set makes for the easiest decisions. But knowing that you would have to push any flop, I deeply discounted hands like up and downs and flush draws if there was no pair in the hand. So my calling range was:
55-77 + Axs, 4 up and down starting at 7+ on button
88-TT + 3 up/down no gaps or single K high flush draw in LP
99-JJ + 3 up/down 1 gap, or double suited, or single Q high flush draw in MP or better
Any QQ+, any double pair, anywhere

2) What would you push/call the push on the flop with?

You could not read these players on the flop, they were so tilted...they were pushing on single pairs, over pairs, all kinds of stuff. Some decisions were easy, like a nut flush draw in a 5 way, or almost any set under these conditions seemed good enough. Others were tough...like top and bottom pair with a Q high flush draw on a straightless board...K high flush + nut straight draw....top two pair and no redraws, etc. The situation required assessing the strength of your flopped hand against a relative average, since there was little information to be gleaned about what you were up against.

Two things I quickly realized is that you could not afford to call those preflop raises unless you were willing to push any equity edge on the flop. And the other thing I learned is that re-raising all-in with AA when you routinely get 6-7 callers gets really expensive [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img].