How to play the worst maniac I've seen?

[sx3_turbo]

I'm at the Party 1/2 6max. One guy, admittedly drunk, through 50 hands is 90VPIP and 82PFR. How do you approach a situation like that. Everyone else at the table has loosened up considerably since he's been 3-betting 26o and such. I tried to loosen, but didn't hit a flop. In something this unpredicatble, it seems you will win big or lose big. Is it worth staying in this situation and how would you approach it?

[Michael Davis]

If everyone else at the table is loosening up, you simply cannot. You must play your solid hands but expect to have high variance. I'm not folding AJo ever preflop in a situation like this, but if everyone else is NOT adjusting to the maniac, I'm threebetting A6o. With everyone else making proper or somewhat proper adjustments, A6o is an easy muck.

Whether to loosen up or not depends on the other players in the game. If you do loosen up, it should always be with a preflop reraise of the maniac. If people are letting you isolate, you want to be on the maniac's left and do a lot of threebetting to get the pot heads up, with the intention of seeing the showdown with any hand that you're threebetting. If the rest of the table is loosening up, you want to be on the maniac's right so that you can checkraise the field after the maniac bets.

-Michael