This guy drives me nuts - dealing with maniacs

[Skuzzy]

How do you deal with preflop maniacs who turn tricky post flop? Why does their strategy often seem to be very effective? What 'weakness' do you look for first in their play or what weakness do you hope to see first because it can be easily exploited?

It's often obvious that a guy is too loose and raises too much preflop. One orbit and you have that knowledge, but his play seems to cripple me leaving me with very few options. My preflop raises never fold him so with non-pair hands raising preflop is treacherous. He reacts to aggression the way others react to weakness so I risk playing big pots with marginal holdings. My cbets are flat called or raised so they have no value. And there's still a whole table of players to deal with.

In a limit game these guys get slowly sucked dry by the whole table, but in NL they carry a real threat by virtue of being able to take your stack. This threat makes playing them very awkward for a weak tight set miner like myself.


Oh and of course he always hits his little two pair on the river so TPTK doesnt' play, he catches runner runer hands against any sets, he seems to show up with AA when you finaly get KK.

Any thoughts appreciated.

PS: Obviously I just lost 2 buyins to a guy like this in his 2nd orbit at the table, once with AA all in preflop against AJo (he made the nut str8) the other with 9Ts on a 9Tx rainbow flop when he hit his Q on the river hold Q9 - he bet $30 on the flop into a $13 pot I pushed ([censored] cracked my AA!) [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

[4_2_it]

Doesn't sound like you played the hands badly. Spend your Sklansky dollars wisely and send your avatar over to kick the maniac in the nuts.

[djoyce003]

I typically limp reraise with big hands against these guys preflop, limp a little more than I normally do and don't play big pots with them unless I have a strong hand...i also checkraise the living hell out of them with TPGK or better.