Playing against maniacs. In online poker, you’ll come up against this type of player all the time. Someone who hogs all the action, dominates, raises left and right and apparently wins all the time. If players like that irritate you and if you feel like they’re bullying you around, maybe you should get to know them a little bit better, and then you wouldn’t fear them anymore. There are two types of maniacs: the good player who knows what’s going on, and who only plays like that because he sees and knows the circumstances allow it to him. It is a very good way to make money when faced with the right kind of opposition. If you’re faced with one of these guys, my advice is: turn the other way and run, that is switch tables and go about your business. The other kind of maniac is the backwards player. This guy plays extremely loose and aggressive in the same time. He is by no means a complete rookie, but he does make some fundamental mistakes: he plays every hand aggressively except the ones that actually give him good positive EV. It might be weird for you learn that, given the fact that you’ve probably always been taught to act decisively on positive EV hands and to limp along or fold altogether on bad EV plays Well, this is exactly why they call this guy a “backwards” player. Whenever you go about finding an online poker table to play at, you should find it fairly easy to spot one of these guys. They’re always the ones with a huge stack of chips in front of them, and apparently the ones calling all the shots at that particular table. You do want to go up against a guy like this for one simple reason: there’s a lot of value in it for you. Here’s how you should step up against him: act tight. Even though you know that most of the time he acts on hands much weaker than yours, you should still refrain form jumping all over him. Texas Holdem is a game of pretty big luck-induced variance, and if you confront his rags with your rags, chances are, he’ll still win. Texas Holdemtakes a continuous re-application of the same small edge (like rakeback) time and time again to beat. You need to be tight and wait for a proper hand to coma along. Don’t make the same mistake the other players have made: do not consider his raises semi-bluffs because that they’re not. While you wait for that “proper” hand to come along you can make your reads on the other players around the table, and decide – based on that – what you would consider a hand you could possible fry the maniac on. If everyone plays the tight-weak game, you may lower your starting hand standards a bit. (A,x will do fine) There are three things the “backwards” guy just hates to death: 1) he gets a monster in the pocket. He doesn’t really know how to play that, so he makes some bad decisions and gives out some obvious tells. The other players pick those tells up, and this takes us to the second thing our man hates: 2) nobody calls him. Your single biggest weapon against this scourge of the poker tables is the check-raise. Not only will you be able to repeatedly trap him with it, you’ll also make him give away precious tells, no matter how he reacts to them.

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