A maniac raises far too many hands, bets every flop and never folds to pressure. They are the biggest long-term loser in most games and the reason a lot of decent players have losing weeks.
The contradiction resolves quickly once you see it. Their edge is variance, not skill. They create enormous pots with weak holdings, and if you play those pots badly, the money goes to them before it comes back to you.
Everything below is about being the one it comes back to.
Seat selection does more than strategy
Before any adjustment, get position on them. You want the maniac on your right, so they act before you do.
With them on your right, you see their raise before you decide, you can isolate with a strong hand, and you play the whole hand knowing what they did. With them on your left, they punish every limp and every weak open, and you are guessing on every street.
This single choice is worth more than any range adjustment on this page. In club apps you can usually leave a table and rejoin, and it is worth the thirty seconds.
Widen for value, not for war
The instinct is to fight aggression with aggression. Against a maniac that is exactly backwards, because they do not fold, so bluffs have no target.
What changes is your value range, and it widens a long way. Against someone raising 60% of hands, top pair with a decent kicker is a strong holding rather than a marginal one, and second pair often has enough showdown value to call down. Hands you would routinely fold against a normal opener become calls and raises.
What does not change is your bluffing frequency, which should drop close to zero. Firing three streets at a player who calls with any pair is not aggression, it is a donation with extra steps. The same principle runs through everything against loose low-limit pools: when nobody folds, stop optimising for folds.
Let them bet your strong hands for you
Against most opponents you bet your good hands to build a pot. Against a maniac you often do better by checking and letting them do it.
They will bet. That is the one thing you can rely on. So flop a set on a dry board and checking is frequently stronger than leading, because a bet from you may finally slow them down, while a check invites two more barrels from a hand that has nothing.
The judgement call is board texture. On wet, connected boards, bet: the free cards you would be giving away cost more than the extra street you might win. On dry boards where little can improve against you, check and let them hang themselves.
Size up when you do bet
When you take the betting lead against a maniac, use larger sizes than normal. They are not folding to a half-pot bet any more than to a two-thirds one, so the smaller size only wins less.
Preflop this means isolating large. Over a maniac's raise, 4x to 5x rather than the usual 3x, both to charge them properly and to fold out the players behind who would otherwise come along and turn your strong hand into a multiway coinflip.
Isolating is the whole game against this player type. Heads-up against a maniac with position and a strong range is one of the best situations in poker. The same hand five-handed is not.
A worked hand
100bb effective, 6-max cash. A maniac opening around 55% of hands raises the cutoff to 3bb. We are on the button with AhTh.
3-bet to 12bb, larger than standard. ATs is comfortably ahead of that opening range and we want the blinds out. They call.
Flop is Th 8c 3d. They check, which is unusual for them. We bet 60% of the pot. Against most opponents a check here might mean weakness worth exploiting, but against a maniac who checks perhaps a tenth of the time, it means very little, and we have top pair with a good kicker.
They check-raise to three times our bet. This is the decision that costs people money.
Call, do not fold and do not re-raise. Their check-raising range here is enormous: any eight, any draw, any two overcards, and quite a lot of pure air. Folding top pair against that range is far too tight. Re-raising is worse, because it turns our hand into a bluff-catcher against the only part of their range that beats us.
Turn brings the 2c. They bet 70%. Call again. River is the 5s and they shove. Now fold, because a maniac who fires three streets and shoves the river on a board where nothing completed usually does have it, and our top pair beats none of the hands still betting.
What this looks like in our clubs
Maniacs turn up more often in some of our fields than others. The Suprema pool plays looser and more aggressively than the PPPoker tables at similar limits, so the table dynamics that follow are more common there.
The pattern we see repeatedly is a solid player having a bad month at a table with one maniac, not because they are playing badly, but because they are sitting to the maniac's right and refusing to move. The seat is the fix, and it takes seconds.
The other habit worth copying from the winners: they write down which regulars play this way. Club apps offer no statistics, so knowing who the maniac is before the first hand is a note-taking problem, covered in our piece on playing without tracking software.
Frequently asked questions
What is a maniac in poker?
A player who raises and bets far more often than their hands justify, and who rarely folds. They are usually long-term losers, but they create large pots and heavy swings for everyone at the table.
Should I play more hands against a maniac?
More value hands, yes, especially in position. Not more speculative ones out of position, since those turn into difficult decisions in bloated pots, which is precisely where a maniac makes their money.
Can I bluff a maniac?
Rarely, and only when they have shown weakness twice. Their defining trait is not folding, so bluffs need a target that is not there. Value bet more instead.
Where should I sit relative to a maniac?
With the maniac on your right, so you act after them. This is the single highest-value adjustment available and it costs nothing but a table change.
How do I handle the swings?
Expect them and size your bankroll for them. Playing correctly against a maniac means winning large pots more often than you lose them, which is not the same as winning them consistently. If the swings are affecting your decisions, the limit is too high rather than the strategy wrong.
Where to start
Next time you spot one, do the boring thing first: check where you are sitting. If they are on your left, change tables before you change your strategy.
If you want to know which of our fields runs loose and aggressive and which runs loose and passive, message @rpunion. The difference between the apps we hold unions in is larger than most players expect, and it decides which adjustments pay.
18+. Play within your means.