Once you start to hit the $20-$40 and $30-$60 levels then the games can be so aggressive that the players on your table can start to resemble maniacs. I think that there are clear differences between a true maniac and someone who is merely very loose aggressive.

There is often a far more deliberate methodology behind the style of a loose aggressive player than that of a true maniac. However, whether we are looking at a true maniac or merely a very loose aggressive player then one thing is certain, they can be very tough to play against for an awful lot of players.

Maniacs in limit hold ‘em will typically have a VPIP of at least 45% and many maniacs are hitting 50%+. Ideally you want to be sitting to their left so that you can three bet to isolate them. All poker variations demand that you strive to achieve proper frequencies and any player who is playing more than 40% of their hands in six max limit hold’em is playing too loose.

Then if their pre-flop raise percentage isn’t too far behind their VPIP then you can rest assured that you are looking at a player that is too aggressive. These are my favourite opponents to play against but you need to be very careful in six handed games facing aggressive players or maniacs. Hyper aggressive play and even maniac play isn’t too far removed from being optimal strategy in these sorts of games so some of your ultra aggressive opponents may be playing close to optimally.

If your post flop play is a little on the tight side and you don’t reach the river often enough then you may find yourself getting run over and especially if you find a player sitting out or that the game has suddenly become four or five handed. You also need to remember that there are clear differences between how a player can play pre-flop to how they play post flop with regards their levels of aggression.

It is for this reason that you need to classify just what type of “maniac” you are going up against as many players who are perceived as being maniacs are actually world class players. Another important factor to consider is that of bankroll requirements. Limit hold ‘em has become tougher to beat and especially online over the past couple of years.

What this means is that the old yardsticks of 250 big bets as an adequate bankroll no longer applies and hasn’t done for some considerable time. One of the things that started to needle me in limit hold ‘em was the increasing variance and several huge (huge for me) swings of around 300 big bets in a very short space of time really did it for me and was why I switched to playing SNG’s and NLHE.

I know many pro’s at the higher limits who have 1000 big bet bankrolls. It is amazing to think now that a $20-$40 player could need as much as $40,000 to ensure not going broke and that is presuming that they are a winning player to begin with.

The extra aggressive tendencies of players in most levels of limit play mean that you will require a far bigger bankroll even as a winning player than what most players can ever imagine. This is why playing maniacs and ultra aggressive players can be so dangerous especially to inexperienced players or players who are not used to experiencing large negative swings.

Even if you are +EV against these players then it may take a long time before you eventually get their money and if you are prone to tilt then any profit that you may have had theoretically can soon be wiped out. I used to leave the table if I felt that a really tough aggressive player had position over me.

But a true maniac is rather different and will often not just play wild pre-flop but also post flop as well. You are going to have to accept that you are going to have to call down with many losing hands as this is an advantage to their style of play in that they get paid off and raised more often when they are ahead.

One of the key features of limit games is to be able to get the hand heads up with added dead money in the middle. This can make many marginal hands profitable. You already know that a maniac is raising and re-raising on a wide range so in effect they are helping you to generate profit.

Then it comes down to not letting them get the better of you in heads up situations as you cannot afford to pass on too much equity by allowing them to bully you out of too many hands. Knowing when to be aggressive against them post flop and when to control the pot comes with experience and a thorough treatise would be far beyond the scope of this article. But if you can hold your own post flop against maniacs and not be pushed around then they can help you to make a lot of money in limit hold ‘em.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson is sponsored by the online poker site, Cake Poker and can be seen at www.pokersharkpool.com.

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This article is courtesy of the BetUS Poker School. Read more strategy content from BetUS.

There are a few situations where we might want to check-raise the river: when we hit a draw, when we miss a draw (a bluff), when we’ve been betting but want to make an extra bet and think our opponent might have something. The problem with going for a check-raise when you hit is that it can be an obvious play, so your opponent might wise up and not bet, in which case you’ve let him off scot-free. Check-raising when you miss your hand can be equally obvious, and it’s a very expensive bluff. Add in the good pot odds your opponent will be getting to call, and there’s not a great chance of success. Going for a check-raise when you’ve been betting the whole way is almost always a bad idea. Your opponent will wonder what’s up and you’ll fool him into betting once or twice at the most. More often than not he’ll simply check behind and you’ll lose a big bet.

When a good player check-raises the river, they have usually hit a draw that isn’t obvious. Most players avoid check-raising if they hit something like a flush because they correctly believe that their opponent might fear the check-raise and check behind. It’s in a situation where you hit a second pair or an inside straight that check-raising really makes sense. However, any time you only do something in a certain situation (in this case, you only check-raise the river when you hit a non-obvious draw), good players are going to catch on and start exploiting you. You need to start check-raising at least one other situation as well, to balance it out.

If your river check-raises are always value bets and never bluffs your opponents will start to fold unless they have a monster themselves. So you have to add in some bluffs, and you need those bluffs to balance out your river value check-raises. That means that you have to bluff on boards where you might have hit a non-obvious draw. Now it would make no sense to bluff when you have a pair (you would be bluffing that you hit a second pair), because your hand has showdown value. So you can really only bluff on hands where you missed a draw, but it looks like you could have hit a non-obvious draw. Going back to our value check-raises, it’s clear that we can no longer check-raise the river when we hit a second pair, because we can’t reasonably bluff the same situation when we miss.

The place of the river check-raise in our strategy is very limited. Basically we do it when we hit an inside straight or runner runner flush on the river, and when we’re bluffing having hit one of those hands. The only thing left to determine is how often we should be bluffing compared to value betting. Basically, we want the ratio of value bets to bluffs to be the same as the average pot odds our opponent is getting. Your check-raise should be a bluff only 5-10% of the time. And seeing as how you’ll rarely chase an inside straight and hit, you’ll very, very rarely be bluffing, much less than once per session. Probably once every couple thousand hands.