Metagame question: Doing the maniac impression.

[Specialwon]

Just on a whim I decided yesterday to play 2 orbits (NL50) at a fresh table as a 50/20 maniac. Took two trash hands to showdown and lost about half a BI. Then changed to the nittiest game I could muster, like 11/6 or so.

Over the next 4 orbits or so I would get at least 2-3 callers to every raise. I won two stacks with AA and AK where guys just called every street holding a weak underpair. I am pretty sure they would not have done that had they not seen me donking it up.

Does anyone do this on a regular basis? It's hard to judge the success of this on one experiment.

[flytrap]

Online I don't think it's that valuable. People just don't pay that much attention. Live it's possible that this could be valuable, but I think people spend far too much time on table image, when most hands should be played in a vacuum after you've taken into account your opponents stats.

[Peleus]

Online at most limits I would say this is, unfortunately, largely useless. The reason behind that is this day an age of online play is defined by poker tracker and huds. No matter what your first actions are a lot of the time the multitabler you're against will only look at the average of the last 500 datamined hands you've played and judge you on how you've previously been, rather then your current table image.

[A_C_Slater]

Yeah if not for HUDs this would probably be a good idea. But the ones you will be playing with again and again will know how you really play.

It would probably be better to make "crazy" plays against a likely HUD player in isolation when heads up, like semi-bluff raising a gutshot vs him and showing if he folds. Then if you're lucky he will make a note on you. But this assumes he makes a note on you and will adapt, rather that continue his robot game.


You also won't always be making hands to extract value post maniac stage. And tables can break up quickly online.

[Specialwon]

I hear what you all are saying, maybe I'm just very lucky with the sites that I play at (ongame), but I have very few players with much hand history at NL50. Maybe 10 other regs, the rest are casual players. Are you guys all from the US and restricted to Stars / FT?

[Baja15]

I'm also a regular in the NL50 games at Ongame. I think this tactic could be quite succesful in these games as there really aren't that many good multitabling regs, so you might be able to get away with it. Whats' your sceenname Specialwon? I'm sure we've played alot together