Exploiting Opponent Aggression in NLHE Tournaments

In tournament poker - whether in a live casino or hosted by online poker websites - no one concept makes a player shudder or quiver in fear than the possibility of having a wild maniac at your table; a Lex Veldhuis or a Tom Dwan sitting and playing every hand insanely aggressively, showing 29o routinely then suddenly busting a player with KK a few hands later. These players can be hell to deal with if they pick up stacks early, so the question is, how do you blunt the onslaught from dealing with them?

Fighting fire with fire is usually a good way to get completely destroyed by these guys and to watch your bankroll go up in flames no matter how much you've earned in poker signup bonuses, rakeback, or through solid play on your part. They’re usually incredibly good about angling the pot sizes to where they can make the last move (in most cases, the all-in) which means your perfectly planned bluff after the flop continuation bet will be met with a big all-in more often than you’d care to think about. Bluffing these guys is a good way to waste your chips, especially if they’ve shown any ability whatsoever to read people effectively.

Therefore, a sound and tight strategy is usually the best way to deal with them, with a few exceptions. If you have a premium hand preflop, QQ+ and AK, attempting to trap and slow play them against the maniac is a terrible idea; these maniacs will know if you’ve been playing tight and will be aware of traps potentially being set, so playing the hand aggressively preflop will make them more likely to blow you off the hand preflop or post flop on innocuous boards; just make the reraise, for the most part.

With any big hand on the flop (TPTK or an overpair or better on non threatening boards) and a stack under 50 big blinds, I’m going to very likely be committed to the hand no matter what, and will be looking for ways to let my opponent manipulate the pot to where he can make the all-in play himself. If he raised to 3 blinds preflop and I repopped it to 9, leaving myself 45 big blinds, I’m looking to continuation bet something like 10-12 big blinds on most flops, which leaves myself 33-35 big blinds in my stack, and putting a juicy 28+ big blinds out in the pot for the maniac to attempt to steal; it looks like the perfect scenario to make the big steal.

This also means that continuation bets against these guys are almost meaningless; they’ll be interpreting them as weak bets more often than not, and you will be floated, semi-bluffed and outright bluffed a fair number of times when you do continuation bet. I’m less likely to attempt to CB missed hands postflop against these guys, especially with position. I’d rather check and attempt to peel a card rather than CB and get a big check-raise shoved down my throat. Remember, even though a lot of times you’ll CB with still the best hand, it functions as a weak bluffy type of bet to most players, especially maniacs, and these players in particular will pounce on them; try to only CB with real hands against them, and let them use their aggressiveness to hang themselves.