Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
When you both have 50BBs or more you can raise with your good hands
When you both have 50BBs or more you can raise with your good hands and go all-in for up to 70BBs or so when he re-raises to 10BBs. Fold or limp with weaker hands and call to see a flop when he raises your limp to around 5BBs. Ideally, you want to see flops with hands that have high implied odds, like small pairs and suited connectors, and you want to get a lot of money, and sometimes all of it, in pre-flop with 9-9+ and A-Q+. You will usually be well ahead of his range, but sometimes he will show up with a monster and bust you. You must accept that one of you is likely going to go broke, and be happy knowing it will be him more than you.
You lose a lot of your implied odds with less than 50BBs,
You lose a lot of your implied odds with less than 50BBs, so you should only play when you don’t mind going all the way with a hand. I usually just play fairly tightly and raise all the hands I don’t mind going all-in with if he re-raises. If this maniac re-raises every hand, you can raise hands like J-10s and 6-6 with the intention of going all-in over his re-raise, whereas if the maniac folds and a tight player behind you re-raises, you can make an easy fold. It is a quite mentally strenuous knowing you will have to be all-in over and over against a maniac. Just take some comfort knowing he is going to go broke much more often than you.