Yes, you should bluff maniacs
Don't fall into the trap of just trapping against crazy LAGs, fight fire with fire, says Dara O'Kearney.
One of the biggest errors players make against 'Maniacs' is to play too timidly against them.
They say "I didn't bluff him because he was reraising everything".
The same players tend to go into check/call mode with their strong hands to induce bluffs, but also out of fear the maniac might have flopped some disguised monster.
The reality is that a LAG type player has too much trash in their range, so you should attack them.
We should be betting into them with our strongest hands, and we should be bluffing them too because we have so many strong hands.
Fight wide ranges aggressively
In the example below it's 40bb's effective, UTG vs BTN, single raised pot. The flop is 942 rainbow.
On the left is UTG's first action in GTO world, on the right is what they should do if the BTN 3-bets five times as often (They should 3-bet about 6% of the time, we made them reraise 35% of the time).
The first thing to note is we bet more, not less, against the maniac. We bet 46% of the time rather than 38% of the time.
Our range is much more weighted to value and we rarely mix with the value hands. We want the maniac to show their crazy tendencies and reraise us, we don't play cautiously and check to induce bluffs.
Our bluffing frequency goes down, but we still bluff. This is because the maniac has a much weaker range, they would need to be completely loco to reraise us all the time.
The bluffs are a little bit stronger overall, they are more likely to be hands that can turn something if we do get reraised. In fact, look what happens when we are reraised:
We never fold, we mostly 4-bet bluff all-in with all our bluffs and very thin value.
We should bluff more against maniacs because by definition they have too wide a range. We also should value bet more in the hopes they take the bait and 3-bet us.
We all remember that one time we 4-bet the maniac and they called with something crappy and they got there, but most of the time we print money because they have put too many chips in with nothing.
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