Hi all,

I've been playing PokerTH for about three months now (enjoying it a lot! ), and have also been lurking these forums a bit. Since one of the more frequent subjects is the problem of PokerTH's vast maniac population, I thought I might chip in with my four step strategy to avoid them as much as possible in games against random opponents:

1) DO NOT play in "partitas" or "partidas" or similar, i.e. games that are likely to contain lots of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Brazilian players. Nothing against these countries (in fact, I've even lived in Spain for a while, despite being an "idiot from Northern Europe" myself ), it's just that for whatever reason they are more likely to play like maniacs than people from other regions. Better look out for English/American players or Germans ("Spiel"). Of course, everyone can join everything, but people are probably more likely to join sessions from their region.

2) DO look out for people having sensible discussions in the lobby chat window and try to join the session they are converging to.

3) DO NOT play full size tables, i.e. those with a maximum of 10 players. First of all, it might take longer to get rid of all the maniacs at a table with 10 players. Furthermore, the maniac who survives the early pre-flop all-in(s) doesn't have that much of a chip stack advantage at a smaller table. I personally look out of for tables with 6 or less seats.

4) DO NOT play at tables with an unreasonable blind structure. Blinds that are growing too fast degrade poker to a lottery anyway. On the other hand, a table with initial stacks of $1 million and blinds of just $10 is sure to contain at least one player who doesn't understand the game: the one who created the session. (And usually all the people who join the table don't get it either.) I prefer tables with the default blind structure (which is reasonable), since it usually indicates players who prefer a good game over just fooling around.

Besides these hints, which I hope to be helpful to some, I would look forward to PMs or public replies from players who are interested in serious games, so that maybe one could meet in password-locked sessions. Even though I'm still a beginner (having started playing just three months ago), I try to play solidly and also have some theoretical knowledge of the game (having read three books so far).

Most of these are "sometimes" things that apply mostly in the daytime hours in the US..mainly 10am-4pm CST..I live in Texas so it's CST here..
For whatever reason the nuts seem to play during these hours, but they also can be there any time. It seems to run in streaks..
I might find several good games for a week then suddenly it all drops off the table for a week and all I can find are AI games. One game yesterday had 7 AI's first hand and not a single card was above a 10 and not one single pair in the lot. Go figure.. When that happens I just leave because I know it's not worth the time even if they play like utter fools. If it was real money it might be another story.
I've tried to find a way to set up private games password protected, but nobody ever joins so I've given up trying and instead just take my chances and hope the newer version comes out soon..