Getting the Most Out of Your HUD

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Before we get into this, let’s get one thing straight first. You do use a HUD, right? Right?Okay, good. If your poker site permits it but you don’t use one, you’re costing yourself money. There are players who succeed without them, but they’re the exception, not the rule, and they’d be better players if they learned to use them effectively. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about how you can learn to get more from that little box that sits next to each player’s name at your table.

I want to mention first of all that for my HUD, I use Holdem Manager 2. Some people have issues with HM2, but I find it runs extremely well and does the job I need from it. PokerTracker 4 is an equally valuable product and plenty of people will tell you as much. So, for the purposes of this article, while there may be certain insights I can offer that are specific to Holdem Manager 2 users, I am not completely aware of which specific functions do or don’t exist in PT4, so do bear in mind that I’m not advocating the use of one program over another.

I’m just passing along what I know about the functions of HM2 which are useful to MTT players, and hoping that as many of those as possible will also be available to PT4 users. Some PT4 users reading this may be able to offer additional suggestions if there are some functions not existing in HM2, so please comment if that’s the case. Either way, I’m not advocating that you use a specific HUD program, just that you use a HUD of some kind if at all possible.

Understand the purpose of a HUD in MTTs

The biggest misconception about HUDs in MTTs is that you can’t use them effectively because you can’t get a big sample of hands on anyone. This is false for many reasons – firstly, you can get some pretty substantial samples on guys you play against regularly. I have more than 10,000 hands on a few guys. Secondly, you’re very rarely using the specific numbers as a basis for a decision

While in a cash game, you might have a big enough sample of hands on someone that you can definitively say, “he’s opening X% here, so I should 3bet Y%”, that’s rarely the case in tournaments, and since every tournament spot is different, you can never have the same depth of knowledge of an opponent’s game. What’s important is to instead see a player’s HUD numbers as a reflection of how they playin comparison to the average player.

Considering how frequently you’ll be dealing with small sample sizes, you can rarely have much of an idea of someone’s specific range or bluffing frequency in MTTs, particularly early in a hand. There are so many unique spots where a player might decide to 3bet bluff with a trashy hand based on gameflow, or they might decide to check-raise bluff a specific flop in an unusual spot because it’s the final table bubble.

When these spots come along, you can’t necessarily make anything more than an educated guess at someone’s range, but identifying a player whose 3bet stat is 3% higher than average or whose check-raise stat is 5% lower than average can make a huge difference in your decision-making. If someone is playing a little outside the box in a particular department, it becomes easier to work out how they might try to exploit you, and how you might be able to exploit them in return. Your knowledge of what the ‘standard’ play would be in these situations forms the framework by which you can extrapolate the potential actions of uncommon player types.

Spend time actively developing your HUD

Probably the biggest mistake most people make with their HUD is to set it up once, when they first get their hands on a HUD program, and then never change it again. If you’re doing this, you’re missing out on a lot of information. When you first start using a HUD, it’s a good idea to start out simple. The most common and most simple HUD setup is something like Hands – VPIP – PFR – 3BET, and this works for a lot of people. But why stop there?

If you’ve been using that setup for a while and are comfortable with it, why not add another stat? Then another, and another? It’ll put more information at your fingertips. There’s no way this can be a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t somehow distract you from seeing the same information that was there before. Build up your HUD the same way you would gradually move up in stakes or learn to play more tables.

Colour-code as much as possible

Most HUD programs give you the ability to assign different colours to stats based on their value. This is a really good idea, because it helps your brain to focus on the right stats in the right spots, and it also trains you to adapt your decisions accordingly. For example, if you were to assign the colour red to any VPIP stat of 10% or below, orange for 10-20%, yellow for 20-30%, and green for over 30%, then you would be able to scope out your table fairly easily simply by assessing which was the dominant colour when you looked at your screen with the HUD enabled.

Lots of red, and you know you’re at a tight table. Lots of green, and you’re at a very loose one, and so on. With stats for which there aren’t clearly-defined boundaries for ‘tight’ or ‘loose’, you can assign a neutral but unique colour, like a shade of blue or purple, so that you can easily locate that individual statistic and you don’t misread your HUD at an important moment.

Use as many stats as you’re comfortable with

This goes hand in hand with the first point about building your HUD gradually. Ideally you would want to get to the point where all the stats you could ever need are at your fingertips – for many people, this means never having to use the pop-up HUD boxes that show an additional level of detail, since that adds a lot of mouse clicks to your process and can complicate things. For other people, this means having a minimal HUD and a very carefully-designed popup screen, so that they can get every bit of detail they could possibly need.

Often the ideal balance is somewhere in between – you don’t want so many stats on your HUD that you can’t see the players’ stack sizes at the table, but if you have the chance to add another stat without affecting visibility, you should consider doing so. It’s also worth playing around with font sizes to make sure that you’re not taking up unnecessary space that could be used for more stats.

Choose stats which are widely applicable

It’s all well and good having a large number of stats on your HUD, but it’s not going to be much use if they’re all so obscure that you never get a decent sample size on anyone. You want to be using stats that give you an overall perspective on someone’s game, rather than a tiny snapshot, since you’re going to be playing a limited number of hands on most players you come up against.

This means that a statistic such as “turn check-raise %” is never going to be as useful as “overall check-raise %” – not just because it’ll take you a long time to get a decent sample of turn check-raises by the same player, but also because it’s very likely that anyone who has a high overall check-raise % is going to have a high turn check-raise % anyway, so focusing on the turn actually reduces the amount of information you have available. The same goes for other stats – don’t use “bet flop when checked to”, use “flop aggression %”. Don’t use “defend BB vs BTN raise”, use “total fold to steal %”, and so on.

Finally – pay attention and actually use it!

This seems almost too obvious to include, but in reality you’d be surprised how easy it is for some players to ignore the fact that their HUD is screaming at them that a certain action isn’t the right play. Those who suffer from the dreaded ‘auto-pilot’ curse, something that affects me a lot personally, will often find this an issue. If you’re going to play optimally in MTTs, you need to be paying continued attention to your HUD. Ignoring it and treating it as part of the background is the same as not having it at all.

If you feel uncomfortable or like your HUD is intruding on your visibility at the table, try moving it around, or use the ‘active table only’ setting in HM2 to have it only show up at your current table and disappear at all the others. Whatever your issue, you need to find a solution that makes using a HUD part of your everyday poker experience, to the point where you don’t consider playing without it. Every hand you play without a HUD is going to be very marginally less +EV than a hand played with a HUD, and over time, that’s going to add up to a lot of EV being sacrificed. Like them or not, HUDs are here to stay in 21st century poker, so it’s up to you whether you’ll adapt – or perish.