I'm a HUD-user, but I still thinking, notes are the king.
Listen, guys, that's really fun to read...
All of you, who writes, that HUD is cheating, I have a question for you: Did you actually used it yourself?! If not, then your assumptions about it just make no sense. Sorry, but how can you blame something you don't even know, how it actually works?
Try to play with HUD for a month (there is a free trial version) and then come back and tell me, that it's pure cheating and since you installed it, your winning fly high to the sky, you're simply printing money. Because is that what you going to tell us about HUD.
Well, don't be too disappointed, as you could probably make even worse results, than when you been playing without using HUD.
I agree that HUD provides a little help, especially for multi-tabling. You can play more tables and hands with HUD, as you don't have to watch every action because HUD helps you a bit recording for you statistics.
But is it actually good?
Yes and not.
On one hand, you are available to play more hands per hour on another hand, you are paying less attention to action and making less self-written notes, which is bad for your edge at games. So you gotta sacrifice one for another.
But actually, if you're being present at the game you're playing in terms of, that you're actually watching every hand and making notes - well, in this case, HUD becomes a pretty much unnecessary thing, because you probably know your opponents better already from notes and watching how they play, than any statistic can give you from the same amount of hands.
Now here is another thing about HUD, I want to point at, for those who never used it. The problem is, for the most stats you need such a gigantic amount of hands been played together, that you hardly can ever collect, so that a stat look as a plausible one.
Basically, there are just a few stats, that really helpful in any HUD, although some have dozens of them hanging. It's because you don't need to have so big hand seize to start believing in it: VPIP (says what % of hands this player actually plays) and PFR (pre-flop raise). Those two can help define a player as a TAG, or NIT, or LAG or Call Station obviously, but still, become to be plausible only from like 300 hands... And even then villain can differ from his patterns and start to play different, because of tilt, being drunk, emotions, distractions or whatever else.
And these are "the fastest to believe in stats", most other stats, like donk bet, floating, check-raise, squeeze, cold call etc. Well, you need like thousands of hands to start looking on them at all! See what I mean?
You just won't have so many hands ever if you play MTTs or even just playing SNGs/Cash on lower limits.
You will get such amounts on high limits of course, because there are mostly the same villains playing and just less traffic in general, but then there is another problem comes out, that ruins all the statistics. There are usually only very good players, who know the importance of "changing gears" and playing unexploitable poker. So, if you hope that your HUD will help against them, it can be that it works against you. So I wouldn't rely too much on HUD against good players, who changing their style all the time.
At the end of my post, I want to say, that I just fail to understand why you guys are so against HUD? It doesn't really give such a big advantage at play at all! It just slightly a help, that you don't really can much rely on. I'm still more rely on my notes, than on HUD.
I can easily back to play without HUD at all, I just need to reduce the amount of games then, but it's not a problem at all!
What is a real problem for me - is that I can't download and save my own hand history on
partypoker anymore. And this is a real bullsh1t. How do I suppose to learn something from my session if I can't watch it through, nor analyze it, nor share it with my poker buddies or Cardschat forum to ask opinions about it?
And I can't stress enough, how after game analyze is important for any poker player, who wants not just
gambling, but serious about his game and tries to improve it daily in order to play higher limits.
Without downloadable hand history it's just not possible, so I'm moving to play to the other sides, where I still have my hand history. And it really has not much to do with HUD.
