You need to ask yourself if you going to take poker as a serious hobby or just a casual one. I said what I'm about to say many years ago.
Poker is the only hobby where you can actually make money. Every other hobby costs you money. For example, I love golf and target shooting. Two hobbies that cost me a lot of money. Sure there's side bets here and there, but they will never cover the cost of greens fees, golf balls, ammo, shooting range fees ect.
Like any hobby, there's an upfront cost to get the proper equipment to be able to enjoy it regularly. In
online poker specifically, you need a decent computer and internet connection, a proper bank roll and the proper hud software and training tools. All of these things require money. Sure, almost everyone has a computer and internet these days, so that part should be easy. But I also ran three monitors with four tables each back in the day. I recommend saving money outside of poker and putting it towards your poker hobby, buying the tools you need.
With that being said, I took about four years away from poker. I got engaged, moved back to my home state of Colorado and got Married! My monitors didn't make the move and my old laptop I used is now obsolete. So I'm playing with a new laptop with a 15 inch screen. It's possible to four table, but on ACR it's hard to see sometimes so I two table most of the time. I plan on poker being a casual hobby and I do not intend to purchase or use a hud at all. I plan to play micro sit n goes, maybe some .05nl from time to time, and I do like the $2 jackpot
poker games on ACR. I find those to be fun and rather easy to win 2 of 3. I also plan to play in some bigger MTT's. In the past I found a hud to be rather useless in MTT's, as most of the players you see in those, you've never seen before, so you're mining data on them. If I remember correctly, HUD's aren't that great of a tool until you have 100 hands on them. The more hands you have the better!
So, to wrap this up. If you're serious, save some money outside of poker and purchase a HUD. If you're just going to do this as a casual hobby, don't worry about a HUD. Yes, you can be successful without a HUD, as long as you keep it down to only a handful of tables.
Hope that helped.
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