The main thing that HUDs take away is studying your opponents and learning to make good reads. This is important both online and live.
I dont see, how a HUD "takes away" anything at all. Its not like, you have suddenly become blind, just because you have a HUD running. You can also still make notes, if someone took an unusual line, and the hand went to showdown. This can sometimes be usefull especially for picking up on bet sizing
tells, because a HUD typically only display data about frequency and not sizes.
The HUD can tell me that with a certain hand I have an estimated percentage of winning against a given range for an opponent. But, it cannot teach me how to outplay that opponent.
With this comment it is clear, that you dont even understand, what information a HUD display, or how it is used. No
poker sites allow the use of software, which display your estimated
equity against anything other than a random hand during play.
So while a tracker could surely be programmed to display estimated equity and even suggested actions, this is not allowed, and for good reasons. It would fall under the definition of a "bot", even if a human still did the final button pressing.
What a HUD display is simply, what your opponent have done in the previous hands, you played with him. Nothing more and nothing less. It show, how often he entered a pot preflop, how often he raised, how often he 3-bet, how often he folded to a 3-bet, and so on and so forth. It is completely up to you to figure out, if this information give you ways to outplay your opponent.
Let me just give a simple example. Today I called a CO open on BTN with QTs. I flopped a gutshot with two overs on a 984. My opponent put out a healthy C-bet, so now it was decision time. You can basically fold, call or raise here, so a lot depend on, how strong you think, your opponent is, when he C-bet on that kind of board.
My HUD showed, that this player had been C-betting the flop 12 times out of 13 opportunities. So basically every single time, he had the chance. Sure 13 is not the largest sample in the world, but it is still fairly unlikely, that someone will find 12 good C-betting spots out of 13. A number of 6-8 would be more normal.
A lot of a typical CO open range has missed 984 completely, and if he was C-betting basically his entire range, he would have a lot of A high, K high etc., that could not stand a raise but was still ahead of me. So I raised, and sure enough he folded, and I took it down.
So this is how, HUD-data are used during play. I play around 30.000 hands per month online, so there is no way, I would be able to manually remember, how often all my opponents are C-betting the flop. Therefore it is usefull for me to let a tracker collect this information for me and display it on a HUD during play.
Does this give me an advantage over people not using a HUD? Sure. And therefore I will also advice everyone, who is serious about online poker, to either use one, or at a minimum play on a site, where they are not allowed, so you dont put yourself at a disadvantage to other players.
And mix-up your bet sizing with a little sporadic play,,,
