To HUD or not to HUD?

A major upgrade of Holdem Manager came out last week and it contained a truckload of new stats for the HUD: squeeze, 4-bet, 4-bet range, fold to 4-bet, triple barrel, fold to triple barrel, etc. These were previously relegated to the popup or didn’t exist at all, so naturally, in a fit of excitement, I threw every single one of them into my HUD.

It took me nearly two hours to move the new stats into position but I thought it was definitely worth it. After all, I now had a wealth of new information with which to crush my opponents! Here’s a picture of what my HUD looked like at this point.

Later that night, I went onto the Two Plus Two forums and found a very interesting thread in the High Stakes NLHE forum. Basically, a struggling small stakes player was wanting to improve his game and was wondering what high stakes players did that separated them from everyone else. Surprisingly (at least, for Two Plus Two threads), several well thought out responses were offered and, amongst them, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern; they often advised against using a HUD at all! At the very least, they suggested to keep the stats in your HUD to a minimum. This, it was said, would help you to develop better reads and to get a better feel of game flow and player dynamics.

Ugh! I’d often heard this sort of advice before but never really listened to it. Now, having just spent the best part of two hours perfecting my SuperHUD, I really didn’t want to listen to it! Unfortunately, deep down, I knew they were right and, as my own game had been stagnating in recent times, I decided that I’d be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t give it a try. So, begrudgingly, I went back to the drawing board and revamped my HUD, trying to keep it to the bare minimum.

Here’s what I eventually settled on (with revamped table and card mods from http://www.tiltbuster.com/).

Beneath each player I have the standard VPIP/PFR/AF stats. On the left (descending) I have Hands/Fold BB to Steal/Attempt to Steal and on the right I have 3-Bet/Fold to 3-Bet. If I wanted to be extra-minimalist I could probably discard the right column altogether but I decided against this as 3-bet stats are very useful in button/small blind/big blind dynamics and in heads-up matches.

I’ve yet to get a chance to really sit down and play so I’m not sure if this revamped HUD will actually help my game. If it does however, it will be rather ironic since it will mean that what I've been looking for was actually always right in front of me; in front of me, when it shouldn’t have been!