Retooling Your HUD

I read a great poohbah post by RapidEvolution the other day about loosening up your game. It made me think about what I've done since loosening up my game and the big thing that stood out for me was that I failed to effectively use my HUD. I was using it as a crutch and looking at useless stats at the same time - a disaster for decision making.

So I thought about this for a few days and decided to go through all the stats available and think "how would this stat help me?" "What situations do I find myself in a lot and which stats do I need to help me in those spots?" Some stats are going to be more important than others for you depending on your style.

And then I did something I should have done long ago that I didn't. I put in minimum number of samples for the stat to be displayed. Without doing this you are essentially using a faulty crutch. Displaying fold to cbet when you have 100 hands on someone doesn't really tell you much. How many cbets has he faced? 2 or 3 if he's a nit for 0%, 33%, 50%, 67%, or 100%? That's a pretty big range that tells you nothing so just put it out of site and out of mind. On the other hand, you might have a LAG that has a decent sample to go off of much sooner than the nit and you need to clarify when a stat becomes suitable for use.

The resulting HUD looked somewhat bleak at first glance - it was more than 1/2 empty for most players. Some players that I have more than 2k hands on still only have 3/4 of their stats displayed. But after thinking about it, this is going to improve my game tremendously. It is going to stop me from making decisions based on stats that are not accurate, plus it is going to force me to do my own hand reading and pay more attention to the line they are taking.

Stats should take a big back seat to reads, lines and hand reading to begin with. Using a faulty HUD is a recipe for disaster, so figure out what you need out of it and when you can start using it.