HUDs: A Response
Monday, 4 August 2014
Dara O'Kearney sets the record straight.
A few months ago, Dara O’Kearney wrote a piece on HUDs, igniting a raging online debate in the process. Now Doke's back, and he's ready to set the record straight.
I worked in the hi-tech sector for over two decades before I learned poker and discovered an easier way to make a living (or so I thought). One thing I quickly learned in that industry is the reaction to any new technology always tends to polarise people into two camps:
(1) This changes everything.
(2) This does nothing.
This happens so universally that there is no doubt in my mind that when the inventor of the wheel rolled out his invention (or rolled it into his cave), half the people who saw it were going, "This changes everything. We're all going to live forever!" while the other half said "All it does is roll? Will never catch on."
After moving into poker, it therefore came as no surprise to me that whenever I bring up the subject of HUDs, the reaction tends to either be "Oh my God, You online players use those?! No wonder I lose online, you're all cheating. They should be banned," or, "Meh. Tried them once, didn't help." Live players tend to fall heavily into what we might call the "This changes everything, I'm going to lose forever" camp, overestimating the benefits of HUDs to even their most expert users, so I wasn't too surprised at Rob Yong's reaction to the piece on HUDs I wrote for Bluff Europe a few months ago. Shortly after it appeared, Rob tweeted a photo of the piece, pronouncing it the most frightening thing he had ever read (on poker, I'm guessing), and calling on all poker sites to ban them immediately.
My first reaction to this was, "Wow, Rob Yong read my piece!" It's nice to be read, especially by someone who has done as much for live poker in the UK as Rob, so hi Rob. My next reaction was that Rob's views were actually fairly typical of those I've heard expressed by a lot of live players (particularly recreational ones). There does seem to be a genuine suspicion that HUDs and tracking sites give pros an unfair edge. People hear the words "tracking software", and immediately have visions of the software telling the HUD user to call, raise or fold.
I always try to counter that by pointing out that really all a HUD is, is the equivalent of sitting at a poker table with a pen and paper taking copious notes on how many hands each player plays, how often he folds or bets on the flop, and so on. Or even dispensing with the pen and paper and doing it in your head. In a nutshell, HUDs help you play more tables more profitably (more on the implications of this and why it means sites are less likely to ban HUDs as a result later). Essentially, they allow you to identify the bad players and their specific leaks, which you would do if you were paying attention anyway (but can't if you're playing dozens of tables).
The article that Rob Yong objected to also stirred some interesting reactions among my friends, several of whom are top pros. Again, they tended to split along live versus online lines. Ludovic Geilich planted himself in the "changes everything" camp, although he did come up with an interesting objection to HUDs I hadn't heard before; he said that he didn't like that it takes money from poker players (who buy HUDs), and gives it to software developers, who don't bring anything to poker themselves. Max Heinzelmann was in the "all it does is roll" camp, saying he felt HUDs were of little use in tournaments due to small sample sizes, large player pools and continually changing conditions.
These are all fair points: we rarely get enough hands with tournament opponents to draw very reliable conclusions on their tendencies (with the exception of other regs we play against constantly). More often than not, those of us who specialise in multi-table tournaments with thousands of runners online will find ourselves at tables with players we have mostly never played with before. By the time we get more than a couple of dozen hands on them into our database, they bust, or we bust, or the table breaks. It's also true that nearly all players play a totally different style early on at 10/20 with no ante from the one they adopt on the final table bubble with an average stack of 14 big blinds and big antes. In those circumstances, having data from the early levels when they mostly folded can be downright misleading.
While conceding the validity of all of Max's points, I would also say that in my view, some data is better than no data – people who go HUDless are essentially working off a sample size of zero all the time. Instead, understanding the limitations of small sample sizes allows us to avoid the more common mistakes people make.
One misconception about HUDs that does annoy me is the view that "it's not really poker." One recreational player commented to me after reading my piece, saying, "Rob Yong is right. Ban all the HUDs and let's find out who can really play poker." My response to this is: I think we already do.
Most players who use HUDs and win are also the biggest winners on networks that ban HUDs. In response to the call from Rob (and others) to sites to ban them, all I can say is it's been done. I think HUDs will never be banned (by the big sites at least) for the simple reason that it's not in the site's interest to have everyone playing less tables. The less tables we play the less rake we pay.
The few networks that have tried, like Cake, essentially did so as a gimmick (and a not very successful one, at that) to try to attract recreational players under the guise of "protecting" them. On a macro level, the online poker economy is a competition between the sites. It is also a competition for the winning players, who fight over the losing players' money. Realistically, it's in the site's best interests to do anything they can to reduce the winning players edges, so that everyone pays more rake.
Now, there's not really anything they can do to make the losing players stop losing money to winning players – but they can at least halt the pace. They achieve this by setting faster and faster structures, with flatter payouts that pay more of the field, and so on. It's also a delicate ecosystem: while the money the winning players take out of the overall cake means less for the sites, simply banning or pissing off winning regs isn't a good idea, as its the mass multi-tablers who provide traffic liquidity. I think the biggest reason that people say PokerStars have effectively "won" online poker is that they got this point early and started actively encouraging multi-tablers (by setting Supernova status etc). Some of the sites still don't get it, and seem intent on pissing regs off.
I know a lot of recreational players think it would be to their advantage if HUDs were banned, but I really don't think so. Having played on networks where they were banned, such as Cake, all it really meant was I couldn't play as many tables, as I had to pay more attention to what was happening on each table.
I don't think it's to the advantage of recreational players to have pros play less tables: it just forces us to pay more attention. The one huge advantage a recreational player playing only one or two tables at a time has over mass multi-tabling pros is they can pay far closer attention to what is actually happening.
The HUD compensates for being able to pay less attention to each table to some extent, but not fully. A HUD will tell you in gross data terms that a player is raising X% of hands or C-betting Y% of the time, but this is information any decent player paying attention will pick up through observation anyway, along with additional detail of specific hands and situations.
While I use HUDs I am by no means a champion of them. I use them because they exist but would have no problem in a level playing field where nobody has one. My historical ROI on networks that don't allow them is actually higher than on sites with HUDs (admittedly, this is probably at least in part down to these networks attracting weaker pools of recreational players who had the misguided view that the absence of HUDs "protected" them). The only thing that will protect a losing player from losing his money long term is to fix the technical leaks, leaks which come into much sharper focus online due to more hands played/larger sample sizes. HUDs are like lie detectors: if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from them.