Heads-up-display is a tool that allows the user to have the stats he wich to have pop up on a poker table. There are a lot of softwares capable of doing this as we cover in this article! In the recent years a lot of poker sites have prohibited HUD´s. In this article we take a look int pros and cons of banning HUD´s.
- Is banning HUD´s good for professional players?
- Is banning HUD´s good for recreational players?
- Poker Sites have anything to win from this, what about poker apps?
- A lot of sites banned HUD´s, how are they doing today?
Is banning HUD´s good for professional players?
For us this is a clear no. Professional players can take a lot of advantages from their ability to take good use of stats. They can also play more tables at the same time without the need of looking into every showdown to understand how their opponents. Yes while they multi-table their overall winrate is lower but they take more money per hour from the poker economy.
Not having your hand history´s is makes studying your game a lot harder too. Some sites allow players to download them after a few hours or days of play and some don´t.
Poker sites that allow you to download your hands after play:
- GGPoker
- PartyPoker
- Bodog/Ignition
- CoinPoker
Poker sites that dont have a download hand history´s option:
- Unibet
- PokerDoom
- PokerMatch
- Pokerbros
- PPPoker
- GGClube
On the other side it also a lot harder to prove that someone is cheating. Good players have been responsible for making poker sites aware of possible security problems over the years. They do it by looking into stats and hand re-players of players they suspected of and if they find something they report it. This is not possible if pros don´t have access to hand history´s.
Is banning HUD´s good for recreational players?
At a first glance this might look to be the case. Banning HUD´s might make the professionals play less tables at the same time an this will have an impact in the recreational/professional player racio in your tables.
On the other side it is very hard for poker sites to make sure that no ones is actually using an HUD. The first step poker sites take is to make it impossible for trackers to access the hand history’s in real time, but there is always a way.
A lot of software providers focus on making hand grabbers that allow HUD´s to work anyway. Of course this creates a situation where the more informed and capable to access this payed software will have an HUD anyway and the recreationals will not.
The worst part is that recreational players will think they are playing vs opponents that don have an HUD when they actually do. This is the case in a lot of poker apps who endorse a free HUD environment wish is far from the truth.
Of course all of this non HUD environment´s ban players using it, but only if they can catch them. Personally i think that GGPoker, PartyPoker and other sites with big budgets to security can do this. I have my doubts about poker apps.
How are poker sites that dont allow HUD´s doing?
GGPoker comes as number one on the list. At this moment they are the biggest poker site in the world and they have a no HUD policy. It is hard to say if this makes them successful or the very good software with a lot of animations that please fun players. Also they benefit a lot by allowing players in from a lot of country and have very handy deposit methods like crypto.
PartyPoker is a traded company that complies with all the country restriction rules and deposit methods options are a litle bit more limited. Anyway they where the 4th biggest site and now they show up in the 11th place for cash games volume at pokerscout.
Poker apps had a lot of success in the last years but we cannot know how would they do if they allowed HUD´s as noon of them does.
