The HUD
Know who you're up against, without taking your eyes off the table.
Gandalf
Co-founder of Poker Sciences
The chapter on the Players page announced it: the study of your opponents was about to gain an in-game HUD.
Here it is.
The HUD (Heads-Up Display) shows, in real time and directly on your tables, a block of stats for every opponent sitting across from you.
You choose the stats, their layout and their colors.
Poker Spin Tracker handles the rest: detecting your tables, recognizing the players, placing the blocks in the right spot and updating the numbers hand after hand.
This chapter covers the essentials: enabling it and knowing which rooms are compatible, building your HUD, and reading it without falling into the small-sample traps.
Compatible rooms
For now, the HUD works on four rooms:
| Room | Supported spins |
|---|---|
| Winamax | Expresso |
| PokerStars | Spin & Go |
| Unibet | Power Spin |
| iPoker (PMU Poker) | Twister |
Two notable absences, for two different reasons:
- GG Poker: nicknames are anonymized at the source (seen in the previous chapter) and the hands are only available after the fact. No HUD is possible on this room, no matter which tracker you use.
- Betclic: the room does not allow HUDs, and does not write the hands to your disk live.
The general rule: the HUD only exists where the room writes your hands live and allows its use. A room that only provides the history once the game is over cannot feed a real-time display.
Where to find it, how to enable it
The HUD is configured on the Players page , HUD tab.
Everything starts with the Enable the HUD switch, at the top of the tab: as long as it is off, nothing shows on your tables.
What it needs
The HUD relies on live import (Import your first hands): the tracker has to monitor the folder where your room writes your hands, exactly as it does for your automatic imports.
On macOS, enabling it also requires the Screen Recording permission: that is what makes it possible to locate your table windows and read the nicknames on display.
If you have only just granted it, a restart of the app may be necessary. The tracker remembers your intent and will enable the HUD on the next launch.
Some machines cannot display the HUD: Intel Macs (the screen-reading engine isn't available on them), Windows ARM and Linux. The tab tells you clearly when that is the case.
Building your HUD
A ready-made HUD
You have nothing to build to get started: the tracker ships a default grid, with a preflop section organized by position and a postflop section (c-bet, barrels, initiative bets).
It is more than enough for your first sessions.
A block, sections, cells
A HUD block is split into sections, displayed as tabs inside the block: only one is visible at a time, and you switch from one to the other with one click, even in game.
Each section is a free-form grid whose rows and columns you choose.
You can even place several blocks per opponent (the panels), each positioned wherever you want.
Two formats, two HUDs
You configure the 3-max HUD and the heads-up HUD separately: the relevant stats aren't the same three-handed as they are heads-up.
In game, the tracker switches on its own from one to the other as soon as a player is eliminated.
Adding a stat
Click the "+" of an empty cell: the catalog opens, with three families:
- General stats: the catalog of classic stats (VPIP, open, limp, c-bet…), filterable by format, position and opponent type.
- Precise: a custom stat, built from an exact action line (for example "SB open 2x, then fold to a 3-bet").
- Text: a free cell, with no number, to label a row. That is how the default grid shows BTN, SB and BB at the start of each row.
On top of that comes the Number of hands cell, set apart in the catalog: it shows the number of hands you have played against that player.
Organizing the grid
A right-click on the grid opens the structure menu: insert or delete rows and columns, add or remove sections and panels.
Drag and drop moves a stat from cell to cell, or to another section by dropping it on that section's tab.
A click on a cell renames its abbreviation.
Each cell can also be given a background color to group your stats visually.
The palette is deliberately neutral, with no green and no red: in the tracker, those two colors judge a value, whereas here the background only organizes.
To the right of the editor, the preview places your block on a mock table with real players from your database (a fish and a reg you have run into a lot): you compose your HUD while seeing immediately what it will look like in game, with real values.
Your own block
By default, the HUD also shows a block for you, with the same stats as your opponents': the direct comparison, on screen, between your game and theirs. The Hide for Hero switch, in the preview, removes it.
Several named HUDs
You can create several HUDs (new, rename, duplicate, delete) and switch from one to the other: the selected HUD is both the one you edit and the one displayed in game.
Handy for testing a variant without touching your main setup.
On your tables: what happens on its own
Once the HUD is enabled, you have nothing to do at the start of a session.
As soon as a table window opens, the tracker detects it and starts the live import, a few seconds before the first hand.
It also reads the nicknames displayed on screen: the blocks appear right at the start of the first hand, with the full history you have on each player, without waiting for a hand to be played.
The blocks are anchored to the table window: move the table, they follow. Every table gets its own blocks, even in a heavy multi-tabling session.
Adjusting position and size
Drag a block to reposition it, pull the handle at the bottom right to resize it.
The settings are stored per room: place your blocks once, they apply to all your tables, in all your sessions.
Live values
Each stat shows the player's full history, current session included, and updates on every new hand. When a player busts, their block disappears and the HUD switches to your heads-up setup from the first hand of the duel.
The colors of the values compare each stat to a reference, exactly as in the Leak Finder: preflop against the reference GTO ranges, postflop against the average of the regs.
- Green: on target (±5 points)
- Red: too aggressive
- Blue: too passive
Before each nickname, you find the logo of their category ( fish, reg, as covered in Fish vs Reg) and the dots of your custom tags (Your opponent tags).
Both markings can be turned off in the settings of the HUD tab.
Finally, click a nickname: a compact player card opens next to the block, the same one as on the Players page, without ever stealing the focus from your poker client. Move the cursor away and it closes.
The small-sample traps
In Spins, you meet most of your opponents over a handful of hands: a few dozen at best, often fewer.
At that scale, many of the numbers on display mean almost nothing.
A stat is a fraction, and everything depends on its denominator. VPIP moves on every hand: a few dozen are enough to sketch a profile.
A "fold vs 3-bet" only moves when the situation comes up. Over the same volume, it often rests on two or three occurrences.
The tracker protects you with two safeguards:
- Grayed-out block: below 20 hands seen on a player, all of their values show in gray. Readable, but to be taken with a grain of salt, and with no comparison color.
- Grayed-out stat: the Min. sample setting grays each stat individually as long as its number of occurrences is too low (10 by default, adjustable). A VPIP measured over 200 hands stays white while a "fold vs barrel" seen twice turns gray.
And a stat without a single occurrence simply shows "—".
Add the Number of hands cell to your grid: it shows the number of hands you have played against that player, across your whole history. It is the number that tells you how far to trust the others, and it is never grayed out.
The safeguards don't do everything: three biases lie in wait for any HUD read.
Mechanical extremes
With only two occurrences, a stat can only show 0%, 50% or 100%.
You see a 100%, and you tell yourself:
He folded twice to my 3-bet, I've found my victim.
No: you have seen two folds. Plenty of perfectly sound players would show the same 100% after two occurrences.
Extreme values are the norm in small samples, not a signal.
Sampling variance
Even a frequent stat swings hard early on. A player whose real VPIP is 25% can easily show 40% after 20 hands, simply because he was dealt a run of playable hands.
The order of magnitude to remember: at 20 hands, a VPIP is read to within ±20 points; it takes a few hundred hands to read it to within ±5 points.
Confirmation bias
An image forms fast: one bluff shown, two limps, and the label is stuck on.
After that, you read the stats in the direction of the label: the 40% VPIP "confirms" the maniac, the 100% fold "confirms" the victim.
Stats should test your impressions, not decorate them. The rarer a stat, the more hands it needs: in game, rely first on the frequent stats, and keep the fine reads for real samples.
In game, favor general stats
Your HUD only analyzes one player at a time: that is its strength (the information is personalized) and its limitation (the sample is tiny).
That is the big difference from your analysis away from the tables.
In the Leak Finder, when you study the Fish or the Regs, you aggregate the hands of hundreds of players under a single tag: even a very precise stat ends up resting on a solid sample.
On a single opponent, it will almost never have one.
A precise stat built in the Precise tab stays relevant in game if its situation comes up on nearly every hand, like the open sizings of the default grid.
But a rare action line will stay gray, or misleading, on almost all of your opponents.
In game: general, frequent stats (VPIP, open, limp, c-bet…), which give a usable read within a few dozen hands. Precise stats come into their own away from the tables, on entire populations.