What Is a HUD in Poker?

A HUD — heads-up display — is an overlay that sits on your online poker table and shows live statistics for each opponent, pulled from the hand histories your tracking software has already stored. It turns thousands of past decisions into a few numbers beside a player's name: how often they enter pots, how often they raise, how often they surrender the flop. It is a memory aid rather than an advantage engine, and a growing number of sites now ban it outright.

What a HUD actually shows

Every display is built from the same handful of percentages. Four of them carry most of the weight; everything else is refinement.

Stat	What it counts	Solid 6-max regular
VPIP	Hands played voluntarily	low-to-mid twenties
PFR	Hands raised before the flop	a few points below VPIP
3-Bet	Reraises before the flop	high single digits
Fold to C-Bet	Flops given up to the aggressor	roughly half

The gap between VPIP and PFR is the most useful read on the overlay. A player at 24/20 raises almost everything they play, so their calls are narrow and specific. A player at 38/9 limps and flats their way into pots, handing you initiative every time you raise.

Using one in a real hand

You open the CO to 2.5bb with A♦Q♣ and the BTN calls. The flop comes J♠7♥3♦, you hold no pair and no draw, and the pot is about 6bb.

If the BTN's fold-to-c-bet number is high over a genuine sample, a 2bb bet needs to work only 25% of the time to break even, and his own stat says it works far more often. If he folds flops rarely, that same bet is a donation — check, keep the pot small, and take a free card with six outs to the best pair.

Sample size is where HUDs lie

Preflop stats settle quickly because every hand feeds them, so VPIP and PFR start meaning something after a few hundred hands. Postflop stats do not. Fold-to-river-bet across 40 hands is noise dressed up as a read, and acting on it costs you more than having no read at all.

Treat any stat under a few hundred observations as a hint, and any postflop stat under a thousand hands as decoration.

It is the same error people make with their own results. Run your winrate through a poker variance calculator and watch how long a number takes to stop swinging — then extend that patience to every box on the overlay.

Where HUDs are banned

A HUD is online-only by definition. It reads the hand histories your client writes to disk, and a live table produces none, which is why the numbers stop the moment you sit down in a casino.

The ground has also shifted online. Several major operators now prohibit third-party tracking overlays completely, and others allow stats only from hands you played yourself. Build reads that survive without the software — bet sizing, timing, and what players actually turn over at showdown.