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Take quizUsing a poker HUD (heads-up display) has been standard practice for online poker players for many years. Whether you subscribe to Hold’em Manager, PokerTracker, or another tool, a HUD is essential for successful online play.
While a number of prominent online poker sites have banned the use of HUDs in recent years, these tools can still be used in most online poker rooms, and you should use them whenever you can.
On this page, we will go over all the most common and useful poker stats you need to understand and how you can use them in-game to give yourself an upper hand.
Before we get to that, let’s talk briefly about how poker HUDs work and what poker stats are in the first place.
Once you have installed poker tracking software like Hold’em Manager on your computer, all the hands you play at major online poker sites will be imported into the software’s database.
Over time, the database will grow, and you will collect many hands played against the same opponents who frequently sit in your games. While the software will allow you to replay hands and sort them in various ways, it will also do so much more for you.
For each individual opponent you face, your poker tracking software will begin to extrapolate a variety of statistics, which you can display over your tables in what's known as a Heads Up Display.
The HUD stats will tell you all sorts of things about your opponents, ranging from their preflop opening ranges from different positions to their flop, turn, and river tendencies.
As you play more and more hands against particular opponents, your database will grow, and the reads you can get on them from their stats will become more and more useful.
As most players play a very imbalanced game of poker, you should be able to recognize many tendencies and deviations in players’ games that you can use to your advantage.
We will now go over some of the most useful stats in your HUD, what they mean, and how you can use them to increase your edge at the table.
The stat's name stands for "voluntarily put into the pot" and is the percentage of hands a player puts any money into the pot without being forced to. This means that posting blinds does not count toward your VPIP stat.
The higher a player's VPIP, the more hands they play in one way or another. This stat does not tell us anything about the player's aggression tendencies but rather only about the number of hands they play.
Typically, good poker players will not have a VPIP much higher than 25 in 6-max games or much higher than 20 in full-ring games, although some games may warrant slightly higher numbers.
A player with a high VPIP will either be an absolute maniac or a complete calling station, which is a distinction you can make based on other stats we will also discuss.
VPIP is generally the first stat in most players' HUDs, and it is certainly one of the most useful as it tells you so much about the player's game.
In an ideal world, you want to play at a table where everyone's VPIP is very high. In such a scenario, you can get away with playing very tight and turn a huge profit by simply having the best hand more often than anyone else.
The second most useful stat in poker is the PFR which stands for preflop raise. This stat tells you the percentage of all hands the player raises with, whether they are the first to raise or making a re-raise over an existing raise.
Every time a player takes aggressive action before the flop, it will increase their PFR stat and give you some extra information.
In combination with the VPIP, PFR will tell you what percentage of hands the player plays aggressively and what percentage they play passively.
Players with a low PFR and high VPIP are generally considered calling stations as they don't like to raise a lot, but they love to call raises and bets.
On the other hand, a player whose VPIP and PFR are both very high is a maniac and can be exploited by playing aggressively against when you have a variety of solid hands.
If a player's PFR is at 35, for example, this means they are raising about one of the three hands they are dealt. This is clearly too much, and you should be willing to play back against this player with a wide range of holdings.
Ideally, your PFR stat should be only slightly lower than your VPIP stat, as you will generally want to be the aggressor as often as possible when playing poker.
Another way to determine if a player is a maniac or a calling station is by looking at their total AF or aggression factor.
The aggression factor is a stat that considers all player’s actions, both before and after the flop, and puts them into a number.
This number represents the player’s overall aggression. An aggression factor of about 3 is what a solid poker player should have in cash games. Much higher than that is too aggressive, while much lower means you play too passively.
Note that the aggression factor is a stat that only becomes useful once you have gathered quite a few hands on the player in question, as it takes some time for the calculation to bring about a meaningful number that does not deceive.
Another very important preflop stat is the 3-bet percentage. This stat tells you how often a player decides to 3-bet when facing a raise preflop.
High 3-bet percentages are a recognizable sign of maniacs who generally play too many hands and who play them too aggressively. Players like this can be more easily played back against, but they can also be quite dangerous to face, much more than the calling stations of the world.
A 3-bet of about 6 to 8 is a relatively normal number, while anything past 10 is too aggressive in most games out there.
If you see a player with a 3-bet of 15 over a reasonable number of hands, you should be prepared to pounce on their 3-bets often and heavily, as they tend to mean very little.
This stat can go even further when you filter it by position and see how differently your opponent plays from each seat. Some players like to 3-bet a lot from the blinds and call when they are in position, making their overall 3bet stat in the normal range, but when you see these disbalances based on position, it becomes easy to exploit it.
So far, most of the stats we have looked at have been about players putting their chips in, but this one is all about how often they fold their cards.
The Fold to 3-Bet stat tells us how often a player folds their cards when facing a 3-bet from us or anyone else at the table.
Generally speaking, a Fold to 3-Bet of 50-60 is considered normal. Players who continue with more hands have a low Fold to 3-Bet, while those who are too tight have a high Fold to 3-Bet.
You should be looking for players with a high Fold to 3-Bet so you can 3-bet them relentlessly and print money, as well as those with a low Fold to 3-Bet so you can be careful about 3-bet bluffing them too often.
Of all the preflop stats, this could just be one of the most important and useful ones, as it gives you information about a play that is so common in modern-day poker games.
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Like the 3-Bet Percentage, the 4-Bet Percentage represents the overall percentage of times the player decides to 4-bet before the flop when he has such an option.
This number is generally very low for most players, around 2 or 3, meaning they only 4-bet before the flop if they have a monster hand.
That said, you will encounter players with a higher 4-Bet Percentage from time to time. If you have enough hands on them, this number may indicate they 4-bet as a bluff quite often.
Against players who 4-bet too much, you should be more willing to stack off with hands like AK, QQ, and JJ before the flop and stick it in with an occasional AQ or TT to make sure you are not getting bluffed off your strong hands.
This stat only works against players you have played thousands of hands against, as it takes time to find a relevant sample of hands in which they 4-bet, so don't look at this one with too much confidence in most cases.
ATS (attempt to steal) is a stat relatively similar to PFR, but one that only considers raises from late position, which is designed to steal the blinds.
This stat is extremely useful in tournament play, where late positions raise to steal the blinds a lot.
A good player's ATS should stand at around 30 in the full ring and 35 in 6-max games, although this can depend a little bit on the type of game and the opponents they are facing. In either case, ATS will tell you much about the player’s tendency to steal the blinds when they get a chance.
Some players will have a very low ATS, indicating that they tend to play in late positions the same way as they do in early positions, only when they have good cards.
On the other hand, you may find that some players have a very high ATS, indicating that they love to try and steal the blinds more often than an average player. These players are great candidates for 3bet bluffs and even re-shoves when the situation is right.
Having this stat on your HUD will give you important insights into a player’s general game and may help you make some decisions that are not standard but are very profitable against them.
The opposite of ATS is the Fold to Steal stat, which indicates how often a player folds their cards in the blinds when facing a late position raise.
While good players usually fold about 60% of all hands in these spots, there are a lot of deviations to that as well. If you find a player's Fold to Steal is very high, you can go ahead and steal their blinds a lot; they will not be likely to resist.
On the other hand, if the opponent in the big blind has a Fold to Steal of 40, you should not be looking to steal too much as they are probably defending very wide.
Note that many players will defend much wider against a small raise as they should and that this stat can have some bias depending on the size of the raises they generally face.
A continuation bet or c-bet is one of the most popular plays in the game. Therefore, you should keep track of how your opponents respond to it.
The Fold to C-Bet stat is the one that tells you just how often a particular player folds their cards when they face a c-bet.
You can go into even more specifics and split this stat into the flop, turn, and river c-bets, although the flop c-bet stat will be the most useful.
A player who folds less than 50% of the time is probably calling too much, while a player who folds more than 70% can be easily exploited by c-betting relentlessly. Note that this stat is also heavily connected to the c-bet size, and there isn't really a way to filter for different sizes in-game.
As a general rule, you can assume that most players fold more when they face a large c-bet and less when they face a small c-bet and act accordingly.
Of all the poker stats, WTSD%, which stands for Went to Showdown Percentage, may be one of the most eye-opening ones. This stat tells you how often the player gets all the way to showdown after they enter the pot in the first place.
The ideal WTSD% in most games is just under 30, as there are many reasons to jump ship and fold your cards after making a preflop raise or calling one.
However, there are quite a few players who have a very high WTSD%, and these players are the ones you don’t want to bluff too much.
If a player has a high WTSD%, it means they are unlikely to fold their cards regardless of the situation. Such players will call flop and turn bets with gutshots and river bets with weak pairs, which means they are ideal for getting value but not for bluffing.
On the other hand, a player with a low WTSD% is one that’s easily bluffed. Such a player folds too many hands and does not defend unless they hit the exact board they dreamed of.
Make sure to include the WTSD% stat in your HUD, and you will quickly become a better player for it, as it will allow you to exploit your opponents like never before.
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