Poker Hud Stats Explained

What the Numbers Count

Your HUD is a counter. It reads the hands your tracker has stored, works out how often each player did a given thing, and prints the percentage over their seat. Every number on it is a fact about hands that have already been played.

Whether it is a good number is a separate question. Most of the answers a tournament player finds when they go looking were written for cash games, where the stacks never move and the table never breaks. Which numbers belong on the display in the first place is a different question, and Jordan’s own HUD layout walks through that one.

A HUD stat is a fraction. The bottom is the number of times a situation came up, the top is the number of times the player took a particular action in it, and the label on the box is shorthand for both halves.

That matters more than it looks, because stats sitting side by side in the same panel count wildly different denominators. Fold to 3-Bet is measured out of the times a player opened and then faced a 3-bet, which is a thin slice of hands. VPIP is measured out of every hand dealt. Same display, very different amounts of evidence underneath. A 40% fold to 3-bet built on nine opportunities is noise wearing a percentage sign.

Four Things That Make the Tournament Reading Different

The Ante Changes the Price of Everything

Nearly every MTT runs with antes, so there is dead money in the middle before anybody acts. A steal needs to work less often to break even, and defending is cheaper relative to the size of the pot. Cash benchmarks were built in a game without that money sitting there.

Stack Depth Is the Whole Game

A cash game is a 100 big blind game, hand after hand, for as long as you sit there. A tournament starts deep and works its way down to the stack depths where you are moving all in. Opening the cutoff at 60 big blinds and opening the cutoff at 18 are separate problems with separate answers, and your HUD reports one number covering both.

Format compounds it. A database mixing turbos, regular speeds, progressive knockouts and satellites averages across structures that reward genuinely different play. The single figure over a player’s seat is a blend of every stack depth and every format they have played in front of you, weighted by nothing more meaningful than how often each happened to come up.

ICM Pulls the Late Numbers Away From the Early Ones

Deep in a tournament the chips you stand to win are worth less per chip than the chips you stand to lose. That is the whole of ICM, and it moves what a correct frequency looks like on the bubble and at the final table, particularly in the blinds. Run a season of hands through one filter and level-two play and bubble play land in the same bucket. The complete guide to the Independent Chip Model covers what the model is doing to those frequencies.

The Table Breaks

This is the difference that decides how a tournament player should use a HUD at all.

Cash players build thousands of hands on the same opponents, because those opponents sit in the same games night after night. In an MTT you get a couple of orbits on someone and then a redraw takes them somewhere else. Opponent samples stay small by design, and the ones that do get large belong to the handful of regulars you keep running into.

Your own sample has no such ceiling. Every hand you play goes into it, across every table, every stack depth and every tournament you have entered. Reading opponents is the advertised use of a HUD. In tournaments, the dependable use is reading yourself.

The Preflop Stats

VPIP and PFR

VPIP counts hands where a player put chips in preflop by choice. Posting a blind does not count and checking your option in the big blind does not count, so a big blind that never faces a raise adds to the bottom of the fraction and not the top.

PFR counts hands where a player raised preflop. A raise also puts chips in voluntarily, so PFR is a subset of VPIP and can never be larger than it.

Using those two numbers you can start to deduce how aggressively or passively an opponent approaches the game. Big VPIP and small PFR would suggest they are coming into a lot of pots by calling. These types of opponents are easy to identify and exploit. This is just one of countless ways to use your HUD to visualize the type of opponent you are up against.

Both figures sit higher in tournaments than the cash game charts suggest, for two structural reasons. The ante improves the price on opening, and short stacks make raising the only sensible way to enter a pot. Measure a tournament player against a cash reference and they will look loose while they are playing the structure correctly. Where the ranges themselves should sit by seat is covered in preflop ranges for tournament poker by position.

RFI by Position

RFI counts the times a player raised when the pot was still unopened. It only means anything broken out by seat. A single combined RFI figure averages the under the gun range against the button range, and there is no useful number sitting between them.

Position by position is where preflop leaks become visible, because the correct curve is steep. It should climb from a narrow figure under the gun to a wide one on the button. A curve that stays roughly flat across the seats is a player running one range everywhere, which costs money at both ends: too many hands from early position, too few from late.

3-Bet and Fold to 3-Bet

3-Bet counts reraises against a preflop open. Fold to 3-Bet counts how often a player gives up their open when it happens to them.

Read them together. A leak in one is only worth attacking given the other, since a high fold to 3-bet is what makes a wide 3-bet profitable against that specific player and a low one is what punishes it. Both take a long time to fill in, because each needs a two-step sequence to occur before it records anything at all.

The Blind Stats

Big blind fold to steal and big blind 3-bet against steals carry more weight in tournaments than in any other format. The ante gives you a better price to defend than a cash player gets, and the blinds arrive on schedule whether the cards cooperate or not. Across a long tournament, big blind defense is the most repeated decision you make. The complete guide to blind vs blind play covers the spot where both of those stats matter most.

Give small blind numbers their own line. Playing out of position for every street, with a partial investment already in the middle, is a different problem and a different set of correct frequencies, and the Apestyles guide to small blind versus big blind is where that spot gets worked out properly.

The Postflop Stats

C-Bet and Fold to C-Bet

C-Bet Flop counts how often the preflop raiser bets the flop. Fold to Flop C-Bet counts how often the caller lets it go when they do.

Both are averaged across board textures that call for opposite approaches, which is the postflop version of the stack depth problem. One figure covers A-7-2 rainbow and 9-8-6 with a flush draw on it. A player sitting mid-range on c-bet might be betting correctly on both, or betting far too often on one texture and far too rarely on the other, and the HUD has no way to separate them. Turn and river figures inherit the same limitation with thinner samples on top.

What the flop numbers do reliably is flag the extremes. A c-bet figure at the top of the range is somebody betting every flop regardless of what came down. A very high fold to c-bet is a player who calls preflop and then surrenders the flop, which is a common way chips leave a stack before anybody sees a showdown.

WTSD and W$SD

Went To Showdown measures how often a player who saw a flop got all the way to showdown. Won Money At Showdown measures how often those showdowns were won.

They read as a pair, and they pull against each other. Reaching showdown often with a low win rate there is a calling problem. Reaching showdown rarely with a high win rate is a folding problem, and the impressive-looking second number is what hides it: you win most of the showdowns you reach because you only reach the ones you were always going to win, having folded the rest of your winners along the way. A strong W$SD only means something next to a normal frequency of getting there.

Aggression Factor and Aggression Frequency

Aggression Factor divides postflop bets and raises by postflop calls. Aggression Frequency expresses aggressive actions as a share of everything a player did after the flop, folds included.

AFq is the steadier of the two. AF puts calls in the denominator, so it swings hard when that count is small and reports infinity for a player who has never called. Both are blunt instruments. They describe the shape of somebody’s postflop game and say nothing about whether that shape is being applied in the right spots.

How Many Hands Before a Number Means Something

Stats fill in at speeds proportional to how often their situation comes up. VPIP and PFR are measured on every hand dealt and settle early. RFI split across six seats takes roughly six times as long to reach the same confidence as one combined figure. A 4-bet percentage needs a sequence that might occur once in a couple of hundred hands, so it can sit there for a whole session of play without moving.

A small sample is a hint. Be most suspicious of the extreme values, because the smallest samples produce the loudest looking numbers. A player showing 100% fold to 3-bet has quite possibly faced exactly one.

Pointing the HUD at Yourself

Everything above works in both directions. Aimed at an opponent it is capped by the redraw, and in an MTT that cap arrives quickly.

Doing that by eye is where it stalls. The numbers are spread across six positions, four streets, a range of stack depths and several formats, and a real leak usually sits in one position on one street rather than in the headline figure. A c-bet number that looks fine overall can be hiding a small blind that never continues and a cutoff that barrels every turn. Nobody spots that scrolling through a report.

That is the job the MTT Database Leak Finder does. Upload your hand histories or a PokerTracker 4 report and it checks 175 stats across preflop, flop, turn and river, broken out by position from under the gun through the blinds, and flags each one as low, high or inside the target range. The targets are tournament targets, which is the part the cash-calibrated reference charts get wrong.