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As promised here is the start of my hud designing.
My goal is to get this designed and then built by Saturday. It's going to be a lot of work.
To start off, I'll explain the software I'm using and what it all does.
The Tools
Holdem Manager 2 - General tracking software, the basis of the HUD.
NoteCaddy Premium - Most people know it as automatic note taking software. It has a bunch of other features such as badges, spark graphs , scatter graphs, population analysis, implied conclusions and much more. I'll explain some of these as I come to them.
NoteCaddy Edge SNG - A premium addon for NoteCaddy that adds a tonne of custom definitions (with the right data considered and right sample sizes), badges and popups to display the right notes in the right place. It also comes with a well thought through HUD which I like, but I want to create one for my own workflow.
What info do I want from my HUD?
There are 4 levels of detail I'm striving for.
Table Selection info - basic pokerstars colour coding of good regs / bad regs / break even players / bad players / super fish.
I'm a massive fan of colour coding players for table selection. Good table selection can account for 3-4% ROI (sometimes more) so it's crucial to get it right. Most people do it by manually marking players a certain colour. It's actually possible to have notecaddy edit the pokerstars xml colour coding files and set people based on certain criteria. The downside is it marks players when you close the stars client.
It's much easier to mark a bad player from stats than a winning players. I'm a judgmental bastard and will mark anyone open limping as a fish. Therefore an easy definition is to set notecaddy to mark anyone as green (bad player colour) when open limp >1%
Good players are more tricky, the easiest way is to do a sharkscope check but to mark bad regs you can do a check against an SNG Wiz definition. There are 2 definitions in notecaddy that compare whether someone made a decent shove or call. It uses the SNG Wiz app in holdem manager 2 which is a stream lined version of the full SNG wiz software. Of course it can only see when someone gets their shove called or when they make a call so we can tell if they're shoving wide of nash or whether they're calling wide of nash. I'm only just starting to explore this particular feature, not much is made of it on the notecaddy site but it seems incredibly powerful to me.
Hud colour coding - You may have noticed you can get autorate icons on the hud, you can also select a coloured square and this will highlight the players hud with the colour you select. This can give a guide to the style of player from a single glance.
Typical I'd colour code for tight aggressive, tight passive, loose aggressive, loose passive and calling station. I don't want to over complicate it, I just want to be able to get an idea of a player at a glance. This can all be set up in holdem manager 2 without the need for anything else.
Top level statistics and badges
The stats on the hud should be simple, relevant and should converge quickly. You should lay out stats in a logical way. Previously I've done it by putting preflop on one line and post flop on another. I think stealing is so important in SNGs that we can devote another line to it. It's important to get the balance right between having the right amount of stats, having a hud that is laid out logically with your thought process and not taking too much screen space, crowding your screen isn't good for clarity of thought. Playing lots of tables takes a lot of your brains capacity and thus you must spend the extra time when designing your hud to make your life easier.
Badges are a feature of notecaddy that displays a 16x16 icon when either a single or combination of conditions are met. This is very powerful because it lets you convey a lot of information (potentially many statistics) into a single icon communicating a concept you instinctively remember.
If you think about the chances of your favorite sports team winning a match, you're actually processing a lot of factors and relationships between said factors, you then apply approximate values to those factors and come up with a very approximate result (your opinion). If your conclusion is that your team is a "massive underdog" that is a single tag encompassing many factors and relationships. By giving it a tag, you are bottling it up into a single universal concept that you understand. This is our brains natural way of clustering information and it's why I think badges are so powerful.
Note Caddy Edge SNG comes with a list of badges, for example "Calls button steal wide and then folds high % to C-bet". If you were to use stats you'd have to first glance at fold to steal %, make sure it's got a decent enough sample, look at fold to flop c-bet %, check it has enough sample, link the two together, come to a conclusion. With the badge you just glance at the icon and understand what to do, conditions for sample size are already taken care of in the criteria. Without a badge that's 6 steps, with a badge it's 2.
Second level statistics and notes
Deeper statistics are useful particularly against regs you have a large sample size on. It would be very profitable to determine whether you can re-isolate a reg who you believe to be isolating a limper wide. It would be pretty horrible to have this statistic on your top level hud for every player. Instead you can use popups to display relevant information. The key to popups is to link popup section to the relevant areas of your hud. For example, c-bet turn/river % should probably be somewhere on the postflop section of your hud, flat v steal should be in the preflop or stealing section of your hud.
This is also a good place to display notecaddy notes. Notes are an observation written out in a human way. Notecaddy notes also include other information such as a sparkgraph distribution of hand strength for when an opponent made the observed action, a list of actual hands they did it with and quick buttons to display the observed hands in the hand reviewer.
Next I'm going to look at the top level hud in more detail and make some decisions on what stats I want and where.
All questions are welcome!
Top Level Stats Continued
My very top line will show the autorate icon, player name, number of hands and stack in tournament adjusted BB. I may set some notes to popup on mouse over of these stats but I'm not sure.
I would like my first stat line to reflect a general player tendency and to put some stats to my hud colour coding (see post above). It will also serve as a point for preflop notecaddy reads.
First Stat Line
VPIP, PFR, 3-bet, Total Aggression %, Total Aggression Factor
I'm going to keep this line very simple.
Next will be my steal line. I don't like mixing steal and fold to steal stats in the same area because when you're trying to steal blinds their own steal % isn't important. What I want to know when stealing is how the opponent may respond and what I can expect from them post flop.
Steal Line (Hero is stealing)
Fold to steal, [Re-steal/Defend split badge] BTN cold call| [Fold to c-bet oop/Donk bet split badge] | Fold BB v SB steal [v SB Re-steal/Defend split badge] Float c-bet IP
vs Steal Line (Opponent is stealing)
BB steal, CO Steal, Fold to Resteal | [Fold to Donk/C-bet IP split badge] | SB steal, Fold to BB Resteal, check/fold turn v flop float.
Definition Badge Line
This will be a line of badges applicable to that player, these are unorganized badges as opposed to the prefixed badges elsewhere in the hud.
Badges Explained
Split badges - Square badge with diagonal line through the middle. Top left displays first stat as a colour for example: re-steal % as a colour red = under 12%, yellow = 12-18%, green = over 18% white = not enough sample. Bottom right does the same for the 2nd stat.
Here's some examples of what they look like: 
I've been taking a week off since finishing my hyper grind.
I spent most of the time researching and developing my hud but I also started playing some 6 max zoom again.
I really really enjoy zoom, it also doesn't hurt that I seem to be able to make a steady profit at it (albeit small sample).
I think the reason I can't bear to ditch sit n go's is all the hard work and knowledge I have of ICM, ranges, overall strategy implications. I'd also be without the group of friends I've made playing SNGs.
The upside of zoom is the ability to start and stop whenever I like. It's much easier to take frequent breaks, something that's not possible to do efficiently playing SNGs.
The downside is that cash in general highlights the reality of the long continuous grind in a way that SNGs don't to the same extent.
Playing zoom has seriously helped me gain valuable experience post flop and thus I think it might be valid to be playing it regularly purely as a training tool. I think I've been able to tighten up my leak of 'over-protecting' in a matter of days playing zoom, simply due to the increased exposure to post flop play.
I think I need to find a balance between the two that allows me to focus on SNGs as my main game, but to also be able to play zoom for post flop development/recreational reasons. I'll also need to convince any potential stakers/coaches of this 
You still being staked?
I have also had to take a step back due to the call out nature if my new job. Cash allows me to quit when I like. I do however agree that it is a pity to waste the SNG skills. You have come a long way in a short time so don't think you'll have a problem gaining the required skill set for any format.
Just become an all round Beast ♠_cool:
Originally posted by maythany
you can spend 80% of your poker time towards sng grinding and 20% for zoom??? ♦
hahaha
John: I'm taking a weeks break between stakes. Obviously I have way too much respect for my staker to be playing and putting energy into other games we've not agreed on, during an active staking period.
I should be clear, I've not fallen out of love for SNGs. I still enjoy playing them and I'm sticking to them until they give me a reason to stop. I do however want to find a way to introduce zoom into my schedule in a pragmatic way.
Yeah I think zoom was just a phase. I did enjoy it and I learnt a lot from it but I'm having a lot of fun playing SNGs again.
For the first time in my poker career I'm starting to play against some really good players (had 3 supernovas on my table earlier).
I'm really determined to make progress at this level. I feel like I'm an above average reg in these games due to the amount of average regs playing a super static/risk averse strategy. That said there are guys who are much better than me and I'll need to work hard to get into that top bracket of regs.
List of stuff to improve in order of importance:
SB V BB play
OOP play postflop (and the preflop implications of this)
exploitative blind defense ranges (and how to play OOP when I get flatted).
protection bet sizing (i need to go into detail with this as I see too many flops as potentially hazardous)
exploitative 3bet/4bet ranges.
general exploitative calling ranges
post flop turn play
In addition I'm going to try some software called poker ranger, I will let you know what I think!
I read somewhere that just because someone is Supernova, it doesn't mean they're good players, It just means they're good grinders. ♦
Originally posted by pauln
In addition I'm going to try some software called poker ranger, I will let you know what I think!
Saw you ask about that in the Moshman session today. Yeah it looks like some pretty sick software - the kind that a guy like you would drool over! ♦
Originally posted by maythany
I read somewhere that just because someone is Supernova, it doesn't mean they're good players, It just means they're good grinders. ♦
True, but they're going to at least be worth marking as a reg for table selection purposes (unless they're a Supernova who's breakeven pre rb on the $7s ♦)
Originally posted by Ramble
Saw you ask about that in the Moshman session today. Yeah it looks like some pretty sick software - the kind that a guy like you would drool over! grin
Yeah, I'd heard of the software before but didn't know whether it was just something like flopzilla or what. It's definitely like cardrunners EV but it looks better designed.
I'm not assuming this was intentional, but Collin initially missed my question and then wouldn't even say the name of cardrunners EV. It's like one of the most used programmers by high stakes cash players, it's pretty well known. I wonder whether he has an unwritten agreement with poker ranger where he's not allowed to say the name of competitors out loud ♦[/tinfoil hat]
Poker ranger is good, it does the things it attempts to do well.
That said, it doesn't quite do all the things I'm looking for. I want something that can do A:B analysis of lines and work out optimal routes from the tendencies/frequencies I've given it. As far as I'm aware, cardrunners EV is the only thing that can do this.
Unfortunately the cardrunners EV trial severely limits what you can do (you can't do A:B analysis in the trial version), so I'll be somewhat in the dark until I get it. I've found a small discount for it however, if anyone wants to know how to get it, skype me or add me on the community tool. I don't want to mention a rival site to pokerstrategy here 
In between running on pure steam so far this month I've been doing a lot of hard work. I realized a couple of months ago that you have to work really hard to improve and I mean really work, not just watch videos and skim read books.
I've been exploring herd analysis; how to collect the data, how to process it and how to use it.
Herd analysis is essentially player analysis done on a 'herd' of players rather than a single player. You can define a herd any way you like, obviously the smaller the herd the more accurate the conclusions. You could define a herd as wide as 'recreational players' or as precise as 'VPIP 12-14 regs'.
I'm using a set of videos from another site to guide my learning with this. If anyone is interested in the processes, let me know and i'll happily show you.
People are always asking me to post graphs, so here you go ♦
This is a scatter graph of players in my database with a VPIP of between 8 and 25 (reg or at least not completely nitty/fishy). The bottom axis is VPIP and the other axis is PFR. You can probably ignore the trend line through the middle.
This threw up some weird patterns.. I have no explanation for them.. something to do with the decimal points used?
Anyway, here is a graph with some boxes drawn on them. These boxes are by no means final or correct (I don't really have enough sample to have 3 TAG groups) but hopefully it should demonstrate what I'm doing first.
The next steps are to start analyzing the players in the boxes as 'herds' and then to start constructing exploitative strategies against each of them.
Very cool stuff indeed bud, I'd love to chat about this with you over the weekend.
After our skype chat the other day I had a quick look at "herding" players myself but quickly realized I understand very little about actually analyzing the data in my database. This goes for one opponent let alone a class of opponents.
That HUD looks so comprehensive 
What's surprising me in those scatter graphs is the presence of so many lines that are standing out (too many points lie on them). How can it be explained? Of course strictly vertical and horizontal lines (not highlighted in the below pic as they're too evident) are no wonder as VPIPs and PFRs like 20% or 25% are very common in data on players with small samples (they do have a plethora various PFRs and VPIPs respectively, but 20% and 25% can be expressed as a ratio of small integers in so many ways, like 1/5, 2/10, 5/15,...). But lopsided lines are surpising me... I'll look for a math explanation soon, I feel they should arise from small samples too as there are bunches of parallel lines and they have slopes like -1/5 that are ratios of small integers.
I'd be really interested to see whatever conclusions you can come to on those lines!
The data in here is filtered to players of 30 hands minimum (which as far as I understand should make the lines even weirder ♦).
I'll do a post later today for everyone, explaining why the groupings are useful and what I'm going to do with them.
March has been a fun month. I've really enjoyed spending most of my time talking/studying/playing poker. I seem to meet interesting people every week through this community and it's giving me a very positive outlook on life at the moment.
I started the month finishing off my time at full tilt poker,
I then took a break to play some games on ongame network which was interesting.
In the second half of the month I finally switched over to pokerstars and have been really enjoying it so far. My red line isn't great but I feel like i'm playing well, hopefully I can improve it.
Here are some lines.
March 2014 - Not including ongame
So far 2014
I've also been coaching a few guys, one my of long term goals is to get into coaching so this is all valuable experience. Hopefully I'll have good things to post about them in the future.
