Although less well known than the more illustrious (and more expensive rivals) Holdem Manager and PokerTracker, DriveHUD has a loyal band of supporters and is an excellent entry point into the world of poker databases and HUDs.
Review, analyze & track all of your online poker hands with an easy to use and beautiful interface. DriveHUD works with Ignition Casino, Bodog, Betonline, Pokerstars, 888 poker, America's Cardroom, and Blackchip poker.
- A 'poker HUD' is software that tracks various key stats and its purpose is to help you make better decisions when playing online poker. The acronym HUD stands for Head-Up Display and this is exactly what it is - a helpful, easy to use and read display. A good HUD tracks and analyzes hundreds of stats in real time. The data collected is shown.
- If your main poker fix comes from MTTs (Multi-Table Tournaments) on PokerStars, you’re probably torn between 2 or 3 different HUDs on the market. This article will do a full Jivaro HUD review and look closely at what it offers in comparison to the opposition.
- An honest review of the best free Poker HUDs and tracking software on the market A poker HUD is an essential tool in modern online poker. Allowing users’ to keep track of the action and stats of opponents with little effort when playing multiple table, a Heads Up Display can help identify your opponents’ at a glance.
As its name suggests Drive HUD is essentially a Heads-Up Display (HUD) driven by a database collected from the hands played by a poker player and their opponents.
For the uninitiated, a HUD has its origins in aviation.
They were designed so a pilot would have access to critical information without having to deviate from looking forward.
They are also becoming increasingly popular in motor vehicles.
A poker HUD relays all the on-screen information by accessing its constantly improving database of information.
It can draw a multitude of data on your play and your opponent’s play in both cash games, Zoom (on Pokerstars), and tournament events.
Used correctly, a poker HUD can give vital information about your opponent’s style, bet frequency, tilt level and help you become a better online poker player.
Table of Contents
- So is DriveHUD any good and is it worth taking for a 30-day trial spin?
So is DriveHUD any good and is it worth taking for a 30-day trial spin?
We’ve tested DriveHUD as well as many other poker HUDs that are on the market. If you just want the real meat and bones on what one we recommend, here it is:
| Your Style | Best HUD for You |
|---|---|
| Casual Player, Committed Player | Holdem Manager |
| High-Volume Grinder | PokerTracker |
| Alternative Option | DriveHUD |
| Mac User | Poker Copilot |
| Currently Unrecommended | Jivaro |
In terms of its full capabilities, there are better poker HUDs on the market.
However, in terms of its price and unique features, it is certainly worth downloading the free 30-day trial – especially if you are new to poker tracking software and want a gentle introduction to what they do, how to set them up, and ultimately how to improve your win-rate.
Besides being an important tool when making decisions in real-time, Drive HUD helps players improve their overall gameplay by indicating possible review hands and situations.
The stats produced by the software are fully customizable to your level, stakes, and specific online poker room e.g BetOnline, Ignition, etc.
Poker is a game of marginal gains and any advantage you have over your opponents should edge you towards more profitable online poker.
Drive Heads-up display dashboard
The dashboard is the first thing you encounter when you fire up the software and its simplicity and ease on the eye is pleasing.
We’ll run through the tabs later but the first thing you encounter on the left-hand side is your current playing statistics.
It shows a summary of your current cash games stats only but does not include any tournament data.
Also shown is the total hands you’ve played, the amount of money you’ve won or lost and your bb/100 figure (big blinds per 100 hands).
The most important stats are listed here and shown in a gauge format.
VPIP (voluntarily put money into pot) – A higher figure would suggest an obvious leak in your game from playing too many of your hole cards before a flop, for instance.
PFR (pre-flop raise) – A high PFR, is seen as a sign of aggression. The bigger the gap between VPIP and PFR the player is seen as more passive.
3-Bet (percentage of the time you re-raised pre-flop)
AF (aggression factor),
AGG% (Total aggression percent),
WTSD (went to showdown),
W$SD (won dollars at showdown),
W$WSF (won dollars when seen flop percent).
The main section on the right is where you can drill down into your cash game performance.
You can filter stats based on poker room eg Ignition, Pokerstars, etc.
Individual opponents can be analysed to note their tendencies for future play.
You can have the analysis presented by money or by BBs.
There is a function to have the graphs displayed as a pop-out.
Toggle buttons located near the top of the software allow you to drill down further into showdown hands (SD) non-showdown hands (NSD) and expected value (EV).
In this section, you can further filter performance based on time either pre-set or include your custom range.
At the bottom of the dashboard, you get to drill down even further to analyse your play.
Reports Tabs where you can click on any of the report tabs to show stats for that aspect of your poker game.
They are listed below:
Overall (all stats combined to give you a simple view of your progress),
Position (how successful or unsuccessful you are from different positions),
Sessions (Displays your results based on sessions),
Stakes (separates the various buy-in level you play and pinpoints the most profitable),
Hole Cards (analyse your game by each hole card type you played),
Time (check what time of the day you play your best poker),
Showdown hands (showdown stats and where you won and lost money),
Poker Site (separate stats for each poker site be that Ignition, Pokerstars, Betonline or Bovada),
Opponents (dial down and reveal stats about playing against named opponents)
Population (see your stats by the type of opponent you played with).
It is unlikely you will use all of these options but depending on your online poker playing style, there will be something to aid your game.
Back to the dashboard and towards the bottom are more filtering options including tag functionality for keeping track and specific hands you nominate to review after a session.
The usual session review tools are also stored here.
Once you have the hand tagged you have plenty of options including loading it in the hand replayer, adding notes, and your equity calculator.
While nothing groundbreaking in these options they are nicely laid out and offer some great ways to explore your opponents and hands played to improve as a player.
The dashboard is also fully customizable to suit your requirements and visual experience.
A feature I particularly like and one that may be needed in the early days is the Support tab.
From here you can connect with support but it also has useful links to the support forums and the knowledge base and FAQs.
By default, if you send a message to support it will attach your logs.
Another important point to note about support is the excellent thread on the 2+2 forums hosted by a representative of the company.
You can find information here about new builds usually caused by poker sites updating their software.
Graphical Heads-up Display
Aside from using the software to spot leaks and review play in the hand replayer, one of the most important aspects of Drive HUD is the graphical HUD itself which overlays on the poker sites you play on.
The overlay is simple and what you would expect, offering statistical clues to the playing style of your opponent.
As ever though, you must have a solid amount of playing experience and data about a villain before taking the visual clues seriously.
See the image below of how bare the information is for a Zoom game on Pokerstars.
Bumper stickers and tilt meter
One obvious feature which makes Drive HUD different from the best HUD providers is their easy-to-use bumpers stickers and their tilt meter.
Stickers allow players to label any particular opponent or group of opponents in a particular style and make recognition much easier.
The tilt meter indicates if a player has suffered recent bad beats and be about to go ‘on tilt’.
Apps to use on DriveHUD
While the software has some useful built-in apps such as the bumper stickers above, 3rd party integration of apps is allowed and there are many with useful functionality.
Leak Buster 2
The software claims to check for over 450 potential leaks in your online poker game by analysing your play.
Leak Buster 2 compares millions of poker hands from its database and offers suggestions based on your particular playing style.
It uses stat ranges and hundreds of post-flop filters to identify blind spot areas of your game where you may be losing money unnecessarily and unknowingly.
This add-on tracking software also works with PokerTracker 4 and Holdem Manager 3 using their powerful databases.
Player X-Ray
Player X-ray is an automated note-taking application that not only saves you time but also allows you to get a better handle on a player’s tendencies.
This add-on can be particularly useful when multi-tabling.
You can use the pre-defined notes in the software and adjust them to which buy-in you are sitting.
Notes are revealed when mousing over a player’s stats in the HUD.
Asian Hand Converter
The Asian hand converter is a 3rd party app that writes hand histories on all of the most popular Asian rooms.
It supports Red Dragon HUD, Poker King HUD, Upoker HUD, PokerTime and PokerBros amongst others.
This can give you a huge advantage given the Asian market is one of the fastest-growing in the world and hand histories would otherwise be unavailable.
PPPoker Card Catcher
As the name suggests, this app works specifically with PP Poker.
Although it is a Windows app, it can be used on ios and android using an emulator such as LDplayer or Nox.
The PPPoker HUD Catcher will track all observed tables, as well as collect data from your own games. All table types, cash and tournaments are tracked.
Icmizer 3
Icmizer is a neat tool to help you evaluate your push/fold strategy in SNG tournaments.
Load hands into the software and it will begin to train you in the situations where you need to improve your MTT strategy.
Prices
DriveHUD offers a variety of price points that depend on the stakes you are planning on using. There are also different versions for Holdem and Omaha, if you want both it will cost you more.
For a full rundown of the prices click here.
DriveHUD Strengths
- Easy to use
- Great looking user interface
- Good user manual and learning materials
- Easy to create HUDs
DriveHUD Weaknesses
- Not fully Mac compatible
Our Verdict on DriveHUD
DriveHUD is not the best poker HUD but worth it’s certainly worth a test drive.
On reviewing Drive HUD, the most interesting factor is the price.
It is much cheaper than the more well-known rivals.
This is because it has fewer features than the others on the market.
However, this does not mean it is not worth purchasing.
It is an excellent starter HUD.
Much like you would not buy an expensive car as your first vehicle, Drive HUD is a serious option to consider to gain a basic understanding of how they work, which add-ons work best for your particular playing style.
One minor gripe is the problems caused when a poker site updates its software.
Sometimes you will need to wait until a patch is released to deal with any issues thrown up.
However, the support is excellent and there are plenty of Youtube video walkthroughs about how to get the most out of this useful piece of poker software.
The hand replayer and equity calculator are two solid parts of the offering that would not look out of place against the best HUD on the market.
There are few arguments against trying DriveHUD especially if it will be your first HUD or if you don’t want to spend too heavily before fully understanding how this type of software can improve your poker game.
If you are interested to get the best rakeback deals and private promotions on poker sites head on to PokerPro website (PS: there are plenty of options to choose from also for the USA players).
Sharkscope is a search engine that allows you to access database with online poker tournaments results. It is the biggest database of that kind and covers all online poker rooms that host tournaments. Sharkscope is one of the crucial applications that tournament players use during the play and in preparation for the play. Sharkscope results provide much-needed information about your opponents and statistical details about the specific tournament.
Why use the Sharkscope
The player pool, especially in micro and low stakes, is so big that you won’t have any information about your opponents at the table. You might have some regulars marked or some big fish from previous sessions, but other than that, you mostly will have very little information about your opponents.
Even if you use tracking software and a HUD, it takes some time to acquire big enough of a sample to make an informed judgment about your opponents. With the help of Sharkscope, you can instantly “scope” players (Poker slang when you search for a player with Sharkscope) at the table and have an insight look at their results.
If the sample is big enough, you can very easily recognize who is the recreational and who professional. That simple information can sway your decision process massively when playing versus a particular villain. Even the lack of a sample is information on its own since it is almost impossible for somebody to be an excellent player if he only played 150 mtts in two years. A more detailed look at the results can tell you who is a crusher at a certain stake level or if somebody is barely beating the game.
Sharkscope pricing
Sharkscope has a subscription-based payment program. Different subscription plans are available so you can choose your plan based on your personal needs. They offer five free daily searches to all users. Those five free searches are added to your subscription plan. For example, If you buy a bronze plan with 10 daily searches, you can still use those 5 free ones, giving you a total of 15 searches.
The main difference between the plans is the number of daily searches, but they do offer extra perks if you choose an advanced plan. Mind that you can use free searches only for basic search without advanced filters.
There are two types of searches: basic and advanced. Basic search gives you all the data about the player, while advanced search gives you the options to use filters. With those filters, you can make precise inquiries about players.
Plan pricing changes with the length/amount of time that you want to subscribe to. They offer monthly, quarterly, and yearly billing. Yearly plans are the cheapest, but you have to commit for an extended period, and you are unable to pause your subscription. That is not a problem if you plan on playing for a full year non-stop but becomes one if you want to take a month off or play cash games for a while. For cash games you don’t need the Sharkscope, but a Software like HoldemManager or PokerTracker instead.
From my personal experience, a Silver plan with a quarterly subscription offers the best value if you are playing professionally. 150 searches per day to use is more than enough for the daily grind, and 14$ monthly expense is nothing compared to all the benefits that you are getting.
Advanced filters
Advanced filters are great for analysis of your own or your opponent’s tournament results. They allow you to dissect and give you a more in-depth look into tournament results. For example, you can check how someone is doing in PKOs versus regular tournaments, or you can sort tournament results based on stake level and compare them with each other.
How to use advanced filters
In this chapter, we are going to show you point by point how to use advanced filters to increase your search accuracy and achieve better results.
- Type in nickname that you want to lookup
- You can select a specific network or search through all of them. Some players use the same nickname on all the sites that they play.
- You can choose between scheduled mtts and Sit and go’s.
- Select minimum and maximum entries per tournament.
- Here, you can select a buy-in range. For example, you can check how your results differ per stake level. In the first search, we selected a buy-in range between 11 and 30 and in the next one between 1 and 10.
- Select the type of tournament. Here you can isolate different types of tournaments.
Image 3: Menu for selection of tournament types
Only the results of the types that you chose will be displayed.
Image 4: Search results for limited for hypers, turbos, and knockouts - Exclude the type of tournaments. This works the same as the previous, but here, selecting a type, you exclude it from results.
- Here, you select a date range or specific period.
Image 5: Dropdown menu for time selection - Type in the amount of rakeback that you are receiving so it can be added to your results.
Image 6: Tournament results graph with Rakeback. - If you want just to check the results of the last 100 tournaments that you played – type in 100
- You can see the results from specifically named tournaments if you type in their name here like “The Big” and “The Hot” on PokerStars or “Monster Stack” on Winamax (Check image 11).
- Here, you can sort your results per day of the week. You can compare different days with each other and see which ones are more profitable.
Image 7: Dropdown menu for playing day selection
Creation of a group: Useful for playing on multiple poker sites
Sharkscope gives you the option of creating a group of players. This comes very handy if you are playing on multiple poker sites. You can join all your aliases into one group and check the results as one. To create a group, you first have to scope all the nicknames that you want to add in the group.
Select “Players Groups” option (1) and press “Create New.” In the next step, add all (2) the players from the right side of the window into the left side. To merge all selected players into one, you have to choose the “Consolidated” option (3) and press apply. To scope your group, you have to choose “Player Group” in “Select a network” menu (4), type in your player group, and press search. The results will be shown as one combined player (5).
Group creation isn’t just useful for your personal results display but also for the analysis of the profitability of tournaments. To do that, you can incorporate another function of Sharkscope, Leaderboards. Sharkscope leaderboards provide coverage for many poker rooms, tournament types, and buy-in levels.
The leaderboards track players with the most profit and the biggest volume (number of mtts played) per year. To figure out how good the games that you are interested in are, you can use the results from the leaderboards. To do that, you can join all the players from the leaderboard with the highest volume into one group.
Let’s say that you want to start incorporating new tournaments into your playing schedule from some smaller sites. But first, you would want to check how good the offered games are. In our example, we checked how much profit you can potentially make per game in the poker room Winamax. We joined the players from the leaderboard who played the most mtts into a group and checked the results.
To check how the group is doing at different buy-ins, you have to click the “breakdown” tab. The results displayed will give you a rough estimate of how much money you can potentially make at various buy-level. In our case, we checked the profitability of tournaments in the 10€ to 20€ buy-in range on Winamax. We can see in the picture below that games can be extremely profitable that of course if we have the skills to beat them.
With the use of the filters, you can check how the group is performing in turbos, PKOsor you can isolate your search to a specifically named tournament like “Monster stack” (which is a popular type on Winamax).
How to find a good tournament
“Find a tournament”function gives you the report of the tournament with all the essential information about it. To find a tournament, you first need an ID number of mtt. An ID number is found in the lobby of the tournament, usually in the lobby window title.
Function “Find a Tournament” is excellent when you are creating your poker playing schedule. You can check how tough the field of the tournament is by looking at the Av. Ability number.
Sharkscope ability is the rating that Sharscope assessed to a player based on their poker player stats and results. The rating mostly depends on the stake level and success at it.
Av. Ability of the tournament is the average of all players’ abilities. It’s a pretty neat way of figuring out how profitable the tournament is. Av. ability grows with the buy-in price.
A 100$ tournament with 75 average ability is extremely soft while a 10$ with the same av. ability is unplayable because the field is too tough. Even if you are playing poker just recreationally, it is a good way of finding the softest game in your buy-in range.
Sharkscope alternatives
Sharkscope is not the only database that tracks tournament poker results. There are other sites like Sharkscope. The other two most commonly used are Officialpokerrankings.com (OPR) and Pokerprolabs.com.
OPR is a free database, but unfortunately, since 2019, they track only Partypoker tournaments. So if you are mainly playing on Partypoker, OPR will do the job for free. You can’t do deep tournament results analysis like in Sharkscope, but you can still check players’ results. You can still check the old results from other covered sites, but you can only see data before June 2019.
Pokerprolabs offers basic information about a player for free, which is enough if you just want to check if somebody is regular or recreational. Basic stats like avg. BI, ROI, profit are provided along with graphs, favorite games, recent large cashes, and last 10 tournaments. More features are offered, but you have to be a subscriber.
Pricing is very similar to Sharkscope, and they offer 10 advanced free searches per day. The bad side of Pokerprolabs is that they don’t count rebuys, add ons, and bounties, which can skew the results. In rebuy tournaments, your profits will be shown bigger than in reality while in PKOs smaller.
Easy Poker Hud Reviews
These alternatives provide the basic information almost just as good as Sharkscope so you can use their free searches for quick inquiries about players (Mostly if somebody is regular or recreational).
How to Opt-in / Opt-out on Sharkscope
As a subscriber, you have an option to opt-in or opt-out your results from public display. Some poker sites do not allow the public display of players’ results without consent. So you have to manually opt-in to see your results. Every poker room has a different way of allowing players to opt-in.
On 888, you have to register for the imaginary tournament “Sharkscope opt.in,” while on Pokerstars, you have to transfer 0.03$ to a player with ID “SharkScope.” You can also request that your results be completely hidden. In a game of incomplete information, it is actually smart to hide your results from the public display, especially if you have other means to track your results like Pokertracker or Holdem Manager.
When you manually request an opt-out, there will be no information available about your playing alias. To hide your results, click on the options menu, find opt-out, and follow the instructions that are provided for your particular poker room.
Sharkscope also has a “Reset statistic” possibility, which clears your previous results and kind of gives you a blank slate. Some players like to reset their tournament results on a monthly or a yearly basis. To use all the options mentioned above, you have to be a paying subscriber.
Easy Poker Hud Review
Conclusion
Sharkscope is by far the best tournament results database. There are other databases that track online poker tournament results, but none of them do as good of a job as Sharkscope. Sharkscope provides coverage for the vast majority of poker sites, while alternatives lack the handling of newer or smaller poker rooms. Sharkscope allows you to dig deeper into tournament results and extract information that can potentially increase your profitability.
Which Poker Hud Is Best
For the creation of a playing schedule, it is absolutely crucial to use the help of Sharkscope to optimize your playing time frames and selection of tournaments. The tournament results are displayed very clearly and are easily manipulated for specific inquiries.
If you are playing poker occasionally for recreation and having some fun, it’s probably best to use up the free searches on all mentioned databases to avoid extra costs. But suppose you are planning to move your game on another level – in that case, you should strongly consider buying those extra searches and scope as many opponents as possible to gain a small competitive advantage.