In online poker, a significant breakthrough in the understanding of theory and practice occurred with the advent of HUD and advanced statistics. Regardless of how you view these tools, good or bad, they have changed our concepts and behavior in the game. If you play online, a HUD is essential. Let's look at the statistics and analyze how to use them to adapt to the opponent's game.
Of course, HUD and stats are not synonyms. Stats in poker are discrete, mathematical expressions of frequencies. HUD is this statistics presented in the most understandable way. Although stats were never clearly accessible until the advent of HUD, they always existed. Without HUD, statistics would be perceived very vaguely, more affected by fluctuations arising from personal biases.
Our brains are not designed to process precise data, so something with 7% and 11% frequencies might seem the same to our intuition, but they can mean completely different player ranges. When we don't have statistics, the only way we can rely on trying to understand other players' frequencies or ranges is our intuitive guesses (and some information obtained through showdowns). One of the reasons why stats are so valuable is that they allow us to overcome the inaccurate natural mechanism and predict opponents more accurately. Most players who use HUDs have learned that even if it seems like someone is playing very aggressively or with a wide range, but the stats say otherwise, we trust the statistics more than intuition (because separate but striking events tend to affect intuition more than they should). Statistics are like corrective lenses for us in the poker game.
In live poker, the only way to gather information is through our intuition and observations. But again, even in live poker, statistics exist, they are just not as clearly accessible. It doesn't matter much whether your understanding of statistics comes from a HUD or from intuition about how aggressive a player is at the table, but adjustments made based on statistics are essentially more effective due to the structure of poker.
A bit about adjustment schemes. An adjustment scheme is an encrypted system by which a player will exploit or respond accordingly based on certain statistics.
