Hand2Note Poker HUD Review 2024 - Is It Worth It?

Hand2Note is a powerful poker tracking software used by professional poker players, as well as amateurs that want to take their game to the next level.

It has everything you would expect from a hand tracking software, and then some.

But I do want to be clear off the top that as a 10+ year professional poker player, the tracking software that I recommend the most, and have always used, is PokerTracker.

You can find my full review for PokerTracker right here.

This is the #1 poker tracking software available these days in my opinion, and frankly, it isn't even close.

But people ask me about Hand2Note from time to time and I have long promised to review it. Just to clear though, this is NOT the software that I and most other online pros use.

I use PokerTracker.  

With that disclaimer out of the way, today I am going to review the Hand2Note software, some of its most important features, and figure out if it is worth you investing in.

Before getting into the specifics, here’s a general overview, as well as some of the most important pros and cons to the software.

Hand2Note automatically stores the hand history from your preferred online poker site, and uses it to create comprehensive reports about your results and stats, and those of other players. 

It creates a visual representation based on hand histories, which can help you plug your leaks, as well as look for weaknesses in your opponent’s game.

 

It also comes with a built-in HUD (heads up display). 

It’s a little pop-up that shows up directly adjacent to your opponent's username on your preferred poker site, and shows you their stats in real time. 

This can help you adjust your game to their tendencies and increase your profitability. 

Poker is a game of incomplete information, and a player with more information is the one that will usually come out on top.

Using a HUD, therefore, gives you a huge edge over your competition.

Now let’s take a quick look at the pros and cons of Hand2Note compared to similar software.

Hand2Note Poker HUD Software Review - PROS

1) Infinitely customizable HUD

You can tailor the HUD based on your individual preferences. 

Unlike static HUDs on other tracking software, Hand2Note allows you to create custom HUDs that change dynamically based on the spots you find yourself in. More on that below.

2) Good note taking system

Hand2Note takes note taking to a whole new level. 

It’s very easy to make comprehensive notes with just a couple of clicks, which is particularly useful if you’re multi-tabling and have limited time to take notes.

3) Useful features too numerous to count

 

Besides the features you would expect from a tracking software, Hand2Note has a bunch of unique features you won’t find anywhere else. 

This includes range research and decision analysis features, automatically recognizing recreational players and other regulars, quick showdown view and so on.

Hand2Note Poker HUD Software Review - CONS

1) Subscription based 

Hand2Note comes with a monthly or a yearly subscription instead of a one-time purchase. 

There are, however, different subscription models, and even a free version with limited features for the microstakes.

2) Some features are limited on Pokerstars

 

Some features like badges, positional and dynamic HUD are not available at Pokerstars site. 

Other features are fully functional, though, so you can still use Hand2Note on Pokerstars without problems. You can also analyse your game outside the tables without restrictions.

3) It takes a while to get used to the software

 

The Hand2Note interface isn’t the most user-friendly, so it might not be the best choice for beginners. 

There is a learning curve to overcome, as it takes some time to figure out how to customise the HUDs and use some features, but it’s well worth it over the long run. 

Fortunately, there are comprehensive guides and video tutorials, as well as customer support if you need any help.

Now let’s get deeper into some of the most useful features, and how you can use them to get the most out of the software.

Smart Poker HUDs Display Relevant Information

Hand2Note Poker HUD (heads-up display) is arguably the most powerful feature of the software. 

It shows you all the relevant stats of your opponent right next to their username on your preferred online poker site. 

It’s updated in real time, and you can use it to quickly figure out what kind of opponent you are up against.

Like other poker HUDs, it’s infinitely customizable, so you can display the stats that are most relevant to you.



There’s no shortage of options here, and you can display just about any poker stat imaginable. In fact, there are over 500 available.

To be fair, PokerTracker, which is the HUD that I use, does offer a lot more than this, but this is still impressive nonetheless.

You can also colour code the stats, so they’re easier to interpret at a glance. 

For example, if you want to spot the recreational players quickly, you can colour code the VPIP (voluntary put money in pot) stat in green for every player that plays, say, more than 40% of the hands dealt to them. 

If you want to watch out for aggressive 3-bettors, you can use another colour for everyone that 3-bets more than 10% of the time. 

These are just examples, of course. You can play around with the HUD as much as you want, and customise it to fully suit your needs.

If you don’t feel like building custom HUDs, no problem. You can use the existing ones from the Hand2Note software. 

Or you can even download the ones that other users have already made. You can find ready-made HUDs and popup packages on the third-party developers’ websites.

If you want to take a stab at creating a HUD manually, but aren’t quite sure how, Hand2Note has comprehensive tutorials to get you started. 

If you have any experience with other poker hand tracking software, you won’t have any problems with building a HUD here. 

If not, there is a certain learning curve to overcome, but it’s nothing that isn’t manageable. And the value you’re bound to get from the software will more than make up for the effort. 

Another great Hand2Note HUD feature that you can’t get with other software is the so-called dynamic HUD. 

Other poker HUDs have the static HUD, i.e. they display the stats you programmed them to display, and they don’t change based on the actions taken in the hand. 

This can make them clunky and packed full of stats you don’t really need at the moment. 

For example, if you face a 3-bet preflop, you don’t really need to know how often your opponent calls the river continuation bet and vice versa. 

If you’re thinking of making a triple barrel bluff, you don’t need to know how often your opponent 3-bets as a bluff preflop.

Poker is a game of incomplete information, and if you have an informational advantage over your opponent (i.e. you know more about them than they know about you), you will come out on top more often than not. 

So you might be tempted to throw a bunch of stats on your HUD, because you never know what you might need. 

This can cause your HUD to look like an incomprehensible, colourful mess. 

What’s worse, a lot of stats aren’t even usable, or reliable until you collect a massive sample size. 

For example, in order to know someone’s river continuation betting frequency with a reliable degree of accuracy, you need to have a sample size of around 5000 hands. 

If you want to know how often a player goes to showdown, you’d need about 1000 hands to give you a rough estimate. 

But if you want the stat to be accurate (give or take one percentage point), you’d also need 5000 hands. 

Granted, a lot of useful stats need a significantly smaller sample size to be reliable, but they’re not all equally useful. 

And some of them are only situationally useful, i.e. you only need them sometimes.

This is where the dynamic HUD comes in. 

Hand2Note has a standard static HUD explained above, but it also has the dynamic HUD that changes the displayed stats based on the spot you find yourself in. 

Let’s say you are seated in the small blind, and a player open-raises from the button. The dynamic HUD can change to display the stats only applicable to this particular situation. 

For example, it can show the percentage of hands the player open-raises from the button, their attempt to steal stat, and how often they fold to a 3-bet.

You don’t need to know how often they fold to steal attempts, because that stat is not applicable to this situation. 

Conversely, you DO need to know how often the player in the big blind folds to steal attempts, because they’re still left to act. 

So the dynamic HUD for the player in the big blind could display stats like fold to steal attempts, how often they defend their blinds, how often they 3-bet squeeze and so on.

Bottom line: 

Unlike other static HUDs, Hand2Note shows you the relevant stats when you need them for a particular situation, without taking up too much screen space.

While some other HUDs like PokerTracker, admittedly, offer a lot more stats and functionality, this is still enough for most average online poker players.

By the way, if you want to know the 15 HUD stats that I use as a pro click here.

Hand2Note Poker HUD Review - Advanced Note Taking System

One of the aspects where Hand2Note software really shines is the note taking system. 

Taking notes on your opponents tendencies is crucial if you want to find the leaks in their game and exploit them accordingly. 

However, taking notes during a session can prove challenging, because there’s a limited amount of time you have to write down everything manually, especially when you’re multi-tabling. 

Another problem is that notes can be unreliable. 

Just because a certain player makes a certain action in a certain spot, it doesn’t mean they will always do the exact same thing in a similar spot. 

This means your notes can sometimes be misleading, or even make you draw totally wrong conclusions.

For these reasons, a lot of players don’t even bother with taking notes on their opponents. 

This is of course a huge disservice to your poker game, because as mentioned previously, poker is a game of incomplete information, and the more information you have, the better. 

Hand2Note makes note taking far easier. You can simply click on the HUD next to your opponent's username and type in a quick note.



Hand2Note also allows you to take abbreviated notes, so you don’t have to manually type in everything, which can save you a lot of time. 

Or better yet, you can just open the hand you wish to make a note on, simply drag and drop it in the note taking window, and the software will automatically make a note for you.

If you want to save even more time with note taking, you can create custom notes away from the tables.

You simply make some templates beforehand, and during the session, you can make the note in just two clicks. 

For example, you notice the villain betting 1/3 of the pot on the flop when they are betting as a bluff. You can make a note that reads: 1/3 CBF = Bluff.

Or you notice that a recreational player calls a lot preflop, but gives up easily if they miss the flop. You make a note called: Fit-or-fold fish.

Hand2Note takes advanced note taking a step further with the so-called badges. 

Badges are little pop-up icons that show up next to the player’s username once certain conditions are met. 

Creating a badge is similar to creating custom notes, except the fact that badges show up automatically once the parameters you’ve set are met. 

First, you design the badge you want displayed: You type in the text, choose the font, the size, the colour and so on. 

Then, you choose when a certain badge will appear based on the stats you choose. 

Here’s an example: 

You want to identify huge calling stations that can’t fold to save their life. 

You name the badge Calling Station, CS, Huge Whale or whatever you prefer. Then you choose the parameters of the badge. 

For this particular badge, the relevant state is how often a player goes to showdown (WTSD stat). 

You choose the badge to be displayed if the player has a WTSD stat of say, more than 30% over a significant sample size (500 hands for example).

Here’s another example: you want to identify aggressive players who bluff a lot on the flop and turn, but don’t have the heart to fire the third shell on the river. 

You call the badge double-barrel monkey. 

You can identify this type of player by the huge discrepancy between their turn c-betting and river c-betting frequency. 

So the parameters for this badge could be the difference between turn c-betting and river c-betting frequency that’s bigger than 30% over a sample size of, say, 1000 hands.

These were just examples, of course. 

When making badges, you need to make sure that you set the parameters properly, and most importantly, always pick a relevant sample size. 

The bigger the sample size, the more accurate the stats. 

This is especially important when using the stats for situations that don’t happen as often. 

While you can accurately assess how many hands a player plays preflop (by using the VPIP stat) in as little as 100 hands, you’d need way more hands to figure out how often they check-raise the river. 

The latter happens far less frequently, so always keep that in mind.

By the way, if you want to know the basic strategy that I use to consistently crush the small and mid stakes games, grab a copy of my free poker cheat sheet.

Hand2Note Automatically Recognizes Other Regular Players

One of the advantages of using a poker tracking software is the ability to quickly recognize other player’s tendencies and adjust accordingly. 

By far the most useful distinction you can make is determining whether someone is a recreational player (a fish) or a regular poker player that isn’t as likely to make costly mistakes (or a reg for short). 

Hand2Note can automatically determine if someone’s a fish or a reg, based on the parameters you set. 

It will automatically colour code the regs with a red marker, and the fish with a green marker. These colours are also customizable, of course. 

The software distinguishes between regs and fish based on the parameters you set. 

You set the parameters, and everyone that matches them is marked as a regular, while players that do not are marked as fish. 

This distinction is very useful, as you can display different HUD stats for regs and fish, respectively. 

For example: 

If someone is a fish, you might want to know how often they donk bet on the flop (bet on the flop while not being the preflop aggressor), but you don’t want this stat displayed against regulars, because they don’t donk bet as often. 

Or you want to see how often a fish limp-calls preflop and folds to a flop c-bet. 

Again, this is a useful stat to have against fish, but it’s virtually useless against other regs, because they won’t limp-call preflop.

Conversely, you’ll want some stats displayed for regs that you wouldn’t need against fish. 

For example, you probably don’t need to know how often a fish c-bets the river, but against other regulars you’re going to play against day in and day out, it might be a useful thing to know. 

In other words, different player types have different stats that are relevant to their play style. 

The problem of most standard heads-up displays is that they have the same basic outline and display the same stats for virtually all players on the table. 

This makes them clunky, rigid, and almost unintelligible. 

Since you never know which stat you might need, you might be tempted to display more of them than you actually need. 

This makes the information you need more difficult to find. 

Also, since not all stats are equally useful in all situations, most of the time they will just be using up your screen space without meaningfully contributing to your decision making process.

 

That won’t be the case with Hand2Note. It will give you precisely the information you need, when you need it.

By simply defining the parameters beforehand, it will do all the player identification for you. No more guesswork.



But automatically identifying player types is not everything that Hand2Note does for you.

We’ve already mentioned how not all stats are equally relevant at a given time, and more importantly, how not all stats are even accurate (i.e. they don’t tell you the full story). 

One of the reasons that stats can sometimes be misleading is because you don’t always know the context of the hand in which the stat was created, which can lead you to the wrong conclusions. 

Let me give you an example. Suppose you encounter a regular that has a very high 4-bet percentage over a significant sample size. 

This can make you believe that he is likely to 4-bet bluff a lot. 

But the reason for the high 4-bet percentage is because he played at a table with a totally out of control fish who stacked off with any two cards. 

Now, if you ever encounter such an individual, you know that it can be profitable to abandon all the usual strategy and try to take all their money before their crazy chip spewing comes to an inevitable end. 

It doesn’t mean that’s how you would usually play against “rational” opponents. But as you can’t see, the stats don’t take this context into account. 

The point is that regs don’t play the same way against fish as they do against other regulars. 

If they play against fish, they may stack off more lightly, value bet more thinly, make wider calldowns etc. 

This is where another genius feature of Hand2Note comes into play. 

Since regulars play very differently against fish and other regs, Hand2Note allows you to omit stats from hands that they played against other fish, so the stats don’t get distorted as they would in the previous example. 

For example, say you are playing against a reg and you have 500 hands of data on him. 

But out of those 500 hands, 50 of them were played against a fish, so Hand2Note will automatically exclude these 50 hands from the sample size to give you a more accurate reading.

By the way, if you are on a budget here is my pick for the best free poker HUD.

Range Research and Decision Analysis: Hand2Note Poker Software Unique Features

One of the most powerful features of Hand2Note is definitely the range research. It allows you to analyse the play-style of your opponents based on the parameters you set. 

Then, it gives you a comprehensive report on given player tendencies. 

This can give you a general overview of the way certain players act in certain situations. The beauty of this feature is that you can go as broad or as specific as you want.



If you want to improve your game off the felt, range research will definitely help you with that. 

For example, let’s say you’re having trouble dealing with 3-bets when playing out of position against other regulars. 

You can filter for this particular situation, and range research will show you the range of hands other regulars tend to 3-bet with from a certain position. 

Or let’s say you don’t know how to react to pot-sized donk bets from recreational players on the flop. 

This is a quite common situation, and it’s very difficult to put your opponent on an exact range of hands. 

You can filter for this situation, and the range research will show you the range of hands an average fish is donk betting the flop with. 

When you get into the intricacies of poker, it’s important to think about ranges, rather than individual hands to make the most +EV decisions. 

Range research helps you visualize these ranges, as well as show you the general tendencies of the player pool you’re up against.

 

Of course, you can also analyse the individual player’s tendencies. This is especially useful once you start climbing up the stakes, and the player pool starts shrinking. 

This means you’re often going to be playing against the same players, day in and day out. 

When you reach that level, it gets increasingly important to look for individual leaks in their game to best exploit them. 

On the other hand, you can also study the game of players that have great results, and learn how they approach the spots you may be having trouble with.

While range research helps you analyse the game of other players, the decision analysis feature can show you the profitability of your own actions. 

In other words, it shows you the expected value of the actions you’ve taken. 

For example, it shows you the profitability of c-bets made out of position, or the profitability of check-raising the turn. 

It can also show you how often certain spots occur, and how other players react to your actions (like folding to your out of position c-bets or turn check-raises).

These are just a few of the advanced features that are unique to the Hand2Note Poker HUD software.

By the way, if you want to know all of the best poker software that I use as an online poker pro, you can find my complete list, right here.   

Can You Use the Hand2Note HUD on PokerStars?

Yes, you can see it listed right on the PokerStars website with their list of approved third party software programs.



And you can use Hand2Note on most other major online poker rooms as well.

Hand2Note Review - Final Verdict

Hand2Note has nearly everything you would expect from a poker tracking software.

Although, once again, I want to be totally clear that as a professional poker player, I have used PokerTracker for over 10 years.

It simply offers far more in every category for serious poker players than Hand2Note does. 

But Hand2Note is a reasonable option that could benefit some.

Firstly, Hand2Note HUDs are infinitely customizable, so you can tailor them to your individual needs and preferences.

While it does take some time to get used to the interface, it’s well worth it in the long run. 

If you have previous experience with other poker tracking software, you won’t have any problems getting used to Hand2Note. 

You can also import the hand histories from other software to Hand2Note. 

Hand2Note is jam packed with a ton of other useful features too numerous to go through. This review might as well have been twice as long. 

All in all, this is a decent option for beginners.

If you want to know the #1 poker tracking software that I and 90% of online poker pros use though, click here.