After watching the WPN live stream on twitch, I think its apparent now that the plan is to keep all the games HUD-less in the name of "fairness".

It may not seem like an issue now, but once medium to higher stakes start running on a regular basis, it may start to encourage cheating on a wider scale.

If you want to keep the games "fair", removing HUDs will only give cheaters an edge that widens the disparity between them and everyone else. The incentives here are huge and your just sending out an open invitation.

It is very possible to have live HUDs without actual hand histories with the advent of certain programming technologies such as screen scraping.

..And lets be real, WPN security has a long way to go before combating anything close to that.

I'm not exactly clear on how lack of HUDs will lead to cheating? You're saying folks will develop screen scrapers to inform a live HUD that will give them an edge?

Setting up a custom hud based on screen-scraping is a pretty big task. Also there would be far more money to be made by making it public and selling it, look at DriveHud for a somewhat similar example.

I think a fair compromise would be to wait on a hud that's a bit more mobile-friendly. Phones/tablets are getting more and more powerful, and hud software is getting more lightweight/efficient. I don't mind playing without a hud, and if someone wants to go through a ton of work and then risk being banned and/or losing their roll for illicit software then just lol...with that caliber of logic they surely shouldn't be much of a threat at the high stakes.

Since you and many others think huds are a massive advantage in tournaments, gimme some decent odds on playing a significant sample of sngs profitably without a hud against 8 others who are allowed to use them.

Also there's other software and such that's far worse of a threat to poker players than screen-scraping huds and micro-stakes bots that are of only mediocre skill at best, but it's better to not mention all the particular stuff publicly...we can only hope security is/remains competent here. This is actually where huds and player vigilance are a huge benefit. But that requires hard evidence (which is mostly only possible with hh/huds) and none of the tinfoil hat crap because that just drowns out legit inquiries. Let's not forget that AI experts are aiming for 6-max nlhe next, and then 9-max after that. Even if bots and all other illicit software-assistance can be 100% prevented all of the time, just being able to train against nearly perfect opponents will bring the skill gap even closer...making rake the main winner. Think of the icm software and other training programs we have now, except on steroids lol

If you wanna settle it fast, get together and pay the DriveHud people to crank out a mobile hud since their software seems to be the most lightweight and suitable atm. Not shilling for them and I don't own their software even, but they just provide really good examples for this discussion and are also 2p2'ers who focus on US sites.

In short, yeah huds would be kinda nice but the cheating/screen-scraping thing is a bit overblown. I would guess that within 6-24 months we will start seeing hud software for mobile devices and then huds will be allowed. Those who wasted their time working out software to cheat will have missed out on most or all of the grinding anyway

Screenscraping is already a pretty big issue in the dark areas of poker amongst regs that are looking to get an edge however they can. It can and will come to ACR spins. I agree with OP here.

Not all regs know how to use HUDs properly, there is a learning curve to even them. I can guarantee you that 2 regs in spins that know how to use HUDs will have a huge edge and you could not complete your challenge there. Now I understand that's not the best argument for HUDs as people feel no one should have that advantage but felt it was worth saying as there is a HUGE edge to be had if the ones with low morals screen scrape.

By the time it becomes a problem on 2.0, we will likely have mobile huds if we can get one of the devs to do it. So all the effort of the cheaters will have been wasted