I read a comment that not a lot of people use the active player window in HM1, and I guess that's a good thing. I can tell you that I sure do as well as all of my students and nothing out there can even touch it, including HM2. I'm sorry to say that after many hours of trying to configure HM2 into something I can use, I couldn't even come up with something I'd ever want to use, and felt pretty much lost with it.
I mainly use one screen on it, postflop default. To be honest, I play one table heads up, so I do enjoy not needing to flip between opponents since there is only one. This screen is simply awesome and is all you need, I don't even use a HUD.
The real beauty of it is its ability to really simplify things so instead of looking at a whole bunch of stuff you can look to the part of the screen which covers the situation you are facing. Even better, at a glance you can see what kind of player you are facing and it makes it easy to figure out how you are going to exploit him or her.
Whoever designed this, I bow deeply to. It does have its drawbacks, for instance you can play one or two tables of 6 max with it but beyond that it becomes difficult to manage. I only play one table at a time myself so I don't care. I'm also happy that so few people use this as it can be a real weapon in the right hands and I wouldn't be too crazy about everyone using this
So what's so good about this screen? Take a look at all the great stuff that's on it and you will see for yourself. Personally, I want to know what frequencies that a player does something. This tells me pretty much everything I want to know. There are a lot more stats but all the important ones are here. It's also very easy to figure out what is going on which is what it is all about.
For example, an opponent leads out into me on the flop. I can see the percentage of times he does this. I also want to know how often he leads the turn and river. So with this player I have up now its 44/32/33. So I can put him on a range from this and decide what to do based upon what I have. I also can look to the vs. raise screen and see his F/C/R is 42/30/28. So when I put that together with his 44 bet here this gives me a good idea of what he's doing that with. I can look at some other stuff here as well, and figure out what I want to be folding with, calling with, and raising with. This guy doesn't fold that much to raises, but I can value town him with better hands when he bets out, and when he checks he folds a lot, 71/64/73, so he's getting hammered there.
Compare with HM2. Hmm. Not much at all. Donk bet? Well what if it it is a limped flop? I had a look at donk bet percentages to compare and it didn't measure up. I would use bet flop but that mixes up IP and OOP. I am left wondering that the heck people are doing in a lot of cases with HM2. Guessing I guess. I don't like to guess. So with HM2 I can't really tell that much about what to do in this case and a lot of other cases.
So after using HM2 in a real game I came away with a feeling of being way out of touch with things. It was almost like playing with no stats at all. Plus I don't really don't want to be bothered with a bunch of mouseovers when I don't have to. I have my table on one side and the active player detail on the other, a heads up players' dream.
I had a tech guy say that there are bugs with adding new things to it, how about just adding it as is to HM2 so those who like it can continue to use it? How about adding the stats that are on the active window so people could actually design popups with this stuff in it? Look at this screen in the postflop default mode and see how many stats you can't get with the HUD, pretty much all of the ones on here. Look at how convenient all of this stuff is displayed. We'll do the work here designing the popups.
All I am looking for is some real simple stuff such as how often a player bets, calls, checks, raises, re-raises and folds by street and by UO/IP. That does not seem too much to ask. In the mean time, I'm back to HM1 and still waiting after all these years for a good HUD.