03 Jul 2025 Intermediate This material is for medium-skilled players A-game EV exploit GTO MDA Contents: 1. Editors of hand strength categories and board textures Positive changes - layout and adding textures Positive changes - editing Positive changes - separate textures for different disciplines Added Ability to Filter Flop, Turn, River by Each Individual Card Negative changes - no “Test” button Lifehack for creating textures Cannot copy/transfer textures between disciplines Still no support for 3-card straight textures on turn/river 2. How the “Game Types” tab has changed Positive changes - removal of active profile selection Names and sorting are now generated automatically based on your filter selection Negative changes - removal of active HUD/popup profile selection (the downside) Inconvenient process for selecting active profiles 3. Call me a dinosaur, but I’m sticking with Hand2Note 3.0 Expanded popup on stat HUD/Popup Editors Customizing colors for preflop charts Hand2Note 4.1 is still rough around the edges Takes some getting used to 4. Conclusion Introduction When a new generation of software is released, users usually split into two camps: those who are eager to switch right away and those who take a cautious approach, sticking with the tried-and-true version a little longer. This is especially true when we’re talking about something as complex and feature-rich as the Hand2Note tracker. After several years of steady use with the third version, the poker community finally got an update. In this article, we compare the old and new versions of Hand2Note, breaking down which features were improved, what has become easier, and where, on the contrary, convenience was sacrificed for the sake of flexibility. You’ll find out whether the upgrade is worth adapting to the new software version or if the old version can still hold its own against the new one. Editors of hand strength categories and board textures The changes here aren’t huge, but they do exist. Overall, I’d say they are positive, though a few contentious points remain in place. Positive changes - layout and adding textures In short, it’s prettier and more pleasing to use. Everything is right in front of you, everything takes a couple of clicks – no more jumping through hoops like before. In Hand2Note 3, you had to create a simple stat with a texture, then add that stat to special groups, then add an abbreviation and color, and then add it for the needed street. Basically, you had to go through seven circles of hell just to get a board texture to appear in an extended popup for a stat. I won’t even bother with screenshots of that process, it was an unnecessarily long and convoluted chain of actions. In Hand2Note 4 everything has become simple, easy and, most importantly, understandable (no “voodoo rituals” required): Positive changes - editing In the old version’s editor, you could only change the order or abbreviation of stats. Editing or cloning was super cumbersome and inconvenient (handled through a completely separate editor). In H2N4, working with the new buttons is a pleasure - you can rearrange, clone, tweak, and delete stats freely. It’s a much smoother experience. Positive changes - separate textures for different disciplines In the old version, board textures were shared across all game disciplines. Now, however, board textures are separated for Hold’em and Omaha: Added Ability to Filter Flop, Turn, River by Each Individual Card In the old version, there were no separate filter buttons for specific ranks (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7); there was only a combined “2–7” filter. Now you can work with board textures more precisely and therefore more effectively: Negative changes - no “Test” button When creating new textures, the absence of a test button is truly an unpleasant point. If you make a mistake and create a non-working or incorrect texture, you will only find out after rebuilding the entire database of stats - leading to a loss of time and nerves. Lifehack for creating textures Open the Stat Editor. Create a new stat. Define your custom texture. Now hit the Test button in the stat editor. This will show you which hands fall into your new category. If everything looks correct (i.e. the right hands are being captured), simply replicate the exact same settings in the Postflop Diagram section - and you won’t run into any issues after rebuilding the stats. It helps to review several sample hands from your database that match the texture criteria, to be confident it’s working as intended. If all is correct, just note down which filters you used and repeat those settings in the Board Texture category section when creating the final texture. Cannot copy/transfer textures between disciplines This point is debatable. There aren’t many people who play both Omaha and Hold’em (or Short Deck and Hold’em, or all three) and use custom textures in their stats, but such users do exist. Unfortunately, any textures you create in H2N4 remain available only for the one discipline you created them in. If you need the same texture for another game type, you’ll have to rebuild it from scratch for that discipline. If you purchased a ready-made HUD/Popup package that includes custom textures for Hold’em only, and you also play Omaha, it’s unlikely the seller will provide textures for both games together. Still no support for 3-card straight textures on turn/river This was not possible in the old version, and it hasn’t been added in the new one either. It’s awful - you still cannot create a board texture definition for situations where, say, the flop or turn didn’t contain a straight, but a three-card straight could be formed with two hole cards plus the next street’s card. In other words, a scenario where your two pocket cards make a straight only after the turn or river card comes, but you can’t define that as a texture. For Omaha enthusiasts, this omission remains a huge downside, as you still can’t filter those specific board developments. How the “Game Types” tab has changed Why do we even have a “Game Types” tab? Different game types allow you to use different HUD/Popup profiles for different disciplines and game formats. Example: You play on GG Poker both 6-max cash and 9-max cash with an ante. You might want to use different popup profiles with different positional stats or bet size stats for each. Thanks to game types, you can segregate by table size (e.g. 3–6 players vs 7–9 players) and by presence of ante, and assign a specific HUD/Popup profile as “active” for each category. Then Hand2Note lets you quickly filter your hands and view stats for each game format separately, and automatically shows the correct HUD when you open a table of that type. In H2N3, you could define such game types with various filters. The options for splitting hands into types included: Games with ante vs. games without ante Big blind size Bomb Pots Discipline Table size No Limit/Pot Limit Games with a straddle Poker room Positive changes - removal of active profile selection The first thing you’ll notice in H2N4 is that the profile selection dropdowns for HUD/Popup are gone. And yes - that’s a good thing! Now Hand2Note 4, when rebuilding the database, calculates stats for all the configs in your setup, all at once, for every profile. If you use different profiles for playing and for post-game analysis, this is extremely convenient. You can have one profile active during gameplay and another for studying your hands later, without needing to rebuild and wait each time you switch. There used to be cases where players accidentally selected the wrong active profile in the Game Types section - and as a result, stats were either built incorrectly or not built at all. Then came the headache of rebuilding everything from scratch. Now, that problem is gone. Names and sorting are now generated automatically based on your filter selection This is a big improvement. Especially if you’ve ever tried to set up a game type for a specific poker room and ended up confused because you forgot one tiny detail. Let’s break it down. When Hand2Note rebuilds the database, it automatically checks every hand to determine which game type it fits into — going through the list from top to bottom. In Hand2Note 3, if you had overlapping game types, some (or even all) hands might not have been filtered properly if the order was incorrect. Another common problem in Hand2Note 3 was that when you created a new game type, it would always be added to the bottom of the list. If you didn’t manually drag it into the correct order, the filtering could fail. Cash players ran into this a lot when using a dynamic HUD for one room and a static HUD for others. For correct operation, you needed to create a separate game type, filter it to only that one room, select the dynamic HUD for it, and move that game type to the very top of the list. This ensured that during the stat-building process, the program would assign hands from that room to the top category first, and send all other hands to the lower categories. If you forgot to move the new type to the top, you’d encounter a scenario where, for example, when opening a table on WPN, you’d see the static HUD active instead of the dynamic one – leaving you puzzled as to what went wrong. Then you’d realize you had to go back into Game Types, adjust the order, and rebuild the whole base again. Ugh, what a nightmare. Now, in H2N4, it’s all handled automatically. Hand2Note 4 itself determines in what order the game types should be arranged after any changes, so you don’t have to worry if you made a mistake in ordering. The program will intelligently place overlapping game types in the correct sequence. It even auto-labels each game type’s name with all the applied filters (table size, ante, site), so you can always see exactly which game type you’re selecting. Negative changes — removal of active HUD/popup profile selection (the downside): Yes, the removal of the active profile setting is a plus, but it also has a negative side. If you have a lot of different profiles and stats, this change can become a serious problem. I know players who have anywhere from 2–3 up to 10–15 different purchased (and custom-made) HUD/Popup profiles in their config. With the update, every single one of those profiles will always be built and kept up to date, all the time. During database rebuilding after imports – and even during live play – H2N4 will now build stats for all profiles, which can balloon your database size considerably. Working with an enormous number of stats and a huge database can lead to freezes, lag, and overall slowness in the software. You need to be extra careful about which stats and profiles you truly use, and delete any stats/profiles you aren’t actually using. This issue will be especially pronounced on weaker PCs or those with limited disk space, because your computer will struggle when H2N is managing an unnecessarily large amount of data and stats simultaneously. Inconvenient process for selecting active profiles Now, to switch the HUD for an active profile in the settings you must open a replay of a hand (or open an actual table in a poker room) and use the H2N icon menu at the table to change the profile. Selecting an active HUD: Selecting an active Popup: Call me a dinosaur, but I’m sticking with Hand2Note 3.0 Expanded popup on stat While in the new version you’re sitting there clicking and clicking and clicking, in 3.0 it’s like the good old days: one click and everything is neatly laid out. Let me save my timebank for the truly tough decisions! HUD/Popup Editors As a HUD/Popup developer, I still handle all my projects in Hand2Note 3.0 because it’s so much more convenient. The old editor is like an old guitar: it creaks and sounds off-key, but you know every quirk. You can open 10 windows, copy whatever you want, and everything is intuitive from the get-go. Among the main downsides of the new editor, compared to the old one: Hand2note 4.1 - All-in-one window In Hand2Note 3.0, each editor was in a separate window, and you could open identical editors multiple times to make parallel changes across several profiles. In 4.1, to open a stat’s editor from within the HUD/Popup editor, you have to right-click and select it, and it opens in that same window. In 3.0, any stat would open with a simple double-click in its own window. Two separate editors for simple and complex stats Customizing colors for preflop charts Not everyone liked the default colors for the preflop matrices: Blue for actions that include a Call Green for actions that include a Raise In 3.0, you could customize those colors to your liking — you could even make it a rainbow if you felt like it. But in 4.1, for now you have to live with the developers’ taste. Hand2Note 4.1 is still rough around the edges I know it sounds strange to call software that was in development for so many years and has gotten so many updates “raw.” But version 4.1 is like a new engine: powerful, but not yet broken in. It sometimes crashes. Sometimes it stalls or gobbles up all your RAM. Hand2Note 3.0 still has its bugs even now, but we’ve all gotten used to them and know that a simple reboot fixes most issues. Takes some getting used to If you’ve just opened Hand2Note 4.1 — congratulations, you’ve set the game to the highest difficulty. You click around, navigate here and there, seem to be making progress — then bam, a new level, and once again you have no idea what to do. I work with players every day and I see the same pattern: those who had no prior experience with Hand2Note get an instant firework of buttons, windows, and popups bursting in their head. In 3.0, everything was small and simple, but it was intuitive: you opened it, clicked, and it worked. And remember, Flopzilla felt complicated at first glance too, yet now people use GTO Wizard without problems. To start enjoying Hand2Note 4.1, you’ll just have to level up your skill a bit. Don’t rush. Don’t dive into all the features at once. Just pick one feature, play around with it, get the hang of it — and step by step, 4.1 will become the best weapon in your arsenal. Conclusion We’ve now gone over all the key advantages of Hand2Note 4.1: from comfort and speed to deep customization of stats and new analysis tools. For me, the conclusion is obvious — if you’re serious about improving your game, want to break down hands faster, and make more accurate decisions at the table, then upgrading to Hand2Note 4.1 is simply the next logical step. Sticking with the old version or switching to the new one is up to you. But if you want to squeeze the maximum out of your tracker — you know which way to go.
