Running your first report

The whole thing runs on the text files your poker client writes while you play. You collect them, upload the folder, and work down what comes back.

1. Collect your hand histories. PokerStars, 888poker, Winamax, iPoker and ACR write a text file to a folder on your machine as you play, so the hands are already sitting there provided saving has been switched on at some point. GGPoker and CoinPoker keep theirs server-side instead, which means picking a date range in PokerCraft or Poker Intel and downloading the batch. The guide has the exact menu path for all seven networks and what to check when the folder turns out to be empty.

2. Upload the folder. Send everything rather than a curated sample. There is nothing to convert and no filters to set up first, and each extra thousand hands makes the stats sitting on thin samples slightly more worth acting on.

3. Read it by position. The report breaks every stat out from under the gun through the blinds. Start with the seats you play most often, because those carry your largest samples and the flags on them are the ones you can trust first.

4. Come back with a fresh database. Upload again after a few months and put the two reports side by side. The stats that moved are the ones your study actually changed, which is a harder question to answer from memory than most players expect.

Full walkthrough with screenshots on the tutorial page.

What the report gives you

175 stats across preflop, flop, turn and river, each one broken out by position. Every line carries four things: the frequency you actually played, where that sits against the target, the target range itself, and what to do about it.

Where the targets come from

Recommended ranges are set by the BBZ team from aggregated preflop and postflop reports, MDF calculations and other theoretical models, all built on equal-stack ChipEV scenarios.

The reason that matters is calibration. Most published stat guides are built on cash game data, which lands close enough to look correct in a tournament report and far enough off to have a player spending a month correcting a frequency that was never wrong for the format they play. ICM, PKO structures and adjustments against a specific pool all sit outside what these targets cover.

How many hands you need

Around 50,000 gives you reliable feedback on the spots that come up in every tournament you play. Below that the report still returns all 175 stats, with progressively more noise on the rarer positional splits, which is the reason the hand count appears next to every single line rather than only in a footnote.

That hand count is worth paying attention to. Sample sizes are extremely important when analyzing Leak Finder stats.

Each position (sb, bb, BTN, etc.) is analyzed in the Leak Finder report.

Rooms it reads

PokerStars, GGPoker, CoinPoker, 888poker, Winamax, iPoker and ACR.

Five of those write your hands to disk as you play. GGPoker and CoinPoker hold them on their own servers for a limited window instead, 90 days in GGPoker’s case, so a player who downloads a batch every couple of months keeps a database worth analysing while everyone else starts from zero each quarter.

Worth doing tonight whether or not you buy anything: open your client and check hand history saving is switched on. Nothing is backfilled, so hands played before you enable it do not exist on your machine at all. Where to find your files has the setting for each network.