What a hand history is, the two kinds of room, turn saving on first

A hand history is the text record of a hand you played: the seats, the stacks, every action in order, and the showdown. Your poker client writes one for every hand. It is the same file a tracker imports to build a database, and it is the file the Leak Finder now reads directly.

Rooms fall into two groups, and which group yours is in decides everything about how you get the files.

Rooms that save to your computer. PokerStars, ACR, Winamax and 888poker write a text file to a folder on your hard drive while you play. The files are already there. You need the folder, and you need to have had saving switched on.

Rooms that make you download them. GGPoker, partypoker and CoinPoker keep the records on their side. Each has its own web tool or export page where you pick a date range and pull the files down.

Turn saving on before you read anything else

The rooms in the first group only save from the moment you enable it. Nothing is backfilled. If the box has been off for the last two years, those hands do not exist on your machine and no amount of folder hunting will produce them.

So open your client, find the setting below, and switch it on now. Then come back and work out where the files are going.

The rooms in the second group have the opposite problem: they hold your hands for a limited window and then drop them. GGPoker keeps 90 days. Downloading a batch every couple of months is the difference between a database worth analysing and starting from zero every quarter.

Checking the files, rooms not listed, the PT4 route, what the hands are for

How to tell your files are usable

Open one of them in Notepad. A hand history is plain text and reads like a transcript, starting with the game, the stakes and the date, then every action in sequence. If you can read it, so can a tracker or the Leak Finder.

Three things break files that otherwise look fine:

The client is not in English. 888poker in particular has to be installed in English and set to save hand histories in English, or nothing downstream can parse them. Other rooms have the same problem in milder form.

The hands are anonymised. Partypoker exports show you as “Hero” and everyone else as “PlayerX”. That is fine for analysing your own play, since your own stats are what you are grading, and useless for opponent profiling.

The folder is empty. Either saving was never switched on, or the client is writing somewhere other than the default. The client’s own settings window is the authority, not any path on this page.

If your room is not listed

Look for Hand History in your client settings. Almost every room has the setting under Settings, Options or Game Settings, usually with a checkbox and a destination folder shown next to it. Switch it on, play a hand, then check that a file appeared.

If the room has no setting at all, it is a download room. Check the client for a “My Game”, “Game History” or “Statistics” section, and check the room’s website while logged in. If neither produces a file, email their support and ask. Several rooms will send hand histories on request without advertising it.

The PokerTracker 4 route still works

If you already run PokerTracker 4, nothing changes. The Leak Finder still accepts a PT4 report, and a tracker database has one real advantage over raw files: it already holds every hand you have ever imported, across every room, in one place.

Raw hand histories are the faster path for everyone else. No software, no import, no report to configure.

What the hands are for

Upload them and the Leak Finder grades 175 stats against tournament targets, broken out by position from under the gun through the blinds.

Every stat comes back with four things: what you actually did, whether that is high, low or inside range, the target range itself, and the adjustment. “Limp/Fold 66.67%, HIGH, target 35 to 45%, fold less” is a complete instruction. Each stat also carries the number of hands it was calculated from, so you can see at a glance which flags are worth acting on and which are three hands of noise.

Around 50,000 hands gives you reliable feedback on the spots that come up often. Smaller databases still produce the full report, with more noise on the rarer positional splits.