poker sites
Export your hand history
Every analysis of your own play starts with one file, and that file lives inside the poker room you already play at. These pages describe how to get it out, per room, without installing anything on the client.
Why the file matters more than the tool
General poker advice is written for an average player who does not exist. Your history is the only record of what you personally do when the pot is real, and it is the difference between a page telling you that people call too much from the blinds and a report telling you that you did it eleven times last week. What happens after the upload is described on the import page, and you can see the shape of the result in the example report before exporting anything at all.
This is also the honest limit of every other kind of poker software. A solver has never seen you play and a chart does not know which hands you fold. That is worth remembering when you are deciding where a study budget should go, which the tracker comparison goes through in more detail.
verified instructions
Checked
GGPoker
Five steps through PokerCraft, the statistics tool built into the client itself. Checked against the client on 28 July 2026.
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not checked yet
Every other room
There is no page here for the other rooms, and there will not be one until somebody has walked the route through the actual client. A menu name we guessed would cost you more time than this empty space does. The section below covers what holds true everywhere.
true at every room
Four things.
The file is plain text
A hand history is a text file describing what happened at the table, action by action. Rooms package them in an archive, usually a zip, and the files inside it are what an analysis tool reads. If a room offers a spreadsheet of results instead, that is a summary and not a history: it says what you won, not what you did.
It arrives after the session, never during it
Rooms release your history once a session is over. That is why every analysis on this site happens afterwards, and it is the practical reason a live display of advice is not something we build.
Your own hands are the point
Several rooms encrypt the names of other players and change the code between sessions, so opponents cannot be followed over time by any tool. Your own play stays fully readable, and that is the part you can actually change.
Exporting is allowed, live assistance is not
Downloading your own history is a feature rooms offer. What they prohibit is software advising you during a hand. Those are different activities and rooms treat them very differently, so check the rules of your own room rather than assuming either way.
Poker clients get updated, so a menu can move or be renamed. Each instruction page states the date it was checked. Where a label no longer matches what you see, look for the nearest equivalent rather than assuming the export has been removed. Why every page here carries a date is set out on the method page.
What the file cannot do
It cannot help you during a hand. Software that advises while you are playing is real time assistance, and the page on what rooms prohibit explains how seriously that is taken. Reading your own history afterwards is a different activity and is not treated the same way.
It also cannot tell you anything reliable from a handful of sessions. Variance is large enough over a few hundred hands to hide a good player inside a losing week and a poor one inside a winning month, which is why every score on this site comes with a threshold attached. The score explanation names those thresholds instead of hiding them.
questions
Fair questions.
Which poker sites are documented here? +
One so far: GGPoker, through PokerCraft, checked against the client itself. Other rooms will be added when the route has been walked through and verified. We do not publish a click path we have not seen, because a wrong menu name wastes more of your time than a missing page does.
My room is not listed. What do I do? +
Look in the client for a section about hand history, statistics or session results, and check the room help pages for the word export. The shape is the same nearly everywhere: choose a game type, choose a date range, download an archive, unpack it, and the text files inside are the histories.
How many hands should I export the first time? +
Enough that the numbers mean something. Findings about how often you enter a pot need a few hundred hands, and findings about rarer actions need several hundred more, because those situations simply do not come up often. Fewer hands does not break anything, it just makes the conclusions wider and the report shorter.
Is exporting my hand history against the rules? +
At the rooms documented here, no. The export is a feature of the client and it covers your own play. What rooms do prohibit is a real time heads up display fed by an external tracker while you play, which is a different thing entirely.
Do I need a tracker to use my history? +
No. A tracker is a separate category of product, built around a live display and a database of opponents. Reading a history after the session needs neither of those.
What happens to the file after I upload it? +
It is parsed into hands and analysed, and the import page describes which formats are recognised and what is refused. Files that are not hand histories are rejected rather than half read.
next step
The GGPoker instructions
Five steps through PokerCraft, with the file types named, the date the route was checked, and what to do when a label has moved.
GGPoker export →