Nowadays, hand histories are a standard feature of online poker sites. These are sometimes available in an ‘instant’ format and sometimes supplied bye-mail (and often both). Each method has pluses and minuses. If you are able to view your hand histories instantly, then you can review them straight after a hand, rather than having to wait for an e-mail, but on the other hand the e-mail method has the advantage that the hand histories are automatically stored in your inbox and can be referred to days or even months later. Furthermore, at some sites these e-mails come in a standard format that can be read into a program such as Poker Tracker or PokerStat, which may then reveal valuable insights into both your own play and that of your opponents.

Programs like Poker Tracker collect and combine your hand histories into a database, and then allow you to run a wide range of database queries. It will tell you what percentage of flops you are seeing, how you fare with each pair of hold’em pocket cards, how often you raise before the flop or give up your blinds uncontested etc. and also provides you with the same information for each of your opponents! Indeed, you can even create a ‘Game Time’ table, which provides the key information on all of your opponents, viewable at a glance.

If you are fortunate enough to have a coach, then hand histories are an extremely helpful basis for analysis and discussion; and you could always write up and post any of your particularly interesting hand histories on a poker newsgroup or forum to invite comments and suggestions. Just remember to provide as much information as possible both about the hand, and the dynamics of the table at that particular time, so that the exact situation you were in can be recreated as accurately as possible. And it would probably be as well to prepare yourself for some blunt criticism from the ‘experts’!

Whether you plan to ask for feedback on your hands or not, it is still important to review the hand histories of the key hands that you played in each session. Did you play well or could you have saved or gained some extra bets? Did your opponents make mistakes or did they pull off any clever plays that you might be able to use yourself at a later date? Once you have reviewed and annotated your key hands, you might like to consider placing them in a file to which you can refer back at a later date. Having amassed a number of these hands, you may then be able to identify recurring positive or negative features of your play, which will enable you to improve your future results.
What were they calling with?
One unique feature of hand histories at some (but not all) sites is that they reveal the pocket cards of players who called at the showdown, even if they failed to win the pot. At a brick and mortar cardroom, the caller on the end is almost always allowed to muck losing hands without showing their cards, but at PokerStars, for example, this valuable information is available instantly.

Consider the following scenario: Playing at your favourite site, you have a good hand, so you bet and get called all the way to the river. You show down your good hand, it holds up, and your opponent mucks. For once, you haven’t been suffered a bad beat on the end -wonder of wonders!

A little while later, the same thing happens. You get called down and again you win (winning two showdowns in a row - it really is your lucky day!) and your opponent mucks. When the euphoria of winning two showdowns in a row subsides, you start to wonder if your opponent may be a calling station and not the type of player against whom you might, for example, want to try and run a bluff.

But how can you be sure? Maybe he also had a good hand, was making legitimate calls and just got a little unlucky with a lower kicker. Well, check the hand history. Even if your opponent mucks at the showdown, his hand is normally revealed if he has called on the river. You can therefore find out what he was doing in the hand and get a handle on what kind of a player he is. Note that this also applies even if you are not involved in the showdown yourself - you can still see what the other players involved in the showdown were going to war with. This difference between online and offline play can provide valuable in sights into your opponents’ play and you should not shy away from taking advantage of it.