Using hand histories

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 16 February 2010 / Leave a Comment

Poker is a game where information is king, and the ability to be able to quickly and efficiently sort through hand histories is crucial when playing online poker.

I was recently watching a beginning poker player friend of mine play a few sit and goes with the aim of me giving them some tips on their play after the session. Like most things in poker, I quickly saw a leak in their game which seemed completely obvious to me, but that they had not even considered a problem - that of using hand histories well.

Online poker has the great benefit of being able to sift through previous hands - even if you missed them through being distracted by another table or some other event. This is an invaluable source of information when weighing up your own options in a given hand, and quickly checking the major pots a player has been involved it can make your life much easier.

In this specific case, my friend was facing a big all in bet mid way through a sit and go and was considering what to do with top pair. Instead of looking to see what this player had been like previously, he was talking about the hand in a vacuum, simply thinking about the pot odds and the stage of the tournament. I told him to pull up the hand history, and it quickly became obvious that the player in question had been involved in lots of large pots up to that point with some pretty marginal holdings.

This information made the decision considerably easier, and an otherwise tough spot was avoided simply through a quick search through the hand history. Poker is a game where information is king, and the ability to be able to quickly and efficiently sort through hand histories is crucial when playing online poker - a point many people used to the live game miss. Look for big pots (or the lack of them in the case of very tight players who always have the goods) and then examine how the pot actually was played.

Clear leaks such as habitually over or under betting, playing weak hands out of position, or only ever having the nuts, are all things that can very quickly be found out through a quick look at hand histories, and can all provide crucial pieces of the puzzle when trying to figure out the optimum course of action in a hand. Hand histories are one of the single most useful features of online poker, and you ignore their importance at your peril.

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