Guide to Poker Datamining and Buying Hand Histories
This page gives you an easy way to find information about datamining and buying hand histories.
I have created it because a lot of people come to this site looking for things that are really hard to find - like a place where you can buy Fixed Limit Omaha hand histories or hands from PokerStars.fr.
When you click on a topic, you will be taken to a section about it and a link to where you can get more information.
Purchasing Hand Histories
Poker Datamining
If you can’t find an answer to your question on this page, please send me a message so I can update the page and others won’t get disappointed.
Buy Hand Histories
If you are looking to buy hand histories, and want to know more about how and where to do it, I recommend that you start out by reading this guide: How and where to buy hand histories.
You can also read the reviews of hand history resellers:
Each review contains a video showing you how to buy hands from the site, and how they will be delivered to you.
Buy Cash Game Hand Histories
It is easy to find a place to buy cash game hand histories, since this is what most people are looking to
buy.See a list of sites that are selling cash game hand histories
Buy Hold’Em Cash Game Hand Histories
Hold’Em cash games is by far the most popular type of poker played online. As a result of this the hand history resellers have a heavy focus on Hold’Em hands. The main focus of the sites is on No Limit hands, but they all have a pretty good selection of Fixed Limit hands too.
You can currently buy Hold’Em hand histories from:
If you are looking for hand histories for rarely played games like CAP No Limit or Pot Limit Hold’Em, you can currently buy them at >Poker Table Ratings.
You can read a guide here: Guide to buying hand histories
Buy Omaha Cash Game Hand Histories
Pot limit Omaha has become fairly popular online, and as a result many hand history resellers have begun selling PLO hands. You will find some large differences in poker rooms and stakes the different hand history databases cover, so depending on where you play, you may have to shop around to find the hands you are looking for – especially if you want Fixed Limit or PLO CAP hands.
You can buy Omaha cash game hands here:
If you are looking for Fixed Limit Omaha hand histories or PLO CAP hands, you can find them at >Poker Table Ratings.
Buy Stud Cash Game Hand Histories
I currently don’t know of any place where you can buy Stud hand histories.
The site most likely to start selling them is >Poker Table Ratings, since they are currently selling hands form a lot of the less popular games.
Buy Tournament Hand Histories
Most of the hand histories that are for sale today are from cash games. There are more people looking to buy cash game hands, and it is also easier to collect the hands, since cash games don’t start/end as often as tournaments.
If you are looking to buy tournament hand histories you best bet is >Poker Table Ratings, who has recently added hands from Hold’Em SNGs to their selection.
Buy SNG Hand Histories
There are not a lot of places where you can buy SNG hand histories, as a matter of fact, I only know of one: Poker Table Ratings.
You can read about Matt’s experience buying SNG hand histories from >Poker Table Ratings in this blog post.
Buy MTT Hand Histories
At the moment don’t know of any site that sell MTT hand histories, and I don’t think it is something we will see added anytime soon. The reason is that MTTs aren’t as easy to datamine as cash games.
The players don’t have to join the individual tables, so it can be tricky to find a list of MTT tables currently running. In addition you have to open a colossal amount of tables each time a new MTT is started and close them down as players gets knocked out.
If there were a large demand for MTT hands it would definitely be possible to figure out a way to get around these problems. Until then you will have to rely on your own hands and data from sites like www.officialpokerrankings.com and www.sharkscope.com that collect the tournament results.
If anybody is going to start selling MTT hands, it will probably be >Poker Table Ratings.
Buy PokerStars Hand Histories
Since PokerStars is the world’s biggest poker room, you can buy their hand histories from every self-respecting hand history reseller.
Buy PokerStars hand histories.
Buy PokerStars.fr Hand Histories
You can buy PokerStars.fr cash game hands from Poker Table Ratings. The amount of hands available is much smaller than for the main PokerStars site, which is to be expected, since there are fewer players on PokerStars.fr. I haven’t had a chance to try out PokerStars French site, but judging from their traffic numbers I think PTR has pretty good coverage of the site.
Buy PokerStars.fr Hand Histories at Poker Table Ratings
Buy Full Tilt Poker Hand Histories
Since Full Tilt Poker is the world’s 2nd largest poker room any self-respecting hand history reseller has a good selection of their hands.
Buy Party Poker Hand Histories
Party Poker is nowhere near as big as PokerStars and Full Tilt poker, but it is still easy to find a place to buy hands, since they are sold by almost all the hand history sellers.
Buy Party Poker Hand Histories.
Buy Bodog Hand Histories
Bodog is a relatively small poker room, so it can be a bit of a headache to get a good supply of hand histories. You can buy hand histories from Poker Table Ratings, but you may have to order fewer hands than you are used to with rooms like PokerStars – There just aren’t a lot of games running, so even though the coverage is quite good, the amount of hands available is limited compared to other rooms.
Buy Ipoker Hand Histories
Despite most rooms on the Ipoker network being fairly small, the network itself is actually very big. This means that you won’t have any trouble finding a place to buy hands, even though the site you are playing at may not be that big.
Buy Everest Poker Hand Histories
Everest Poker is a bit of a strange fish compared to most other poker rooms. Historically they have had a very strong focus on international players translating their website and software to a large amount of different languages, but today many of the large rooms have now caught up and now have their websites available in even more languages than Everest Poker.
Due to the fact that Everest Poker is fairly small there currently aren’t any site that sell hand histories from the site.
Buy Cereus Hand Histories
The Cereus network consists of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Personally I would not touch any of those two sites with a 10 foot pole due to their history of cheating scandals, but I realize that you may not feel the same way.
Buy Pacific Poker Hand Histories
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Pacific Poker. The games at the site tend to be soft, and after several years they have now upgraded their previously horrible software. Unfortunately this doesn’t the fact that they still tend to have minor screw-ups that just doesn’t inspire confidence. Recently I have had them send me 6 identical emails in one day and have their poker software show popups in a language I couldn’t read.
I suspect that this general screw-up-ness that haunt the room may have played a role in hand history resellers not selling hands from the site.
Buy Ongame Hand Histories
It used to be easy to buy hands from the Ongame network, but today you may have to do a bit of digging. The network is still quite big - almost the size of Ipoker, but recently they have taken a lot of flak from players about their software (I’m not a fan myself).
Buy Entraction/B2B Hand Histories
The Entraction network, also known as "B2B", Is quite small compared to networks like Ipoker and Ongame. Despite this Hand HQ are collecting and selling hand histories from them. The selection of hands are limited compared to other networks and sites, since there just aren’t that many games running, so even with very good coverage you just can’t get a lot of hands.
Buy Entraction/B2B hand histories
Buy Cake Poker Hand Histories
Cake Poker is a relatively small network that allows their players to change their nick every 7 days. This means that you won’t benefit as much from buying hand histories as you would at other rooms and networks. You can compensate to some degree by buying a subscription where you get fresh hands daily, so you are always have a decent sample, but it still won’t get you the same level of insight as you get at other site.
Buy Cake Poker hand histories.
Poker Datamining
I originally created this site to help people get started datamining. Unfortunately Idleminer, the company that created pretty much all the software used for datamining, has sold their domain name to Poker Table Rating. You can read more here: The Day Poker Datamining Died
I’m confident that this means that datamining will slowly die out, and everybody will migrate to buying hand histories instead. I like Idleminer, but as a result of the sale I do not recommend that anybody buy their handgrabbers unless you "have to", since I basically expect them to slowly shut down the company and stop updating the handgrabbers.
I have kept many of the datamining guides I have written, since they are still helpful for a lot of people, including those who has already purchased a hangrabber. You can see a list of topics and poker rooms at the bottom of the page.
Cash Game Datamining
Cash games have always been the main focus of datamining, since it enables you to improve your table selection quite a bit. In addition cash games are much easier to datamining than tournaments (MTT), where tables are constantly shut down as players are eliminated.
As a result the developers of handgrabbers focus on cash game support, and have usually added on tournament support as a bit of an extra feature.
Hold’Em, Omaha and Stud Datamining
Datamining has always been focused on Hold’Em, since it is the most popular variant of the game. Part of the reason for the lack of Omaha and Stud handgrabbers is that it took some time before pokertracking software for Omaha and Stud were developed – Nobody would want to gather thousands of hands without any way to analyze them afterwards.
You can still buy some Hold’Em handgrabbers from Idleminer, but like I explained in this blog post I don’t recommend that you buy them.
Omaha and Stud datamining is definitely possible, but I have never seen any handgrabbers for those games being sold publicly.
I recommend that you buy the hand histories instead:
Tournament Datamining (MTT and SNG)
Datamining has always been focused on cash games. There aren’t any sites that sell handgrabbers for either MTTs at the moment, and I doubt that there ever will be.
I think the closest you can get is buying SNG hand histories.
Guides to Datamining Poker Rooms
I have made guides for datamining on most of the major poker rooms. Unfortunately the company that created the software you use (handgrabbers) has sold their domain name, and as a result I no longer recommend that you buy anything from them – It wouldn’t make sense to sell the domain name if the wanted to continue doing business. For what it is worth, I think the development of the market pretty much forced Idleminer to sell, since people are moving from datamining themselves to buying the hands.
I strongly recommend that you buy hand histories instead of datamining yourself.
I have left the guides online, since they are still useful for those, who have already purchased a handgrabber: