Hand-Histories.com Review
Hand-histories.com is a site that mines and sells hand histories, either in bulk or as a subscription service. According to the info in their footer, they've been around for the last couple of years.
My first impression when visiting their site was that buying hand histories was going to be a very straight forward process. It's easy to see how to get started -- choose what room you want to buy hands for, whether you want hands in bulk or as a subscription service or you can choose the room along with the game you want hands for. Simple.
The only things that I would've liked to see when first visiting the site is maybe an About and FAQs page. The About page is more of a formality and a way of making a visitor feel at ease, especially when asking him or her to pull out their wallet. The FAQs page would've been ideal so that I can check for things like subscription details, prices, etc.
Other than that, I thought hand-histories.com was a very solid site overall. I had a good experience with them and will definitely buy from them again in the future. I've outlined the details of their service for you below.
Buy hands from Hand-Histories.com
Video Guide
Supported Poker Rooms
Hand-histories.com collects and sell hand histories from the following sites:
- PokerStars
- Full Tilt Poker
- Party Poker
- iPoker / Titan Poker
- Cereus / Absolute Poker / Ultimate Bet Poker
- OnGame / bwin
- B2B Entraction
Screenshot showing the poker rooms that Hand-Histories.com sell datamined hands from.
Game Coverage
The games that are mined by hand-histories.com include no limit holdem, fixed limit holdem and pot limit omaha. Only cash games are covered -- SNG and MTT hand histories are not available.
Similar to other datamining sites, hand-histories.com provides a graph outlining when the hands you bought were mined. This is helpful so that you know how old the hands are. It's also helpful in gauging how many hands you can expect to receive if you choose to sign up for hand-histories.com subscription service.
Something I liked was that on page(s) where you choose your bulk package, you're told how old the hands can be. The bigger the package, the older the hand histories can potentially be (up to 50 days and as much as 90 days in some cases). So if age is of importance to you, you can choose the package that better suits your needs in that regard.
Delivery of Hand Histories
You can obtain your hand histories one of a couple of ways from hand-histories.com. Hand histories can be downloaded through the "My Hands" tab when you're logged into hand-histories.com. Alternatively, you are emailed a download link after your purchase has been processed.
I bought a small package of 200,000 PokerStars 6-max hand histories and it took maybe 15 minutes for my order to be processed so I could download them. It took only a minute or so for the hand histories to download to my computer. This will likely vary depending on where you live, the type of internet you have and the hand history package you purchased.A neat feature that hand-histories.com has is that they remember the hands you buy. So if you buy a package one day and then a couple of days later you go to buy a larger package, they'll remember the hands you already have so you won't be sent duplicates.
On their website, hand-histories.com has mentioned that an application is in development so that you can have hand histories automatically sent and unzipped for you. This would be a nice feature to have for sure.
Subscription Option
In addition to their bulk hand histories, hand-histories.com does offer a subscription service. You'll receive hand histories daily (assuming the games you need run enough) with this service.
When doing the math, signing up for a subscription seems to make more sense than buying in bulk -- although this may depend on your needs. I paid around $12 USD for 200,000 hands from PokerStars. However, when I look at the graph for the same stakes, over 2.3 million hands were mined within the last 4 weeks. So for double the price, I could get over 10x the number of hands. Even if you were to do this for only a month, it just makes more sense to go with the subscription.
Payment Options
The following payment options are available at hand-histories.com:
- PayPal
- MoneyBookers
- WebMoney
- NETeller
- Visa
- MasterCard
I used PayPal when buying my hand histories and had no issues. It was as simple as confirming my purchase and hitting submit.
Support
I didn't need to contact support at hand-histories.com. However, in the event that you do, they have a contact form on their site.
Note from Jake: I have talked to the support at hand-histories.com a few of times, and they have always been very fast to get back to me with an answers to my questions.
Overall Impression
I found hand-histories.com to be a solid site to buy hands from. Their prices are competitive (from my experience) and they cover the major poker sites, games and stakes. And they deliver your hands quickly. The bottom line -- I'd have no problem buying hands from them again.