I’ve given some though to “poker tracker” type of features lately, and considering it’s a topic where people may have strong opinions one way or the other, this is the plan I’ve come up with: (Remember though that these are just the first thoughts, and this won’t get done in quite awhile as there are many more things to do first that are more important.)

I think it would good to have an option to play with “poker tracker” stats enabled if both players wish to do so. So when you open new tables you could decide which type your tables will be, and when joining other people’s tables you would see which tables have the tracker functionality enabled.

The “no stats” tables would be just like the tables are now, where you don’t get any stats about your opponents but have to make all the reads about your opponents on your own. In the optional “tracker enabled” tables you could see stats about your opponents’ tendencies and playing patters, but collected only from the hands you’ve played against her/him in “tracker enabled” tables (so data mining would still not be possible).

I think the “tracker enabled” tables might be valuable teaching tools for people who also play in real money poker rooms using any of the available tracker software.

Seeing poker tracker type of stats about your own play could also help people to avoid certain predictable and exploitable patterns in their own play even if they never intend to utilize such programs in regular online poker. Actually, tracking your own play should always be possible regardless of the type of the game as that would just be and improved version of the current stats page that already lets you know a little bit about how you play on different streets and different situations.

Any thoughts?

Agreed, ability to download the hands for importing them to Poker Tracker is easier short term solution. I don’t have Poker Tracker myself so I’m not sure how easy it would be to do (i.e. do I need to export the hands in a format of some known online poker site?), but I’ll give it some thought and try to learn the format requirements and other stuff that’s needed for Poker Tracker to understand the hand histories.

That would be a really helpful if you had some example hand histories for heads-up poker on PokerStars or FullTilt. I think once I know the format that will work for you, it should be really easy to add the hand history export feature. I’d also like to take up on your offer for testing the results before I publicly release this feature.

When you get the chance, you can post any sample hands here, or PM me to keep the info private if you prefer, and we’ll continue from there.

Thanks for helping out with this!

The online sites change their output formats a couple times a year and that always leads to the PT guys having to patch their stuff. The support a surprising number of sites/formats already. Maybe some of them are a bit more static than P* or FullTilt.

I know you two are already using the new hand exporting feature that was added yesterday, but let’s add the announcement here too so everyone else will know too:

In the Hand History -page you can now export your hand histories in PokerStars format that can be imported to Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker for further analysis!

Hey Teppo, the download by month function (PS format, under "hand histories") didn’t work for me …. it gave me from the 21st of the month to the last day (not coincidentally, it’s the 21st today…)

Hey Teppo, the download by month function (PS format, under "hand histories") didn’t work for me …. it gave me from the 21st of the month to the last day (not coincidentally, it’s the 21st today…)

Maybe you didn’t choose any date range from the drop down?

I realize now it’s not very clear how it works, but the downloaded HH’s also use the date range selector (which by default only shows a few hands now unless you choose a different date range). I’ll have to work on the page a little more to make it a bit clearer…

For September, that gave me 21 Sep – 30 Sep
For August, that gave me 21 Aug – 31 Aug
etc

That doesn’t sound like what you’re describing?

Nope, it doesn’t. I misunderstood you first, but that kind of output is definitely a bug. I’ll look into it tonight and will fix it then. Thanks for reporting it!