Buy Hand Histories

Some pokerrooms does not allow the use of purchased hand histories.

Where to Buy Hand Histories?

Below are a list of places where you can buy hand histories. Please note that there are other sites that sell hand histories – I have limited the list to sites that i have used and were happy with the service.

Why should I buy hand histories?

The reason that people buy hand histories are the same as for datamining. They want as much information about their opponents as possible inorder to increase their winrate.

If you play micro-, small- or midstakes, odds are that there will be thousands if not tens of thousands of active players on the site you play at. This means that even if you write notes on every single player you play against, you still won’t know anything about the majority of the players you encounter – There are just too many of them.

By aquirering large amounts of hand histories, either by datamining yourself or buying them, you can import them to Pokertracker or Holdem Manager, which will then compile them into statistics about your opponents.

Statistics obviously aren’t a replacement for “real” reads, however, statistics are vastly superior to no knowledge at all, which is what you usually start out with when you sit down and play at midstakes and below.

If you play 6-max NL Hold’Em you will usually need to play 20-30 hands before you have a general idea of how good the other players at the table are.

By using statistics of their previous play, you can get this knowledge the second you sit down at the table, and immediately start exploiting their weaknesses. If you know that a player has played 50% of the hands he has been dealt, you can be pretty confident that he is a very bad player, and if you run into someone that you can see played 40.000 hands last month, chances are that they at least know a fair bit about poker – Otherwise they would have gone broke a long time ago.

Buying hand histories vs. datamining

Recently it has become more and more popular to buy hand histories instead of datamining yourself.

There are several reasons for this development, but to cut it short you can get a lot more hand histories that you would ever be able to gether yourself, and it won’t cost you much more that the electricity bill of having you computer turned on to datamine.