Ignition and Bovada Hand History: Download, Convert and Import

Ignition gives you something no other poker site does: every player's hole cards, in every hand you played. It also deletes the lot after seven days, which is why most players have almost no record of their own game.

There is no folder, and that changes everything

Most poker sites write a text file to your computer while you play. Ignition doesn't. Nothing is saved locally, at all. The hands are built on the site's servers and handed back to you on request.

That has one useful consequence and one painful one.

The useful one: you can get hands from sessions you played before you ever thought about tracking. There was no setting to forget.

The painful one is the seven-day window, and it's the tightest of any major site.

The window

Read those two middle rows together. The dropdown shows you a month, which makes it look like you have a month. You don't. Anything past seven days can be looked at and never downloaded, and then it's gone for good.

So playing for a year and deciding to study in December leaves you with six usable days of poker. There's no appeal and no support route: the files were never generated.

Download every week. Put it in the calendar.

How to download them

In the desktop client, on Windows or Mac:

1. Open Account from the lobby.
2. Go to the Hand History page.
3. Choose Game Transactions.
4. Pick the game type: Zone Poker, Ring Games, Sit and Go, or Scheduled Tournaments.
5. Pick the period.
6. Each session gets its own button. It reads Available for Download, then Download Requested, then Open File.

There's no button that fetches everything. It's session by session, game type by game type, which is tedious and is the main reason people stop doing it.

Two things that catch people out. Browser play isn't captured at all, so anything you played in a web tab doesn't exist here. And the client has to be set to English before you download, or trackers won't parse what comes out.

What the file looks like

Plain text, in Ignition's own dialect. The opening lines of a hand run something like this:

Ignition Hand #3453331430 Zone Poker ID#1036 HOLDEMZonePoker No Limit
Seat 1: UTG ($25 in chips)
Seat 6: Big Blind [ME] ($25 in chips)
Card dealt to a spot [Ah Kd]

Two things make it unusual. There are no player names. Seats are labelled by position, and your own seat carries [ME]. And hole cards are dealt "to a spot" rather than to a person.

The compensation is real though. The downloaded file contains every player's hole cards, including hands that never reached showdown. No other major site gives you that. You can go back and see exactly what your opponent folded, which is the single best raw material for working out whether a bluff was ever getting through.

Do you need a converter?

Not for the main trackers, not any more. This is where most guides are out of date.

• PokerTracker 4 reads the files directly. Play Poker tab, then Get Hands From Disk.
• Hold'em Manager 3 reads them too, through File, then Import Folder. You need to tick the import setting under Tools, Settings, Import first.
• Anything else usually still wants a converter.

A converter is worth understanding even so, because it does things the trackers don't. It rewrites the file into PokerStars format, names your seat Hero, gives opponents consistent identities so within-session stats work, and turns Zone into Zoom, since PokerStars format has no Zone game type.

If you read a page telling you a paid converter is compulsory, check its date. That was true, and stopped being true.

Anonymous tables, and what you lose

Every table on this network is anonymous. Nobody has a screen name, on the table or in the file.

What you lose: opponent tracking, entirely. Nothing carries from one session to the next, because there's nothing to carry. At Zone Poker the players change every hand anyway.

What you keep: all of your own play, in full, plus everyone's cards. For working on your own game, which is the only thing you can actually control, this is close to the best data any site produces.

The rules

The terms prohibit software that gives you information about other players beyond what you'd see yourself. That's aimed at displays running while you play and at shared databases, and it rules out a heads-up display on this site.

Reading your own hands after you've finished is a different thing, and it's how people study here. The anonymity does most of the enforcement by itself.

The common mistakes

• Waiting. The seven-day window is the whole game. Nothing else on this page matters if you skip it.
• Mixing live grabbing with downloads. If you ran a grabber during play and then download the same sessions, the two sets of invented names don't match and your tracker reports duplicates. Choose one, or keep downloads in a separate database.
• On Mac, leaving the files where they land. Ignition puts them inside the application bundle, and PokerTracker can't import from there. Show Package Contents and move them out first.
• Forgetting Zone is separate. It's its own game type in the dropdown, so downloading your ring game sessions leaves all your Zone hands behind.

For every other site, the full list is here. Once you have the files, the stats guides cover what to read first.

Educational only. No real-money play. 18+. On Google Play now; iPhone coming soon.

Frequently asked questions

Related: every site, in one place · America's Cardroom · what the stats mean · Zayrion Analytics