PokerStars Hand History: Save It, Find It, and Request Old Hands

PokerStars keeps seven years of your hands on its servers and will send them to you on request. It also ships a setting that throws away the copies on your own computer, and almost nobody changes it.

Switching it on

PokerStars writes a text file for every hand you play, but not until you tell it to. The setting is off by default, which is the first thing most players discover too late.

In PokerStars' own words:

Go to 'Settings' in the main lobby. Select 'Playing History' → 'Hand History'. Pick 'Save My Hand History'. Hit 'Apply Changes'.

Same dialog on Windows and Mac. Underneath the tick box, a Where To Save heading shows the folder, with a Change Folder button beside it.

Guides that send you to Options, then Instant Hand History, are describing naming from before 2019.

The setting that deletes your hands

In that same dialog sits a field for how many days to keep files. It runs on its own and removes anything older.

This is the single most common way players lose their own record, and it never looks like a fault. You go looking for last spring and it simply isn't there.

Set it to 9999. That's what PokerTracker, Hold'em Manager and Poker Copilot all tell their users to do, and there's no reason to keep less.

Where the files land

PokerStars' own help page still gives a Program Files path, which is where the client installed itself many years ago. Modern versions write to AppData, and every tracker vendor says so independently.

Rather than take anyone's word for it, read the folder out of the Where To Save box. PokerTracker and DriveHUD both ship an auto-detect button, which tells you how often this question has more than one answer.

One folder per screen name. Files are split by table session.

Getting hands you never saved

This is the part that makes PokerStars unusual, and hardly anyone uses it. The site keeps your hands for seven years and will send them to you.

On desktop: Tools, then History and Stats, then Get Hand History. On mobile: the account icon, then History, then Hand History.

You can request your last 100 hands, a specific period, an entire tournament, or one hand. Play money and freeroll hands aren't archived, so those are genuinely gone.

You'll see claims that anything older than three months comes back empty. That was true once. Seven years is what PokerStars states on its own help page today.

This is the only route for mobile hands, since the app can't save locally. If you play on your phone, this is how those sessions reach your database.

Emails arrive as plain text in the message body, separated by lines of asterisks. Trackers want a file starting at PokerStars Hand #, so the header has to come off first. SharkScope and Poker Copilot both include a tool that does exactly that.

The format

Plain text, one file per table session, not zipped. No converter needed, ever. PokerStars' format is the one every other site's hands get converted into.

The one requirement is that the client must be running in English. A localised client produces files that trackers refuse.

What the rules allow

PokerStars publishes a detailed third-party tools policy and keeps it current. Trackers and displays are permitted when the numbers come only from hands you played yourself, with limits on what can be shown during a hand.

The part that matters for studying is explicit:

There are virtually no restrictions to what the tracking applications can do with the data in terms of what, how and when data is displayed

And the condition attached to it:

all of these databases can be used for studying and training purposes, but the PokerStars software must not be running when this occurs

So review your hands with the client closed. Solvers, range tools and chart services fall under the same rule. Datamining is banned outright, at any time.

There's no market where displays are banned. The restrictions are per game: Spin and Go is excluded, and Zoom needs particular handling in most trackers.

American players are on different software

Worth checking before you follow any of the paths above. US players now use PokerStars on FanDuel, and it's a genuinely different product.

Its hand histories are XML rather than plain text, and they live under a PokerStars on FanDuel folder, then your username, then History, then Data. PokerTracker and Poker Copilot have both added support.

If the folders on this page don't exist on your machine, that's probably why.

The rest of the gotchas

• Tournament summaries are a separate setting, under Settings, then Playing History, then Tournament Summaries, with their own folder. Trackers treat a missing summary as a critical problem.
• Set auto-close tournament without notification to Off, under Multi-Tabling, or summaries get lost as tables close.
• Instant Hand History is a viewer, not a saver. It shows you the hand and writes no file. Easy to confuse with the setting that matters.
• Since May 2025, histories only cover hands where you were dealt cards. Observed hands are gone.

For every other site, see the full list. For the room with the strictest rules about what you may do afterwards, see GGPoker.

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

Frequently asked questions

Related: every site, in one place · GGPoker and PokerCraft · what the stats mean · Zayrion Analytics