What the free online poker hand replayer does
A hand history is a text transcript: who sat where with how many chips, who posted what, every bet, raise, call and fold by street, the board, and who collected the pot. Every room's client writes one, and almost nobody reads them, because a wall of lines like "Garnet: raises 11500 to 20000" is hard to follow. The replayer turns the transcript into a table. Each step applies one action: chips leave a stack, a bet appears in front of the seat, the pot label updates, the board fills in, and at the end the uncalled portion goes back and the pot is awarded. The action log under the table says what just happened in plain words.
The poker hand replayer is a free online tool with no account and no upload. The parsing and the drawing happen in your browser; the only network request is the page itself. That is a deliberate design choice for a tool that handles files with your screen name, your stack sizes and your opponents' names in them.
How to load a hand history file into the replayer
- Save the hand history file from your client (the FAQ below gives the menu path for PokerStars and GGPoker).
- Press "Choose file" above and pick the text file, or paste its contents into the box and press "Parse pasted text".
- Pick a hand from the selector if the file holds more than one.
- Press play, or step with the arrow keys. The slider jumps to any point in the hand.
- To send the hand to a friend, tick "Hide the hero's name" if you want your screen name out of it, step to the moment you want them to see, and press "Copy link to this hand". The link holds the hand; no copy is kept here.
If the file does not parse, the message under the box says why. The usual causes are a file from a room the replayer does not read yet, a file saved in a language other than English (the clients localise the action words), or a cash-game file with a format detail the tournament parser does not expect. Send the first few lines of the file to the desk and the parser gets taught.
The training hands
Three hands are built in to the free online poker hand replayer, written in the rooms' own formats so the parser treats them exactly like a real file. They are training material, not records of real play, and the players carry placeholder names.
- Training hand 2: the river bluff catch: Six-handed, level 20. The cutoff barrels three streets on a paired board and the big blind calls down with second pair.
- Training hand 3: the eight-big-blind shove: Nine-handed, late in a Low tier Main Event. The hijack shoves eight big blinds, the button isolates and the blinds get out of the way.
- Training hand 1: the big blind squeeze: Nine-handed, level 12 of a $109 event. The big blind faces an open and a flat call and squeezes with ace-king; the opener four-bets and the hand goes to showdown.
What the replayer does not do
The poker hand replayer does not evaluate hands or calculate equities, so it cannot tell you a decision was right; it shows what was done. It does not read every room's format yet: PokerStars and GGPoker are covered, partypoker and the US networks are next, and stud and draw games are not parsed because their streets are written differently in the file. It does not store anything, which also means the free online poker hand replayer cannot keep a library of your hands between visits; keep the files, or keep the share links, which hold the hand themselves.
One thing it does better than the clients' own replayers is handle the odd lines. An uncalled bet returned before the pot is awarded, an all-in call for less than the bet, a runner-up listed as collecting from a side pot: the engine applies each as the file states it, which is why the training hand with the eight-big-blind shove shows chips going back to the raiser before the showdown, exactly as the transcript says.