How to Download Your GGPoker Hand History Before It Disappears

You download a GGPoker hand history from PokerCraft, the browser tool linked at the bottom of the GGPoker client, not from a folder on your computer. GGPoker never writes hand history to your hard drive while you play, which is the single detail that trips up most players coming from PokerStars or Winamax. Everything below walks through where PokerCraft lives, what the exported file actually contains, and what to do with it once you have it.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A folder of text files that never gets opened is just clutter. The point of pulling your GGPoker hand history is to find out what happened in the hands that actually decided your session, and that only works if you get the download right first.

What a GGPoker hand history file actually contains

A hand history is the plain-text record of one hand: seats, stack sizes, every action in order, and the showdown if there was one. On GGPoker it comes as a .txt file bundled inside a .zip archive, one hand history file per download batch rather than one continuous file per day.

Two things make GGPoker's version different from a PokerStars or ACR hand history. First, you are labeled "Hero" in every hand, which is standard across rooms. Second, every other player at the table shows up as an encrypted string of numbers and letters instead of a screen name, a detail confirmed by pokerenergy.net in its breakdown of the format.

What is a GGPoker hand history file for, if I can't see opponent names?

It is for reviewing your own decisions, not building reads on regulars. Because the network (GGPoker, PokerOK, Natural8) treats opponent tracking as exactly the unfair edge it wants to prevent, the export is deliberately stripped of anything that would let you build a database on another player. If your goal is session review, that limitation does not cost you anything: the hands you played, the actions you chose, and the results are all intact.

How to download your GGPoker hand history from PokerCraft

Open the GGPoker client and click the PokerCraft icon at the bottom of the lobby. It opens as a new tab in your default browser rather than inside the client itself, which is worth knowing before you go hunting through client menus for a download button that isn't there.

Inside PokerCraft, the tabs are split by game type: Rush & Cash, Hold'em, Omaha, and My Tournaments. As pokerenergy.net puts it plainly, "you cannot download the entire hand history from GGPoker with one button." You have to enter each tab, pick a date range or select individual sessions with the checkboxes, and open the Game History window that appears before the Download button becomes active. Repeat that once per game type you played.

The result lands in your downloads folder as a .zip archive. Extract it (right-click, Extract All on Windows) and you get a folder of .txt files, one set per session or tournament, ready to hand to a tracker or a replayer.

Where do I find PokerCraft if I only play on my phone?

PokerCraft is a browser tool, so the desktop client is the reliable path. On mobile, GGPoker routes you to a mobile-formatted version of the same PokerCraft site from within the app's stats menu, but the download and extraction steps that follow are far easier to do on a computer, since you will need to unzip a file and hand it to tracker software afterward.

Why the clock is running on your GGPoker hand history

This is the part most guides skip. GGPoker does not keep your hand history on its servers forever. According to bbzpoker.com, GGPoker retains roughly 90 days of hands before they age out of PokerCraft, which puts it in a different category from PokerStars, Winamax, ACR and the iPoker skins, all of which write hands straight to a local folder the moment you enable saving. Miss that 90-day window on GGPoker and there is nothing left to recover.

A hand history you never download is a hand history you will not have in three months. That single fact is why a recurring download habit (say, once a month) matters more on GGPoker than on any room that saves locally, especially as the pool of hands worth reviewing keeps growing: Statista tracks online gambling revenue climbing into the tens of billions of dollars a year worldwide, a volume of play that makes a 90-day export window easy to underestimate.

If you already run a room that saves locally, the guide to where your Winamax hand history folder actually sits covers that side of the split. GGPoker and CoinPoker are the two rooms where you have to go get the file yourself, on a clock.

Do other GG Network skins like Natural8 or PokerOK work the same way?

Yes. Natural8 and PokerOK run on the same GG Network backend as GGPoker, so PokerCraft, the retention window, and the encrypted opponent IDs are identical across all three. The only differences are branding and, in some regions, the exact wording on the download page.

Getting your GGPoker hands into a tracker or a replayer

Once you have the extracted .txt files, there are two practical routes. If you already run PokerTracker 4 or Holdem Manager, open the tracker's import function (in PokerTracker 4 it is Play Poker, then "Get Hands from Disk") and point it at the extracted folder rather than a single file, since GGPoker splits hands into many small session files. One import tutorial on YouTube walks through exactly this: select the folder, let the tracker read every file inside, and the hands appear in your database without any manual reformatting.

If you do not want to run tracking software at all, a free hand replayer works just as well for reviewing individual hands. The CheckReplay tutorial demonstrates the simplest version of that path: open the downloaded .txt file, copy the raw text, and paste it directly into the replayer's "load hands" box. From there you can reorder hands chronologically (GGPoker exports last-to-first by default), convert stacks to big blinds, and jump straight to hands where you were dealt in, which strips out the folds you had no part in.

Can I use a HUD live on GGPoker?

No, and this is not a gray area. Third-party heads-up displays and tracking software are banned outright on the GG Network, live or otherwise, and using one risks account closure and forfeiture of funds. GGPoker's own PokerCraft and SmartHUD are the only stats tools sanctioned inside the client. If you are trying to study without a tracker, the approach in how to study poker without a HUD on GGPoker, WPT Global and CoinPoker is built for exactly this constraint, and it works entirely from the same exported hand history file, after the session is over.

That constraint also explains why a small industry of third-party "hand history mining" services exists for the GG Network, offering bulk databases of opponent hands collected outside the official export. Buying into one to build reads on regulars sits well outside anything GGPoker sanctions, and it defeats the purpose of a format that deliberately scrambles opponent identities in the first place.

What to actually do with the file once you have it

A player on r/poker put the real question plainly: "I play NL2 on GGPoker, so I can download my hand history in .txt format... how should I get started, and what software should I get?" Having the file was never the hard part. Reading it well is.

The download itself only pays off once you sit down with the hands that actually decided your session, the ones where a big pot swung on a single street. If you are new to that process, how to review a poker session in 30 minutes and actually find your leaks walks through turning a raw hand history, GGPoker's or anyone else's, into a short list of what actually cost you money, measured in big blinds rather than a vague feeling that something went wrong.