PokerStars Hand History: Every Way to Get It, and Which Fits

You can get a PokerStars hand history in three ways: copy a single hand from Instant Hand History (Ctrl+I on Windows, Cmd+I on Mac), request a batch by email from Tools > History & Stats > Get Hand History, or switch on automatic local saving in the client settings before you play. The right one depends on whether you need one hand, a finished session, or every future session.

I wrote this because the menus are scattered across several help pages and videos, and a Reddit thread from a PokerStars on FanDuel player shows that the answer is no longer the same on every client.

This guide goes through the five routes in order of effort, then shows which one fits which situation and what to do with the file once you have it.

What is a PokerStars hand history, and what does the file contain?

A PokerStars hand history is a plain text record of one hand: seats, stacks, blinds, every action street by street, the board, and the showdown. It is the raw material for any review, which is why a replayer, a tracker or a study tool starts by asking for it. For a longer look at what the format keeps and what it drops, see what's actually in your poker hand history.

Why does the PokerStars format matter outside PokerStars?

Because other tools copy it. In a December 2023 paper (revised 1 January 2024) on the Poker Hand History file format, the University of Toronto researcher Juho Kim describes the PokerStars hand history format as the log that one of the most popular online rooms saves, and uses it as a reference when converting hands into the new PHH standard. A Reddit post on r/poker about LiveSolver, an app for recording live hands, makes the same point from the user side: it exports in PokerStars format so that "any solver or hand history analyzer" can read it.

The practical consequence is simple. A file in this format works almost everywhere, so getting it out of the client is the only hard step.

How do you open one hand with Instant Hand History?

Instant Hand History is the client window listing every hand you saw or played at the table, and it is the fastest way to grab a single hand. According to pokerstarsreplayer.com, you open it by clicking the hand number at the top left of the table, from the table menu on themes such as Mercury, from the page icon in the Hands section of the chat box, or with Ctrl+I on Windows and Cmd+I on Mac.

Then find the hand in the list and copy all the text from the hand history section at the bottom. The Show Summary Only box must be unchecked, otherwise you copy a one-line summary and not the actions.

Can you share a hand without sending the text?

Yes. The YouTube walkthrough from MyTechMastery (2025) shows the Tools icon, then History and Stats, then Instant Hand History, where each hand has a share button that produces a URL you can send by message or email. A friend can replay that single hand without any file.

For one hand, nothing beats Instant Hand History. For a session of 600 hands, it is the wrong tool.

How do you request a whole session or tournament by email?

Get Hand History is the PokerStars request form that emails you a batch of hands, and it is the standard way to retrieve a session you already finished. The path documented by both the Poker Copilot guide and the SharkScope Desktop guide is: Tools in the main menu, then History & Stats, then Get Hand History, then choose what you want to receive.

The MyTechMastery video lists the choices: the last hands up to 100, a time frame such as the last 10 hours, a specific hand, or a specific tournament, in a language of your choice. Submit, and PokerStars emails you instructions to download the data.

What do you do if you only know the tournament?

You need the tournament code. In a Portuguese-language walkthrough from the channel Icone Do Poker, the player finds the code either in the tournament lobby results (recent tournaments only) or through SharkScope, copies it, then uses Tools, Request My Hand History, Tournament and pastes the code. The email arrives with every hand played in that tournament.

One caution from the same video: set the language to English. The presenter says that is required for the file to load in Universal Replayer, and I would treat it as a safe default for any tool.

The emailed file can be large, and when you request several periods you may need to find the exact hand in the text, as pokerstarsreplayer.com points out for the "last 1 hour" option.

How do you save hand histories automatically from now on?

Automatic saving is a client setting that writes every hand to a folder of your choice as you play, so no request is ever needed. The Icone Do Poker video places it in Settings, under History, then the hand history options: pick the folder, the number of days to keep files, the language (English), tick the option to save your hand history, and apply.

I recommend doing this today, before your next session. The emailed route has a delay and, as the next section shows, a risk. The local file does not.

After that, every session lands in the folder, ready for a replayer or for a tracker. If you use SharkScope Desktop or Poker Copilot, both guides tell you to point the software at the same hand history folders in their own settings.

Why can't some PokerStars players find their hand histories?

Because the client changed for some of them. Three Reddit threads in r/poker describe the same wall after the move of PokerStars to the FanDuel app: one player says they used to export 200 hands or a full tournament by email and now cannot find how, another looked for stored files in a Local AppData path and in the PokerStars on FanDuel folder under Program Files and found none, and a third notes that the play-money version has no export at all and wanted to upload hands to GTO Wizard.

None of those threads has a confirmed answer in the material I read. So I cannot tell you a FanDuel folder path, and I will not invent one.

What can you do on a client without export?

Four honest options exist. Check the history area of that specific client for a request or download entry, since menus differ between versions. Use the in-app hand viewer and screenshots for the hands that matter. Or, if you play on several rooms anyway, export the others cleanly: the guides for Winamax, GGPoker and ACR give exact paths. Last, if you live in the EU, the right of access to your personal data under the GDPR, explained by the European Commission, is a legitimate basis for asking support for your history; whether it covers hand logs is for the room to confirm.

An undocumented export is a reason to check the menus again, not a reason to guess.

Which method should you pick?

Pick by what you need to review. One memorable hand calls for Instant Hand History, a finished session or tournament calls for the emailed request, and anything you will play from now on calls for local saving. The table puts the limits side by side.

Every row above is a way to move data out. None of it works during a hand, and none of it should: using any tool to get advice while a hand is in progress is real-time assistance, which every room treats as cheating and punishes up to closing the account and seizing the funds. A hand history is for after the session, once the cards are dead.

What do you do with the file once you have it?

You review it, hand by hand, starting with the pots that decided the session. Paste a single hand into a replayer to see the action street by street. Drop the whole file into a tool that can read PokerStars format and sort the hands by size of loss.

The free replayer on Poker Debrief reads PokerStars alongside six other rooms, no account needed. For the full session, Poker Debrief reviews 18 hands street by street and ranks leaks by their cost in big blinds, at 3 $ a session with no subscription, and the first session is free and complete. If you would rather do it yourself, reviewing a session in 30 minutes works from the same file.

Is one session enough to judge your play?

No, and the file will not tell you otherwise. A few hundred hands carry too much variance to say whether a call was a leak or a bad run, which is why how many hands until your win rate means anything matters before you rebuild your strategy on one export.

My verdict: switch on local saving first

The best PokerStars hand history method is the one you set up before you need it: local auto-save, with the language on English. Instant Hand History covers the single hand, the emailed request rescues the session you forgot to save, and neither should be your only plan, because the FanDuel reports show that the email route can vanish with a client change.

If you play on the FanDuel client and cannot find an export, I would test a short session today and check whether a file appears, rather than discovering the gap after a tournament you wanted to review. That is the one case where I cannot give you a documented path.