Overview
A hand history is a ledger of every piece of information and action that occurred within an online poker hand. The hand histories must provide all of the information needed for the user to fully reconstruct the hand from the user's point of view. This specification standardizes the format of these hand histories to ensure that all the data is available to the user regardless of where the hand was played or how the hand intends to be reviewed.
This specification is intended to be an open format that any poker site or network is free to use to ensure that they are providing complete hand history data to their players and the hand histories can be consumed via any tool of the customer's choice for review.
Online Poker Operators
If the specification does not meet your needs for a particular use case, please see the Change Request Process to learn how to submit your recommended changes for review and inclusion into the specification. The specification is versioned to allow for continual improvements.
Third Party Developers
We strongly encourage every third party developer to support consumption of hand histories conformed to the specification. If you believe that certain information is potentially missing or could be a benefit to be included in the hand history, please see the Change Request Process to learn how to submit your recommended changes for review and potential inclusion into the specification. The specification is versioned to allow for continual improvements.
Tournament Summaries
Where hand histories outline every action within a single poker hand, they cannot contain all of the information needed about a tournament as a whole and some of that data may not be available until the conclusion of the tournament. Tournament summaries are equally as important as hand histories; however, due to their structural differences, there is a separate and independent standardized tournament summary specification.
