Most poker players remember the spectacular hands: the monster pot, the ridiculous bad beat, the bluff that somehow got through... What they usually do not remember is the hundreds of ordinary decisions surrounding them! And those are often far more useful when you are trying to understand whether you are actually playing well.

That is where PokerCraft on GGPoker becomes your friend.

PokerCraft automatically records your hands and gives you several ways to revisit, filter and analyse them, including hand replays, positional data, hole-card results, opponent results and shareable Hand Moments. It is available through both the desktop and mobile GGPoker applications.

But having all that information available is one thing, knowing what to look for and what to do with that information is another.

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PokerCraft is more than a hand history

The easiest way to use PokerCraft is also probably the least useful one. You lose a big pot, open the hand replay, stare at it for thirty seconds and decide that the river was terrible.

Technically, you have reviewed a hand and you probably have not learned very much.

The real value of PokerCraft appears when you stop treating it as a museum of memorable poker hands and start treating it as a record of patterns. One strange hand means almost nothing, two hands same story but... fifty similar decisions might be a pattern.

PokerCraft stores the hands you play and allows sessions or groups of hands to be filtered and viewed in different ways. That makes it useful not only for asking “what happened here?” but for asking a much better question like “Does this keep happening?”

How to actually use PokerCraft

Before looking for leaks, patterns or positional problems, it helps to know where everything is.

On desktop, you can access PokerCraft from the GGPoker lobby through your profile menu. PokerCraft is also available through the mobile app, although the amount of information on screen naturally makes desktop particularly convenient for deeper reviews.

Once inside, PokerCraft is divided into different views. You do not need to use all of them every time. In fact, a good review usually starts with one question and then moves through the sections that can help answer it.

Start with the Timeline

The Timeline gives you a chronological overview of notable moments from your recent games and events. Think of it as the front page of your poker history.

It is useful for quickly finding a recent session or remembering when something happened, but it is not where most serious analysis takes place. If your goal is simply to revisit yesterday's session, though, this is an easy place to begin.

Choose the game you actually want to analyse

PokerCraft separates information by game type, so you can look at statistics relevant to the format you have been playing rather than mixing everything together. These sections can include cumulative information such as your best and worst hands, Luck Rating and other game-specific statistics.

Though your cash-game results tell you very little about how you are playing tournaments. Even two different stakes can produce very different situations and opponents.

So before drawing conclusions, make sure you are looking at the right game.

Use Game History to find the actual hands

If you want to move from numbers to decisions, Game History is where things become much more useful. PokerCraft organises your played hands by session, allowing you to locate individual hands and examine them in more detail. From here, hands can also be turned into Hand Moments for sharing.

Suppose you notice that one session went particularly badly and instead of staring at the final number, open that session and start looking through the hands.

You can then ask yourself questions like: Which pots did most of the damage? Was there one huge cooler? Were there several medium-sized pots lost in similar situations? Did the trouble begin after a particular decision?

Now you are moving from result to cause.

Replay the hands that deserve another look

When you find an interesting hand, use Hand Replay. PokerCraft can replay dealt hands street by street, allowing you to reconstruct the action rather than relying on memory.

This is particularly useful because memory is terrible at poker: after a session, we tend to remember what happened on the river and forget exactly how the pot became so large in the first place.

During the replay, stop at each decision and ask what information you actually had at that moment. Do not judge your flop decision using information revealed on the river, this simple habit will make hand review considerably more useful.

Check Win/Loss but do not stop there

The Win/Loss section shows how your results developed over time and can display an expected-value line alongside the actual result. Naturally, this is the graph everybody wants to look at first, and of course it is useful.

It can show whether a difficult week is part of a longer trend or merely a small interruption inside a much larger sample. But the graph should usually be the beginning of the investigation, not the conclusion.

A downward line tells you that money was lost but cannot tell you whether the cause was poor play, difficult situations, variance or some combination of all three.

Open the Hole Card Matrix

The Hole Card Matrix groups your results according to the starting hands you have played and shows the net result for each combination.

This makes it extremely easy to spot something that looks strange: perhaps a traditionally strong hand is performing badly, or perhaps a speculative hand appears unexpectedly profitable.

Clicking into those results gives you a starting point for reviewing the underlying hands. But resist the temptation to turn the matrix into a list of commandments.

If AQs is red, that does not mean AQs has suddenly become a bad poker hand, it just means your recorded results with AQs are red.

Now investigate why.

Then look at Position

The Position view shows your net results from the different seats at the table. This is one of the quickest ways to give your review some direction:  if your losses from one position look unusual, go back into the relevant hands and look for repeated situations.

Maybe you defend the big blind too often.

Maybe your early-position range is too ambitious.

Maybe you are failing to take advantage of the button.

PokerCraft will not make that diagnosis for you of course, what it can do is show you where the symptoms are appearing.

Use Opponents when a particular matchup feels strange

The Opponents section displays your net results against individual players within the sessions you choose to review, with winning and losing results represented visually.

This can help when you have the feeling that one regular continually causes you problems. Instead of relying on that feeling, look at the hands: maybe there really is a recurring tactical problem or maybe two enormous pots have simply distorted your impression. Either result is useful!

And let's say you played not two but three significant pots against that opponent and lost all three. That is not necessarily a strategic trend, consider the possibility it may simply be poker.

Opponent results become more interesting when they push you toward specific hands: do you repeatedly build oversized pots against aggressive players? Do you become too passive against certain regulars? Are you calling too widely because somebody feels like they are always bluffing?

Save and share hands with Hand Moments

PokerCraft can turn individual hands into Hand Moments, designed to make notable hands easy to export and share. That obviously works for spectacular wins and bad beats but there is a more practical use too.

If you have a hand you cannot make sense of, save it and discuss it with other players or use it later during study: a questionable turn check may be far more valuable than the biggest pot you won that week.

A simple PokerCraft routine

You do not need to spend hours staring at statistics. A useful review can be surprisingly simple.

After a session:

1. Open the relevant game type.
2. Check the overall Win/Loss picture.
3. Open the session in Game History.
4. Find a few large or interesting pots.
5. Replay them without looking only at the final result.
6. Check Position and Hole Cards for anything unusual.
7. If a pattern appears, find more hands from the same situation.

That last step is the most important one.

Review ordinary hands too

Poker players naturally gravitate toward extreme outcomes, and that creates a strange study bias. We analyse the enormous river call that went wrong while ignoring twenty small pots where we may have repeatedly made the same unnecessary call.

PokerCraft's replay function lets you revisit individual hands in detail. Use it for the spectacular hands, certainly, they are interesting for a reason. But also and more importantly review hands that felt completely uneventful.

Look at spots where you:

• defended a blind;
• called a continuation bet;
• checked back a turn;
• folded to a river bet;
• opened from an awkward stack depth.

Those boring decisions are the machinery of poker. A huge cooler might cost you one stack, but a small mistake repeated hundreds of times can become part of your playing style.

Do not confuse results with decisions

This is probably the most important PokerCraft habit.

The software can show you what happened but cannot magically tell you whether every decision was correct. Winning a hand does not prove that you played it well and losing one does not prove that you played badly.

Suppose you call an enormous river bet with a weak bluff-catcher and your opponent happens to be bluffing. PokerCraft records a profitable hand but that does not necessarily make the call good.

Likewise, you can make an excellent all-in decision, lose the runout and produce a spectacular red result.

The database records outcomes, outcomes require interpretations. Especially during reviews of short periods of play, where variance can dominate the picture.

The best PokerCraft filter is a question

Do not open PokerCraft and simply browse. Open it with something you want to investigate.

For example:

Am I defending the big blind too loosely?

Now find relevant hands.

Am I losing too much with one-pair hands in large pots?

Find them.

Am I opening hands from early position that constantly leave me in difficult situations?

Look.

Do I give up too easily after missing the flop?

Review those spots.

The difference sounds small, but it completely changes the experience. Instead of allowing statistics to tell you random stories, you use the database to test an idea, and that is much closer to actual analysis.

Beware of the tiny sample trap

There is one final problem with poker statistics: they look precise even when they are not reliable.

A graph can move sharply, a hand can show a frightening loss, one position can suddenly look terrible. None of this guarantees that you have discovered a meaningful leak. Poker contains a lot of variance, and small samples amplify it.

If your kings have lost money over your last few sessions, you have not discovered that pocket kings are unprofitable of course. You have simply discovered that your kings recently lost money.

Those are very different statements! The more general the conclusion, the more evidence you need before believing it.

Use small samples to discover hands worth reviewing and then use larger samples to investigate recurring tendencies.

Do not rewrite your entire strategy because one weekend produced an ugly graph.

PokerCraft cannot do the thinking for you

PokerCraft does not need to be an automatic poker coach. It is more useful as something simpler: a searchable memory of your own play.

GGPoker records the hands. PokerCraft lets you replay, download, filter and analyse them. Your job is to ask better questions.

You can look at twenty decisions, examine how you are actually playing, ask yourself the correct questions and then start looking for evidence.