by Todd Gross

If you're a new poker player, and want to improve your chances of winning money (or at least losing less money), you don't want to rely on luck. Luck is unpredictable, it can come or go at any time. You want to improve your odds of winning by making good decisions: betting money when you have a good chance of winning the hand, and folding when you don't. You need information to make good decisions.

One type of information is probability: what percent of the time will a random event happen, like flopping a set (see Poker Terms for a definition) or having the best hand after all cards have been dealt. In my last article, Getting Off to a Good Start, we looked at which starting hands gave you the best chance of winning. This is probability: the odds that your two cards, with the five community cards yet to be dealt, will create the best hand and win.

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Another type of information is statistics: what people actually do in a given situation. For example, if you raise before the flop, statistics tells you how often your opponent will call, will raise, and will fold. You don't get this information from running computer simulations, because it's based on how people actually behave. You get the information from watching people play and keeping track of their behavior. In this article, we tell you how to get this valuable information…without having to spend any money playing poker.

There are two parts to getting valuable statistical information about your opponents. First you have to watch actual poker hands and keep track of what the players do: when they call, when they bet or raise (and if it's a no-limit or pot-limit game, how much they bet or raise), and when they fold. Then you have to take this information you've gathered and analyze it, to find out what their behavior is. This article is also divided into two parts. In this part, Part I, we look at how to gather information from actual poker hands. In Part II, we'll take some poker hands I've collected and do a simple analysis to see how much money you're likely to win if you take a pot (nice to know, right?).

If you have an account with PartyPoker, you can look at a text record of any poker hand and save it to a file. We'll see what the contents look like in a moment, right now I need to explain how to get this text record.

1. First, you need to log into your account at PartyPoker, then choose a table. The game (or games) you record will be ones that are played at the table you choose while you're watching.
2. When you see a window of a specific table, look in the upper right hand corner. You should see a line of white text that looks like the following:
   This Hand# 1,393,734,690
   After the first hand, you will see another line of text below it that looks like the following:
   Last Hand# 1,393,732,684
   Both of these are links. Click your mouse on either link, you get a window with the title Request Hand History.
3. The Request Hand History window has two scrollable text areas. On the left side is a list of numbers. These are hand numbers—the same numbers you saw in the link you clicked to open this window. You can select any number with a green check next to it. When you select the hand number (by clicking on the number), the right text area shows the hand history for that specific hand.
4. You can read the contents of the hand history, you can also save a copy by cutting and pasting. The easiest way to do this is to press CTRL-a then CTRL-c in the hand history window to get a copy, then press CTRL-v in a text editor like Notepad or Microsoft Word to copy the hand history to your editor (which you can then save in a file for later use).