The best way to learn about pokertracker is to screw aorund with the program while learning from the various guides around the net and the PT forums. I'll try to give you a little quick guide here as well to get you started in exploring the program.

First off you'll need to learn how to import some hands. Most of the common sites will work automatically with Pokertracker ocne you have things set up. We'll use Party as an example and I'll try to point out any place where the process would be different with another site.

<readmore> After you open Pokertracker you will see a row of brightly colored icons across the top. The first icon on the left is (for some odd reason) a colorful boat. that icon will be useful for importing big chunnks of hands if you ever have them emailed to you as a one time import, but we'll skip it for now. The second icon is what you would use to import hand histories from some sites (like UB or PokerShare) that are not completely automated. The third icon (the Party Poker chip symbol) is the one we'll work with today.

The Party Poker chip symbol is the one that we'll use today, but the next four or five icons will bring up fairly similar windows for various sites if you aren't playing on Party. Click the icon and you will get the Party auto-import window. Once things are set up here you'll just need to hit the icon and the "start timer" button to import hand histories as you play or watch games for datamining.

Next you will want to create a new folder somewhere that you can easily locate (mine is on my desktop and label it "Old hand histories". This file will basically just be a bucket to throw old hand histories into so you can delete them. Check the box next to "Move processed files to ..." and enter the folder you just created.

Leave the rest of the boxes unchecked and set the timer to import hands every 1 minute.

Now click on the "Observed Hands" tab and we'll get that set up as well. that will allow you to datamine the tables and get information on your opponents. Many of the members of my site are learning that if they don't have stats on an opponent it's much harder to make a correct decision.

"My first Database" should already be entered in the box, and make sure the box marked "do not import..." is NOT checked.

Now switch back to the Settings tab and hit the button to start the timer. Now you have Pokertracker checking for new files every minute and loading them into it's database. In the future all you need to do is hit the Party Chip icon and the start timer button to get things rolling.

If you open up a few tables on Party for a few minutes, or if you already ahve some hands played on Party that it will import the first time the timer fires, you will have yourself a database.

Once you have imported some hands you can close the auto-import windowa dn click on the little gold ring icon 7 from the left and explore some statistics. We'll get to that in the next blog.

See you at the final table,
Fox
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