The hand archives are your personal storehouse of significant hands you have played or observed. When you return from a session, there may be a few hands that stick with you because they were significant in some way. Maybe you made a really great play or pulled off a good bluff. Maybe you made a mistake and learned something from that hand. You can even record hands that you did not play. If you learned something from the way someone else played a hand, you can store that as well.

Performing your own analysis on hands can help you become a better player, because it is important to think about the game and always consider different and better ways to play a hand. And once you build up a number of hands in your archive, you have the powerful searching capabilities of PokerBrain available to you. You can search for hands based on all sorts of different search criteria to identify patterns in your play and to determine on which types of hands you need improvement in your play.

• Store basic hand data: Date, game, stakes, the cards in the hand, etc.
• Hands can be associated with a particular playing session or added independently if observed in a session you did not play
• Hand type can be automatically determined based on game and cards
• Additional hand characteristics: Customizable hand category, your position at the table, table conditions (full table, short-handed, or heads up)
• Associate hands with players in your player profile—specify a player other than yourself for the hand and/or select the other players who had a significant involvement in the hand
• Record the playing action, your analysis of the hand, and any lessons learned
• Search the hand archives by date, game, hand type, category, players, specific cards, table conditions, etc.

All the greatest poker players have impressive memories which hold a huge number of hands they have played. They can recognize when they are in familiar situations and very quickly know the right thing to do. In tough situations, they can review in their mind similar hands they have played against a particular player in the past, and this can help them make the right play. It may not be done consciously all the time, but their memories and experiences certainly guide the great players in consistently making the correct decisions.

The hand archives are designed to help you strengthen your ability to recall your own hands and improve your ability to consistently make the correct decisions.