PokerCraft on GGPoker: how to read your stats and find leaks

PokerCraft is GGPoker’s built-in stats tool. It records every hand you play and turns them into results graphs, a matrix of your starting hands, position reports and searchable hand histories, all free and all reviewed after the session, not at the table. Since GGPoker banned third-party poker software on October 15, 2026, PokerCraft is also the only tracker you can use with the GGPoker client open.

That makes it worth learning properly. This guide shows where to find PokerCraft, what each section tells you, how to read results against all-in EV, three reports that expose leaks and what the new software rules mean for your hand histories.

How to open PokerCraft

In the desktop client, PokerCraft sits in the client’s main menu. It opens as a separate window that works like a website, so you can keep it on a second screen while you are not playing. On a phone, open it from the menu in the GGPoker app. If you play on a GG Network skin such as Natural8, the same tool appears under the same name. Our guides to the GGPoker download and the GGPoker app show where the menus are.

The first screen is an overview across every format you play, with your strongest and weakest positions and a luck indicator. From there you pick a format, and inside each format you can filter by stakes and dates or pick single sessions.

What each PokerCraft section shows

PokerCraft is split by format, and each format has the same core set of reports. The table maps them to what they are good for.

The luck indicator, shown as a clover, compares your real all-in results with what was expected, and it needs at least 1,000 hands before it shows anything. Player notes are written in PokerCraft too and appear when you hover over an opponent at the table.

Results vs all-in EV: luck or skill?

The results graph shows two lines. One is the money you actually won. The other, all-in EV, replaces the outcome of every all-in with what you were expected to win at that moment, based on your equity. If the lines are far apart, luck in all-ins explains the gap; if they move together, the result reflects your play.

An example makes it concrete. Say that after 20,000 hands at NL10 your real line shows +$150 and your all-in EV line shows +$380. You lost about $230 to bad luck in all-in pots, and your play earned roughly $380 over that stretch, about 19 big blinds per 100 hands on paper. Now reverse it: real +$380, EV +$150. You ran $230 above expectation and the graph flatters you.

All-in EV only corrects hands where the money went in before the river. Bad luck in hands that went to showdown without an all-in, or bluffs that met the top of a range, still sit in both lines. So a gap tells you about all-in luck only; a lot of hands is still needed for the rest, as explained in variance in poker and how to calculate your winrate.

PokerCraft shows results in money and in big blinds per 100 hands. Whether its graphs show your result before or after rake isn’t spelled out in the tool. Compare a session’s PokerCraft total with the change in your cashier balance once, and you will know which one you are looking at.

Find leaks with three reports

Most leaks show up in three places: the seats you lose from, the hands you lose with and the big pots you play. Each report below answers one of those questions.

Position: where you lose the most

Almost every player loses money from the blinds, because they post chips there every orbit without position. What matters is how much, and the most common leak is defending the big blind badly against button raises. To see the decision behind that number, take a typical spot: the button opens to 2.5 big blinds, the small blind folds, and you hold K♣ 7♦ in the big blind.

Against a button that opens about 42% of hands, K♣ 7♦ has 42.8% equity. Out of position you won’t realise all of it, but there is plenty of room above 27%, so this is a standard defend. 8♥ 3♦ has 30.9%, close enough to the price that playing it out of position loses money for most players. If the Positions report shows a big blind loss far larger than in your other seats, filter the game history for big blind hands that went to the flop and look for this pattern: folding hands like K♣ 7♦ and calling hands like 8♥ 3♦. The full approach is in defending the big blind and position in poker.

The hole-card matrix

The matrix colours each of the 169 starting hands by how much you won or lost with it. It is tempting to read it like a verdict, and that is where most players go wrong.

Sample size is the problem. Any single suited hand, A♠ K♠ and the other three suits together, is dealt only 4 times in 1,326. To see it just 100 times you need about 33,000 hands; a pocket pair needs about 22,000. A red square after 5,000 hands usually means a couple of coolers, not a leak.

Use the matrix for patterns across many hands instead of single squares. A whole column of weak offsuit aces losing money, or every small suited connector in the red, is a pattern worth checking in the hand history. One bleeding square is not.

Game history filters

The game history lists every hand you played and lets you filter by result, by hand number and by opponent nickname. Two searches give the most value. Sort by your biggest losing pots and replay the top ten from last week: most players find two or three hands where they could have folded earlier. Then search for a regular you meet often, and check how your hands against that player went.

Download hand histories and share hands

Inside a format, select the sessions or tournaments you want and press the download button. PokerCraft saves the hand histories as text files on your computer, which many study tools can read. The built-in replayer plays any hand back street by street, and you can share a hand as an image, which is how most hands from GGPoker end up on forums and social media.

PokerCraft, Smart HUD and the third-party software ban

On October 15, 2026, GGPoker banned all third-party poker software and automation tools from running alongside its client. The named programs include PokerTracker 4, Hold’em Manager 3, Hand2Note, DriveHUD 2, Jurojin, Intuitive Tables, StarsCaption, Lobbyze, Equilab and AutoHotkey, and the ban covers any other poker tool too. They must be fully closed before you launch GGPoker: turning off the HUD while the program keeps running is not enough.

From December 1, 2026, the client actively looks for banned tools and shows an in-client warning. What follows a warning is not described. The chart sums up where the lines fall.

Smart HUD is PokerCraft’s partner at the table. It shows a few basic stats about opponents, collected by GGPoker itself, and works only inside the client. PokerCraft covers your own play after the session. Between them they replace the parts of a tracker that GGPoker is willing to allow.

One question remains open. GGPoker has not said in plain words whether you may import PokerCraft downloads into a tracker on a computer where GGPoker is closed. In the past GGPoker has also told players not to upload GG hand histories into tracking software.

Running Hand2Note, PokerTracker or any other tracker alongside GGPoker now breaks the rules and, from December 1, 2026, triggers the client’s warning system. If you still need a tracker for another site, close it completely before you open GGPoker, and ask GG support in writing before you import GG hand histories into it.

A 20-minute weekly review routine

PokerCraft is only useful if you look at it regularly and briefly. A routine that fits into a weekly coffee break:

1. Check the graph. Compare the real line with all-in EV for the week. A large gap means luck; note it and move on.
2. Open Positions. Compare the blinds with the last month. A sudden drop in one seat is your first lead.
3. Replay the five biggest losing pots. For each, write one line: the street where you could have done better.
4. Search one regular. Look at every hand against a player you meet often and add a note in PokerCraft.
5. Pick one thing to change. Only one. Next week, check whether the number moved.

PokerCraft works the same way in tournaments and Spin & Gold, where the chip graph shows where your runs ended. Our guide to Spin & Gold explains how to read results in a format where luck is especially loud.

PokerCraft FAQ

The rest of GGPoker’s software and rules are covered in our GGPoker review.