Common Guides
One thing that many people do when playing tournaments is to simply load the hand histories from those tournaments. This is fine, but the main thing you must do with tournaments is to enter the tournament summaries. The summaries contain information essential to the program like buy-in amount, fee, place of finish, payouts, etc. Without loading the summaries, you won't be able to view the hand histories for the tournaments you are playing in or some of the data will display as "N/A".
Sit&Go tournament summaries can be obtained from Paradise Poker by requesting them at the end of each tournament you play. Paradise will prompt you at the end of each tournament to see if you want them to send you a summary of that tournament. You must answer YES to this prompt. You may also request them from Paradise customer support. For the 1-on-1 tournaments at Paradise, Poker Tracker will automatically detect the winner/loser, provided you have the last hand of the tournament, and create a tournament summary for you. This is because Paradise does not provide tournament summaries for these types of tournaments like they do their sit and go tournaments. For Multi-table tournaments, Paradise does not offer tournament summaries. Because of this, you have to manually enter your tournament summary information using the File/Paradise Multi-Table Tournament Results - Manual Entry window.
Poker Stars has a nice feature that allows you to request a tournament summary without having to go through customer support (from the Stars lobby window, select the Requests menu option and select Tournament History...). Beware though that if you request your last XX tournament summaries from Stars, the information that they send to you probably won't be complete enough to load into Poker Tracker. The first few tournament summaries will include the full details of each tournament (buy-in, fee, place of finish for all players, etc) however, the remaining summaries will include only a small summary and not the full details of each tournament therefore it may be necessary for you to manually request each tournament summary, one at time. The emails you get from Stars containing the tournament summaries can be loaded into Poker Tracker using the File > Import Hand Histories/Tournament Summaries window. If you would prefer to manually enter the tournament summary information (you may want to do this for large Stars tournaments where you just want to enter your own place of finish rather than the 1000's of other players that you'll probably never see again that would be loaded if you imported the summary sent by Stars), you can do so by using the Stars tournament summary manual entry window that you can open under the File menu.
The latest version of Poker Tracker has a "Auto-Request Tournament Summaries" button on the File/PokerStars Tournament Results - Manual Entry window which you can use to request the summaries for you. Click the help link at the top right corner of this window for more details/constraints on using it.
Check out this Tourney Updater program which will automatically enter the information for you.
or SINGLE TABLE Sit&Go tournaments, they will prompt you at the end of the tournament to see if you want them to send the hand histories for that tournament. MAKE SURE YOU ANSWER YES TO THIS PROMPT. Included in this email will be the summary of that tournament at the top of the message. Another feature is that they often times, but not always for whatever reason, will send you hands that were played even after busted out of the tournament. This gives you additional information about your opponents that you don't get from Paradise or Stars. However, for the multi-table tournaments at Party, there are no summaries available and you can't get them from customer support, at least not at the time version 2 was released. So you must manually enter the tournament information if you want to track your results using the File/Party and Affiliates Tournement Results - Manual Entry window.
The latest version of Poker Tracker is able to record the summary information (buy-in, fee, place of finish, etc) for the SINGLE TABLE SNG's at Party because this information is contained in the hand histories that are stored on your hard drive. You shouldn't need to get the emailed summary/hands any longer unless you want to record the payout and place of finish for every player in the tournament.
As of October 2006, Absolute stores the tournament summary information in their hand history files so PT can automatically generate the summary for you, there isn't a need to manually enter them anymore.
Unfortunately these sites do not offer a way to get any kind of tournament summary via email. It is therefore up to you to manually enter the tournament information if you want to track your results using the File/Tournament Results - Manual Entry/[site name] window.
A PT user has written a program that creates tournament summary files for FullTilt Poker that can be imported into PT by using the Select Files To Import button on the File/Import Hand Histories/Tournament Summaries window. A link to the program is here: http://www.mattahfahtu.com/gfts/
Check out this Tourney Updater program which will automatically enter the information for you. Right now, Stars and Full Tilt are supported, more sites to come...
The only files you need to backup are the database files. These files have the extension ".MDB". DO NOT BACKUP PTREGV2.MDB though. If you haven't created additional databases, the only files you'll have are PTRACK.MDB and HHDB.MDB. Additional databases usually have the names PTRACK2.MDB, PTRACK3.MDB unless you have renamed them.
If you want to move Poker Tracker to a different PC, just backup the database files then run the install program - Download Section - on the new PC. Copy the database files over to the new PC and overwrite the files loaded during the install. You will need to send a message via the Support System to obtain a new product key
If you have created any custom known hands filters, you will also want to backup/copy the files ptfilter.txt and pthands.txt. These files contain the custom filters so if you copy these you won't have to recreate them on the new pc.
All of these files should be in the c:\program files\poker tracker v2 folder if you have used the default settings.
The database files listed above are the Microsoft Access databases. If you are using PostgreSQL databases then you have to backup the database files differently.
To do the backup (on the old computer):
To do the restore (on the new computer):
If you are getting these type errors there are 2 possible options.
then the problem is with your hand history database being full.
What you should do is, WITH PT CLOSED, rename the current hhdb.mdb file to hhdb_old.mdb and then download this new file in it's place: hhdb.mdb - These files would be in your c:\program files\poker tracker v2 folder if you used the default folder during install.
Go to the Utilities/Database Maintenance and Options window. Click on the Hand History DB's tab at the end of the window. Click on the "Add File" button and point it to the hhdb_old.mdb file you just renamed.
What this will do is allow you to import new hands into the current file but also replay old hands that are in the hhdb_old.mdb file.
Try using the Utilities > Repair A Poker Database option to fix the file.
If it works for a while after the repair and then comes back then this error means you have hit the maximum allowable file size for an Access database file (imposed by Microsoft, not PT) so you need to start a new database using the File/Maintain Database Names window and then start importing hands into that.
Another option is to convert the database to the PostgreSQL database format that does not have the file size restriction. See this guide for more details.
This text has been taken from the help window that opens when you select the Help/PostgreSQL License Agreement/How To Install PostgreSQL option and click the link at the bottom of the window...
Poker Tracker comes ready to use with a Microsoft Access database that stores the statistics and text of your hand histories. For most users, the Access database is sufficient and works just fine. However, for more advanced users and users that want to store a huge amount of hands, a more robust database option has been a requested for a long time. Enter PostgreSQL...
"PostgreSQL is a highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system. With more than 15 years of development history, it is quickly becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open source solutions."
Don't be intimidated by PostgreSQL. Following the steps listed in the link below, the average user will be able to download, install PostgreSQL and be up and running in Poker Tracker in very little time with very little effort.
To install PostgreSQL on your computer, please follow the steps detailed below in
How To Download and Install PostgreSQL.
Also, make sure you are running the latest version of Poker Tracker. Check for a new patch in the Download Section
After PostgreSQL is installed:
Download the Windows version of PostgreSQL 8.2.6 here. As of this writing, version was v8.2.6 is the latest official version. You can also check for newer versions directly on the PostgreSQL web site if you would like to.
Download the file linked above to a folder on your hard drive.
Extract all of the files from the zip file you downloaded to a folder on your hard drive. You must extract all of the files from the ZIP file into a folder or you will get errors if you try to run the installer.
Double-click on the file "postgresql-8.2.msi" to begin the install.
If you get this error message when you do this...
Then you have not extracted the files from the ZIP file as detailed in the step above and you will need to do this first.
The basic setup is all that is needed to run PostgreSQL with Poker Tracker.
Please follow the steps below and do not deviate from them unless you know what you are doing.
 The first window to open will look something like this window to the left. Select English/English at the language and click the Start > button. |
 On this window, click the Next button, leave everything as it is defaulted. |
 Enter a password to use here. You can use something simple. It may tell you the password appears to be weak and ask if you want to have one generated for you. DO NOT USE THE OPTION TO HAVE THE PASSWORD GENERATED FOR YOU. Just allow it to use the simple password you have entered. |
 Leave everything as defaulted again and enter another password where required. This password can be the same as the previous password if you want to make it simple. Please Note: make sure you write this password down. This will be the value you need to enter on the Utilities > PostgreSQL Settings window in Poker Tracker after you install PostgreSQL (along with user name which will be "postgres"). |
 Click the Next button, leave everything as defaulted. |
 Click Next again and the install will begin. Once the install is done, you can convert your Access database(s) to PostgreSQL. Open the Utilities > Convert Database window in Poker Tracker and click the help link at the top right corner of that window for details on how to complete the process. |