Poker hand history exports cap at 30 days—your HUD forgets first

If you play on the major Australian-facing sites, your hand history files vanish 30 days after the session ends. Not archived, not compressed — deleted. That means your HUD is quietly rebuilding a partial picture of every regular you've ever tagged, and the villain who stacked you six weeks ago is a stranger again. The 30-day cap isn't a bug you can toggle off in settings either; it's baked into how the client serves the data.

This matters more than most players realise, because the whole logic of a HUD assumes continuity. PokerTracker 4 and Hold'em Manager 3 don't just show you today's stats — they weight your entire observed history to build a read. Strip out everything older than a month and the sample you're drawing conclusions from isn't just smaller, it's systematically skewed toward recent variance. A guy running 12 buy-ins hot over his last 800 hands looks like a 32/28 maniac when the 40,000 hands that prove he's actually a 22/18 nit have been deleted off the server.

What actually gets deleted, and when

The 30-day window applies to the raw hand history files the client writes to your machine — the text files your tracker imports. On most networks, the client will only serve you hands from the last 30 days if you request a re-download, and after that the data's gone from your end unless you already saved it. Some skins are more generous, some less. I've seen 60-day windows on smaller networks and 7-day windows on a couple of the fast-fold pools, which is genuinely brutal.

The 30-day figure is the one you'll bump into most often because it's the default on the biggest Australian-accessible rooms. It's also the number that lines up with a lot of privacy and data-retention policies, which is where the cap actually comes from. The sites aren't deleting your hands to spite your HUD — they're managing server load and, in some cases, complying with retention rules that vary by jurisdiction. You're just collateral damage.

Here's the practical problem: your tracker only stores what it has already imported. If you open PT4 once a week, you're fine. If you take three weeks off and then come back, the hands from that gap are still there — 30 days hasn't elapsed. But if you take two months off, or you reinstall your tracker, or you switch machines, the old hands are unrecoverable. No support ticket gets them back.

Why the HUD doesn't just "forget" — it misremembers

The deletion itself would be survivable if your stats simply reset to zero. They don't. This is the part that catches people out.

Say you've got 50,000 hands on a regular over two years. He's a 24/19 reg with a 3-bet of 7.2% and a fold-to-3-bet of 58%. Solid, readable, exploitable in specific spots. Now 45,000 of those hands age out because you didn't play him for two months. Your HUD now shows 5,000 hands. Same player, same tendencies — but the sample is thin enough that a single 200-hand heater distorts his 3-bet stat up to 9% or down to 5%. You'll make a different decision against a 9% 3-bettor than a 7.2% one, and you'll make it confidently, because the HUD number looks authoritative.

This is the misremembering problem. It's not that the HUD has no data — it's that it has just enough data to be dangerous. A 5,000-hand sample carries a standard error on most stats that's roughly double what a 50,000-hand sample gives you. On something like fold-to-3-bet, the confidence interval at 5,000 hands is wide enough that a 58% true rate can easily read as 52% or 64%. You're not exploiting a leak anymore; you're exploiting noise.

The reg problem specifically

Against recreational players, none of this matters much. You're not building long-run reads on someone who plays 200 hands a month and never comes back. The 30-day cap hurts you against the exact population you most want data on: the regulars who populate your pool week in, week out.

Regulars are the players you face hundreds of times a year. They're the ones where a 50,000-hand history is genuinely valuable, because their frequencies are stable and their leaks are consistent. And they're the ones whose history gets chopped into 30-day chunks, each chunk too small to be statistically meaningful on its own.

There's a second-order effect here too. The regs who understand this are already archiving their own hands obsessively — exporting monthly, backing up to cloud storage, running scripts to scrape their own histories before the window closes. If you're not doing that, you're playing with worse information than the people you're sitting with. The edge isn't in the HUD software; it's in whether you kept the data.

What you can actually do about it

The fix is boring and manual, which is why most people don't do it.

Export on a schedule. Once a week, open your tracker and export the current month's hands to a backup folder. Once a month, push that folder to cloud storage. This takes about four minutes. It's the entire solution for 90% of players. The 30-day cap only bites people who never export, and the people who never export are the people who lose their history permanently the first time they take a break.

Check your client's actual window. Don't assume 30 days. Some rooms will re-serve you hands going back further if you request them through the client's hand replayer or a support ticket. Test it: request a hand from 45 days ago and see if it comes back. If it does, you've got more room than you thought. If it doesn't, you know your deadline.

Don't rely on the HUD for reads on low-sample villains. This is the actual poker lesson underneath the technical one. If your HUD shows a player with under 1,000 hands, treat the stats as a hypothesis, not a fact. The 30-day cap makes low-sample villains more common than they should be, because it's constantly resetting the clock on people you've played against for years.

Consider a shared database, carefully. Some player pools have community databases that aggregate hand histories across users. These sidestep the 30-day cap entirely because the data lives outside any single client. They also raise their own ethical and terms-of-service questions, and on most major networks they're explicitly banned. I'm mentioning them because you'll encounter them, not because I'd recommend one.

The number that should worry you

If you play 20,000 hands a month and take a two-month break, you've lost 40,000 hands of history on every regular in your pool. At a typical 6-max table with a 25% reg population, that's maybe 15 to 20 players you now have incomplete data on — and incomplete data that looks complete, because the HUD doesn't flag it. The software shows you a number. It doesn't show you what's missing.

The deeper question is whether the 30-day cap is a technical constraint or a deliberate design choice. Data retention costs money, sure. But the players who benefit most from long histories are the ones who study hardest, and there's an argument — never made officially, obviously — that a short retention window keeps the playing field flatter by preventing a small group of grinders from building an insurmountable informational edge over everyone else. Whether you find that reassuring or infuriating probably depends on which side of the reg divide you're on.

Either way, the clock is running on your data right now. If you haven't exported this month's hands, you've got a few weeks before the client decides for you.