Read a hand at a glance
How PokerLens writes a whole hand on one line, and how to read it.
Wherever PokerLens lists your hands, it can draw each one out street by street, so you can see what happened without opening the replayer. This guide explains where you'll see it and how to read it.
Where you'll see it
PokerLens draws a finished hand in two shapes, depending on how much room there is:
- On one line — under each hand in the Session screen's hands table, on every row of the Marked Hands screen, in the hand report's As It Played column, and under the hands behind a figure in a pool report. The whole hand runs left to right, with a thin divider between streets.
- As a ladder — one street to a line, in the narrow rows beside your notes on a player. The ladder adds the street names, the pot at the foot and, where the hand ran twice, the second board.
In the hand report, As It Played is one of the columns that starts switched off. Turn it on from the report's columns — see Find the hands behind a result.
What's on it
Reading from the start:
- Your cards and seat — the two cards held by the player the row is about (usually you), and the seat they sat in. If nobody saw the cards, nothing is drawn there.
- Each street — the cards that came out on that street (only the new ones), the pot as it stood when the street was dealt, and then every player's actions in the order they were taken. Blinds and antes are counted into the pot rather than written as actions.
- Streets nobody bet on are still drawn. If two players are all in on the flop, you still see the turn and river that decided the hand.
- Ran again — if the players agreed to run it twice, the second board is shown under the streets.
- Pot — what was played for, and who won it.
The letters
Each action is a letter, followed by an amount in big blinds:
| Letter | Means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| F | Folded | F |
| X | Checked | X |
| C | Called | C2 — called 2 big blinds |
| B | Bet | B4 — bet 4 big blinds |
| R | Raised to | R3 — raised to 3 big blinds |
Amounts are rounded to one decimal place and never show a trailing zero, so you'll see 3 and 2.5, not 3.0. A raise is always written as the total it was raised to, because that's the price the table faced. The letters and seat names (UTG, CO, BTN, SB, BB…) look the same in every language; the numbers follow your own number format.
Colors and underlines
- Every seat has its own color, and every action is drawn in the color of the seat that took it. The colors run in preflop order, from cool and dim under the gun to warmer and brighter toward the button and the blinds, so you can follow one player down a hand without reading it.
- The actions of the player the row is about are underlined, so you can find your own line quickly.
- An all-in sits on a wash of that seat's color. It isn't spelled out in the letters — a shove is simply a bet or raise that happened to be every chip.
Hover for the details
Rest the pointer on any action to see the rest of it: which seat acted, what they did in words, and — when chips went in — the size against the pot, for example 2 big blinds into a pot of 6. Hover a street's pot to see what it means: the pot when that street was dealt, in big blinds.
Notes on the ladder
When a hand appears beside a note, the ladder marks the street the note was written on with note taken here. That way you can tell, for example, that you wrote the note on the turn, before the river came.
When a hand isn't there
Sometimes a row says This hand has not reached the book yet. That's normal for a hand that is still being played or imported — a note taken at the table is saved immediately, but the hand only arrives once the poker site writes it out. Open the screen again a little later and it will be drawn. It can also mean the hand is no longer in your database (for example, it was removed), while your mark or note on it is kept.