LiveHands: The Live Poker Hand Tracking App Built for Speed
You played 250 hands in a ten-hour tournament day. You had a massive decision with ace-king in a three-bet pot on a king-high board. You made a hero call on the river that doubled your stack. And by the time you got back to your hotel room — you could not reconstruct the exact bet sizes, the stack depths, or even which street the action got interesting.
That is the problem. Every live tournament player knows it. And it is the reason LiveHands exists.
LiveHands is a mobile hand logging app for live no-limit hold'em tournament players — available on iOS and Android — built around one core idea: capturing hands at the table has to be fast enough to fit between deals, or most players simply will not do it consistently. It is designed to help players log, review, export, and share live poker hands quickly, bridging the gap between the table and the analysis tools where real study happens.
This article walks through what LiveHands does, how it works, what makes it different from other tracking apps, and who it is built for. If you are evaluating hand tracking options or just want to understand the product before trying it, this is the place.
The Problem LiveHands Solves
Online poker players take hand data for granted. Every hand is logged automatically — positions, stacks, actions, cards, pot sizes — and it all flows into databases they can filter, analyze, and study. PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, Hand2Note — these tools run on that data.
Live players get none of it automatically. You may play roughly 25–30 hands per hour, and once a hand ends, the details start fading fast. After a long session, most players can recall only a handful of hands clearly — by community accounts, roughly 3–5 from sessions of 200 or more. The rest — the marginal spots, the small-pot decisions, the patterns that reveal real leaks — tend to disappear.
Some players use phone notes. Some use paper journals. Some rely on memory and reconstruct hands hours later. All of these approaches share the same problem: they do not produce structured, exportable data. You cannot import a text message into PokerTracker 4. You cannot filter hand-written notes by position and street. The data gap between live and online poker is not just about capturing hands — it is about capturing them in a format that makes real analysis possible.
LiveHands closes that gap.
How It Works: The Core Loop
LiveHands is designed around the pace of live play. You have 30–60 seconds between hands. Everything in the app is built to work within that window.
Table Setup
Before you start logging, you set up the table: 2–10 players, blind levels, ante format (off, BB ante, or traditional with a custom amount), hero seat, button position, and starting stack sizes for each player.
Between hands, you can edit the table setup without starting over. New blind level? Seat change? Stack adjustments? Update them in place. Toggle the on-screen display between currency and big blind (BB) values during table setup and hand logging — useful for seeing standardized stack depths across different blind levels.
Table Memory
When you return to an existing tournament, LiveHands carries forward the previous hand's state — stacks, blinds, and positions pick up right where you left off. No re-entering table configuration between hands or between sessions at the same table. Win/loss results from each hand update all stack totals automatically, and the button advances so the next hand starts with accurate counts and positions across the table. If your last hand was a draft, the app restores the table config and prompts you to verify before continuing. If a player busted, the app flags the zero stack for adjustment before the next hand begins. Table Memory applies within a single table seating — table changes from breaks or day-end redraws require fresh table setup.
Hand Logging
This is where the speed-first design matters most. LiveHands uses a guided flow from preflop through river with a quick-tap interface built for live play. Common bet and raise sizings have dedicated action buttons, so most actions can be recorded in a single tap. When you need more precision — exact amounts or villain hole cards, for example — full manual entry is available.
Hero cards are logged for every hand, including walks and raise-and-take-it pots, so your hole card data is always complete for analysis. Each logged hand automatically calculates hand rankings and win/loss net amounts for all players at the table. Edge cases are fully handled: walks, board runouts, and split pots all resolve correctly.
Need to capture something the structured fields do not cover? Add a note to any hand — reads, table dynamics, timing tells, mental state, anything worth remembering later.
Draft Auto-Save and Recovery
Hands are automatically saved as drafts during logging. If you get interrupted — a new hand starts, the dealer calls for a break, you need to step away — pick up right where you left off. No data loss from interruptions. Your draft hand appears on the Dashboard, ready to resume.
Hand Review
Every logged hand is available in a full hand history view: an action-by-action written record showing all positions, actions, stack sizes, and bet amounts in currency. Hand details include the winning hand, betting line (bet/call/check-raise), pot type (single raised, 3-bet, limped), and net result.
Mark any hand as a favorite for quick access from the Dashboard. Use the filtering and search tools to find specific hands by outcome, position, betting line, pot type, and other criteria. Everything you need to reconstruct exactly what happened — structured, searchable, and browsable.
Export: The Bridge to Your Analysis Tools
Export is where LiveHands delivers on its role as a connector. Hand logging is valuable on its own, but the real payoff comes when your live hands flow into the same analysis software your online hands do.
LiveHands exports in PokerStars text format — the de facto standard accepted by leading analysis tools. One tap generates a .txt file that imports cleanly into PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, Hand2Note, and more, with no conversion or reformatting required.
Export individual hands or entire tournaments in bulk — to your phone's file system or directly to Google Drive. One-tap share a hand history .txt file directly with a friend or coach. The export is the bridge: you capture hands at the table, and your desktop analysis tools do what they have always done, now with your live data in the mix.
Social Share Cards
Not every hand needs to go into a database. Some hands need to go on social media.
LiveHands generates branded visual share cards — PNG images designed for posting to X and Instagram. The share card design adapts automatically to different hand densities. The cards present your hand as a visual story — event context, key hand info, hero cards, board, and result.
What Makes LiveHands Different
There are several apps that can record live poker hands. Here is what separates LiveHands from the rest.
A Connector, Not an All-in-One Toolkit
Some competing apps try to be everything at once — hand recorder, replayer, bankroll tracker, range trainer, equity tool. LiveHands takes a narrower approach: it is a connector. Its job is to help you capture hands at the table and move them into the tools and channels where they become useful.
Live hands → Analysis software. Export PokerStars-format .txt files that import directly into PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, Hand2Note, and other leading analysis tools. This is the core study pipeline the product is built to support.
Live hands → Social channels. Share cards turn any hand into a visual, narrative-driven image for posting to X and Instagram. Share your deep-run hero call as a visual story, not a wall of text.
Live hands → Coaches and study groups. Export hand history files that coaches and peers can import into their own analysis tools — not screenshots or verbal reconstructions, but actual importable data.
LiveHands does not include an in-app replayer, solver, bankroll tracker, range trainer, or equity calculator. Those tools already exist and players already have preferences among them. LiveHands is designed to feed them, not compete with them — bridging the live hands you play to everything else you want to do with that data.
Speed-First Design for At-the-Table Use
LiveHands is not a bankroll tracker with a hand recording feature bolted on. It is not a general-purpose session logger that happens to let you enter hand details. It is purpose-built for capturing hands between deals at a live poker table, where you have 30–60 seconds before the next hand starts.
The interface is designed around that constraint. Tap-based card selection, contextual action buttons, common sizing shortcuts, auto-advancing streets. The product decisions all flow from the same question: how do we make this faster at the table?
Native File-Based Export
LiveHands generates actual .txt files in PokerStars format — not clipboard text, narrative summaries, or screenshots. The result is an export your analysis software can read natively. That workflow gap matters: many apps can record hands, but fewer produce output that tools like PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, or Hand2Note can import directly.
Complete Hand Lifecycle in One App
Log, review, edit, export, and share — all from a single app. Capture a hand at the table. Review it on the rail during a break. Edit it the next morning when you remember a detail you missed. Export it to your analysis database. Turn it into a share card for social media. One app, one data set, no juggling between tools.
Data Ownership and Privacy
Your hand data belongs to you. That is not just marketing language — it is reflected in the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. LiveHands is subscription-only, with no ads, no ad tracking, and no sale of raw hand data. The Privacy Policy also identifies third-party providers and explains retention, deletion, and regional compliance terms in plain language. For a deeper look at how poker app privacy policies compare, see Who Owns Your Poker Hands?.
Who LiveHands Is Built For
Tournament grinders who already use PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, Hand2Note, or another leading analysis tool — and want their live hands in the same database as their online hands. If your study workflow depends on structured hand data, LiveHands is the capture layer that feeds it.
Recreational-serious players who want to improve but do not have a system for tracking and reviewing hands. You do not need desktop analysis software to get value from LiveHands — the in-app hand review alone gives you structured, detailed hand histories you can study, instead of relying on memory.
Coaches and their students. Coaches who want students to submit structured hand histories in a format they can import directly into their own analysis tools — not voice notes, not text messages, not incomplete hand descriptions. Students who want to give their coach something useful to work with.
Content creators who play live and want to turn hands into shareable content fast. The share cards are designed for how poker content gets consumed — visual, narrative-driven, and built for the platforms where the poker community lives.
What LiveHands Is Not
Just as important as what LiveHands does well is what it is not trying to do:
- Not a training app. It does not teach strategy, run equity calculations, or provide coaching. It captures the raw data that makes study and coaching possible.
- Not a bankroll tracker. It does not track session results or profit/loss over time. It tracks individual hands at the action level.
- Not a desktop analysis tool. It does not replace PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, or Hand2Note — it feeds them. LiveHands is the mobile capture layer; those tools are the analysis layer.
- Not a cash game tracker. LiveHands is designed exclusively for live tournament poker — purpose-built for serious players.
- Not a real-time odds calculator or GTO solver. It captures what happened. Analysis tools help you figure out what should have happened.
Pricing
LiveHands is $10/month with a 7-day free trial. The trial includes full feature access — logging, review, editing, export, sharing, and cloud backup — with no credit card required. After the trial, a Pro subscription keeps those features unlocked. If your subscription lapses, your data remains available in read-only form, including access to view and export existing hands.
Multi-currency support is built in: USD ($), EUR (€), and GBP (£). The app is available across 15 countries spanning North America, Europe, and Oceania.
The Origin Story
LiveHands exists because of a specific moment. Tom Sullivan finished 239th out of 8,663 at the 2022 WSOP Main Event — his first live tournament — and afterward could not reconstruct the key hands he wanted to study. The spots that mattered most, the decisions he wanted to analyze, the hands he wanted to show his friends — they were gone. Fragments of memory and half-legible phone notes were all that remained.
LiveHands was built so no live player has to lose meaningful hands again.
Your live hands deserve the same level of analysis as your online hands. LiveHands helps you capture positions, stacks, bet sizes, and cards at the table while the details are still fresh, then move those hands into the analysis tools and sharing channels you already use. Try it free for 7 days.