I formatted both my desktop and laptop yesterday and today I did a fresh install of the newest beta version of Pokertracker 3, although there is a stable version of this online poker software as well. I have been using Poker Tracker 2 with PokerAce HUD for over 3 years and decided to make the move, since there are more useful stats in the PT3 nowadays, there's been huge improvement regarding the HUD and importing hands in the online poker database is known to need less time to complete. So, I started to import a directory of more than 1 million hand histories and 3 hours later the import actions have finished.

My previous Poker Tracker 2 databases (3 databases) take about 5GB in hard disk space and they are Access databases. Poker Tracker 3 is using PostgreSQL which doesn't have the 2GB size limitation per database. So, I'm able to import all my hands into one big database. The first directory I wanted to import was the one with all the hand histories PT2 had already accessed and saved during the past months. I'm talking about over 13,000 files, that is 1.5GB in text documents!

It turns out that PT3 needed about 2 hours to import all my hand histories and 1 more to do the Database Housekeeping. Database Housekeeping means to cluster, vacuum, analyze and update the cache of the database after the import. I must admit that it was more than acceptable, since the first time I installed PT3 (6 months ago, early stages of development), you had to wait for more than 10 hours until the whole import process finished. Quite a few online poker players kept databases of more than 2 or 3 million hands which meant the computer should work for more than 20 hours until all the hands were imported!

Pokertracker 2 was one of the best online poker software available to help me make money playing online poker by finding my poker leaks along with a couple of more online poker tools which minimized the mouse clicks required for all the table actions. Now that I have completed importing the majority of my hands, I'll be taking a look at the improved HUD and arrange the new stats which PT3 offers.Until then, you can read about my previous HUD stats arrangement with Poker Tracker 2.