Before you try to configure OpenHoldem to work with a Poker Tracker database, you must have a properly working Poker Tracker configuration set up first. This is not the most trivial of activities, and does have a learning curve. The best information on how to set up Poker Tracker can be found on the Poker Tracker website (http://www.pokertracker.com).

Assuming you have a working Poker Tracker installation, let’s move on to getting OpenHoldem to work with your Poker Tracker database. OpenHoldem only works with ↓PostgreSQL databases, not with ↓Access databases; so if you do not have Poker Tracker configured in that way (and you know if you do), go back and get that set up first.

OK, so now you have Poker Tracker installed using PostgreSQL as the underlying database. Do you have Poker Tracker setup to automatically import hand histories into your database? If not, OpenHoldem will not be able to provide you any useful information, as there will be no information in your database to pull from. Learn how to automatically import hand histories here: http://www.pokertracker.com

After all of that is configured, you can use the settings in {Preferences} to instruct OpenHoldem how to connect to your Poker Tracker database.

When connected, OpenHoldem will query the database using the ↓sitename and ↓playername as key parameters for the ↓query.

Everything in Poker Tracker is first organized by what it calls a “site id”. When querying the database, the first thing OpenHoldem will try to do is associate your sitename or ↓network, as specified in the Table Map, to a Poker Tracker “↓site id”. This is done by doing a case-insensitive substring lookup against the following lists. This means that if your sitename string is “stars10sng” it will still be able to associate that to the proper “site ID”, as “stars” is within that sitename.

If one of the below character strings can be found in either the sitename or network strings, as specified in your Table Map file, using a case-insensitive substring search, then OpenHoldem will be able to lookup statistics for the players playing at your table. As a note, the sitename string is searched first, and if a match cannot be found there, then the network string is searched.

The second critical piece of information that OpenHoldem needs to query the database is the name of the player. OpenHoldem gets this from the pXname/uXname regions on the Table Map. Note that this scraped name does not need to exactly match the name as stored in the database. This is useful, as there is currently no method for scraping spaces in players’ names. OpenHoldem will in all cases, return the statistics for an exact name match if it exists, and if it does not exist, will find the closest match using a Levenshtein distance algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance). Note that Levenshtein distances that exceed a certain level (currently 30% of the length of the name) are discarded as invalid.