HandCrawler Interview with PokerSoftware

In the past few months, a new website has been launched that allows a user to enter in specific hand scenarios and crawl the internet to find hand histories posted in forums fitting the variables the user put in. HandCrawler.com is quickly gaining ground as one of the most popular websites for students of poker who want to find specific hands without having to crawl through hundreds of pages manually. PokerSoftare.com caught up with the site's creator and manager, Neil Quinn, and asked him about this new poker resource.

PokerSoftware.com: Can you give us a brief biography and how you started HandCrawler?

Quinn: Like most people, I started playing poker casually during college in home games. In an attempt to become a strong player, I stumbled across the TwoPlusTwo forums. I still play today, but am a casual player who heads to the micro-stakes. I struggle with the game quite a bit and it really frustrates me since my win rate is around 2 PTBB/100 at the $0.25-$0.50 and $0.50-$1 games.

In the past, the best way for me to learn was to watch videos and talk about hands I played with friends online. The problem is that videos are limited to the hands that happened in one session and friends aren't always available.

HandCrawler was created to help me find specific situations instantaneously. Now, immediately after I play a hand, I can look up similar situations to see how it should be played. In short, HandCrawler started off as a tool to help me become a stronger player, but I quickly realized that others could find it useful as well.

PokerSoftware.com: Give us an overview of HandCrawler and how it can help online poker players.

Quinn: HandCrawler is a search engine that finds discussions of poker hand histories on the web and indexes them for users to find. Think of it as Google for poker. For example, say you just played a hand where you found yourself check-raised with top pair on a dry flop. Should you fold, get it in, or just call? In HandCrawler, you can simply check the filters "Top Pair,” "Monotone Flop,” and "C/R on Flop” and you will instantly see dozens of other hands that are similar to your situation.

PokerSoftware.com: What sites does HandCrawler sift through to find these hand history threads?

Quinn: Currently, HandCrawler only indexes hands on the TwoPlusTwo forums. I have plans to index at least three or four other major poker boards, but am waiting to clean up a few more bugs in the parsing scripts before I expand.

PokerSoftware.com: What features that are in development can you tell us about?

Quinn: First and foremost is continuing support for various hand history formats. While it may not seem like a difficult task to extract data, you have to remember that there are dozens of format combinations, all of which need custom regular expressions to get the proper information. For example, some converters have text-only histories, HTML histories, TwoPlusTwo format histories, and other forum histories. Additionally, they have other options such as image-based cards. These all break the scripts and need exceptions. It's not that fun to code because about 80% of hand histories can be handled with about five or six expressions, but writing scripts for all of the rare formats has diminishing value on return.

As far as other fun features, here are a few things I have in mind:
Support for Limit games
Support for tournaments
More advanced filters (gutshot draws, backdoor flush draws, etc.)
Pre-canned queries on common situations
Performance optimization (the database is quite large and queries can take a long time to run)

I'd love user feedback on any other common actions they might want to search for.

PokerSoftware.com: There are spots where it seems like content will be a big part of your site, such as strategy videos and the forums. What plan is in place to beef up these sections of the site? Will it be user-generated or will you be hiring staff?

Quinn: While I'd love to build a thriving community, I have very little free time, so the boards are placeholders for future efforts. I think that the search engine itself, while very cool, is not enough to keep people coming back on a daily basis.

I'd really like to create more videos that summarize the most common spots that people play wrong and roll them all into a few videos or tutorials. The best part of the Web is sharing information with people who are smarter than you.

PokerSoftware.com: HandCrawler is currently free. Is that the general plan for the lifetime of the site?

Quinn: I hope to keep this site free to all users, but it really depends on how it grows. One of the problems with free software is that users demand all kinds of updates and new features as it gets popular, but it can be difficult to keep up. I work a regular nine to five-type job, so my hours available to work on the site are limited to evenings and weekends. I hope that sponsors and affiliate programs can help bring in some money for now.

PokerSoftware.com: What's the general message from HandCrawler to the online poker community?

Quinn: My overall advice is that poker, for any young person, can be an amazing opportunity. If you're going to play, even casually, you might as well learn how to play properly. Besides, it's more fun when you win, right? I just hope that this tool can make your poker study sessions more efficient. It's sort of like the old saying, "Practicing doesn't make perfect. Perfect practicing makes perfect." You can practice all you want by playing a million hands, but if you aren't forcing yourself to learn in the process, you'll just tread water forever.

In short, have fun, enjoy Hand Crawler, and I hope you guys find it useful because I've put way too many hours into this project to let it sit unused!

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