Share a Hand or a Session While Hiding the Screen Names
You want to post a hand to a forum, ask for a read in a coaching Discord, or attach a spot to a review session. The content (the sizes, the board, the line played) is worth sharing. The screen names aren't: they identify a real person, you included, and needlessly exposing who's playing what adds nothing to the strategy discussion.
GrindLab handles this with one switch. Turn on Hide screen names in the share panel, and the public link masks your hero name along with every villain screen name, wherever that content gets shared: a single hand, a full session, or an analysis built in the Lab.
Why anonymize a hand share
Three situations come up often when you want to show a hand to someone outside your usual review group.
Forums and social feeds. You post a marginal spot for outside opinions. The discussion is about the line, not about who played it. Exposing your name (or the opponent's) ties your table to a public identity, for content that doesn't need one.
Coaching. You send a hand to a coach or a study group. The format is the same as in a complete GrindLab guide: board, actions, sizes, EV verdict. None of that requires the coach to see the opponent's exact screen name, especially if it's a player other group members also run into at the tables.
A public history tied to an account. If you link a profile, a session link, or a hand referenced from a review, you don't necessarily want that link to double as a record of your play patterns at specific times and tables, or of the opponents you cross paths with.
Not leaking your reads on regulars. If you play the same pool often, a public thread breaking down how a specific regular plays a specific spot can travel back to them, or to people who play with them. Masking the villain name lets you discuss the pattern (how a loose-passive defends, how a nitty 3-bettor folds to a 4-bet) without pointing a finger at a name that regular can recognize.
In all four cases, the problem isn't the poker content: it's the identity attached to it.
What the toggle actually masks
The flag is called anonymous internally, and it acts on two categories of names at once:
| Element | Without anonymization | With Hide screen names on |
|---|---|---|
| Your hero name | Shown as-is on the Hero seat | Replaced with a generic label (Hero) |
| Villain screen names | Shown as-is (e.g. villain_92, Regu_FR) | Replaced with Player 1, Player 2, etc. |
| Your identity as the sharer | Nothing, or your profile visible depending on context | Discreet Shared by *** pill |
| Board, actions, bet sizes, cards | Unchanged | Unchanged |
| EV verdict / assigned range (if Lab content) | Unchanged | Unchanged |
The important line: nothing in the analysis itself moves. What changes is only what identifies a person. The board stays the board, the range you set in the Lab stays set, the EV verdict is still computed on the same numbers. Anonymizing a hand doesn't water it down.
Where it happens: server-side, not client-side
One technical point that matters for actual privacy: anonymization doesn't happen in the browser of the person viewing the link. It happens server-side, before the public page is generated at all.
Concretely, when you flip the toggle and share, the anonymous flag is stored with the shared content. Every time the public link is opened, the server rebuilds the table from the stored hand and applies the name masking before sending anything to the browser. The real screen names never make it to the client: they aren't in the final HTML, and they aren't in an API response someone could inspect to dig them out.
That's a meaningful difference from a plain CSS blur or a visual mask that would still leave the raw data reachable by poking around the page. Here, once the toggle is on, the real names simply don't leave your database.
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Try it free →The Shared by *** pill
Beyond masking hero and villains, anonymous mode adds a small ghost pill to the public page: Shared by ***. It replaces the usual display of who shared the content, without leaving a suspicious blank or a display glitch. Anyone who opens the link immediately understands the content is shared anonymously, without having to guess why the names are generic.
It's a small detail, but it avoids a common confusion with anonymized shares elsewhere: you never know if the anonymization is intentional or a display bug. With the pill, the intent is explicit.
The toggle, section by section
The control lives in the share panel, under the Share section, next to the public link you copy. The label is Hide screen names, no technical jargon: you flip it, you watch the link's state change, you copy it.
The same control shows up in three contexts:
- A single hand, shared from My Hands after a session or a one-off review.
- A full session, when you share the whole arc of a session rather than a single spot. Useful if you want to show table dynamics across several hands, for example to illustrate how your read adjusted over a session (see how to review your poker sessions for the logic behind session-level review).
- A Lab analysis, with an assigned range, filters applied, and an EV verdict. That's the most common format in coaching: the full spot, anonymized if needed.
You don't have to remember three different settings. It's the same flag, in the same place, everywhere GrindLab content turns into a public link.
Anonymizing without losing track of the opponent
A fair worry: if villain screen names become Player 1 / Player 2, do you lose consistency from one hand to the next? No, within a single share the attribution stays stable: the player who was in BTN stays Player 1 from start to finish across the shared hand or session, there's no mixing between seats. What disappears is only the link to the real identity, not the structure of the table.
If you also use the villain tracker to read an opponent's VPIP/PFR/3-Bet stats next to their seat during your own review, this isn't affected: anonymization only touches what goes out through a public link, not your private view of your own hands, where you keep seeing the real screen names and tracking your opponents normally.
Web and desktop, same behavior
Whether you share from the web replayer or from the desktop tracker, the anonymous share control behaves identically: same anonymous flag, same Hide screen names toggle, same Shared by *** pill. If you spend your session importing hands on the desktop tracker (see how to import your hands into GrindLab for the import mechanics) and then share a snippet from the web later, you get the exact same setting, with no surprise behavior change between platforms.
A simple habit before you post
Here's how it plays out in practice, compared to sharing without thinking about anonymity:
| Situation | Without thinking about it | With Hide screen names |
|---|---|---|
| Posting a marginal spot to a forum | Your name and the opponent's are publicly visible | Seats anonymized, discussion focused on the decision |
| Sending a hand to a coach | The coach sees the opponent's exact identity | The coach sees the line played, not who played it |
| Sharing a full session in a group review | Potentially identifying session history | Session dynamics readable, identities masked |
| Publishing a Lab analysis with an EV verdict | Range and verdict visible, with real names | Range and verdict visible, generic names |
In all four cases, the value of the share (the strategic content) stays intact. What changes is only what didn't need to be there.
Conclusion
Sharing a hand shouldn't force a choice between keeping the analysis to yourself or exposing screen names, yours and the opponents'. With Hide screen names, GrindLab separates the two: the strategic content (board, actions, EV verdict) stays whole, and the identification (hero, villains, the sharer) becomes optional, masked server-side before the link exists for anyone else.
The toggle lives in the same place, under the Share section, on a hand, a session, or a Lab analysis, on web and desktop alike. One habit worth building: before you copy a share link, check the toggle's state. It costs nothing to flip, and it saves you from patching over identities you'd rather have kept private after the fact.
Head into My Hands, pick a hand you wanted to post or show a coach, and try the anonymous share. The public link you get tells the same hand, just without the names.