Track your poker sessions automatically (cash and tournaments)
You close your poker client after three hours of play. You roughly know whether you won or lost, but you have already lost track of when the real session started, or whether that 25-minute break in the middle counted as a stop or not. Without structure, every session dissolves into a vague feeling of "played fine" or "played badly."
GrindLab fixes this at the source: every hand you import is automatically attached to a session, cash games and tournaments alike, without you ever clicking "start" or "stop" anything. The point is not just to count your hands, it is to give you a clear unit of work for review, which is where actual improvement happens.
Why a well-cut session changes how you improve
A badly bounded session distorts everything. If you mentally lump three hours of play separated by a lunch break and a nap into a single "session," you mix different states of mind and different fatigue levels, and you lose the ability to isolate what actually caused your mistakes.
On the other hand, if you cut things too finely, one session per table, one per tournament, you lose the bigger picture: you cannot tell whether a tricky hand happened early in your session, when you were fresh, or late, when fatigue had already started eroding your decisions.
The right granularity is actual time played, measured by the gaps between your hands. That is exactly what GrindLab automates, so you spend your time reviewing decisions instead of manually reconstructing the timeline of your evening.
How GrindLab splits your sessions automatically
The rule is simple and deliberately consistent across the whole app: once about 20 minutes pass with no hand played, GrindLab treats the current session as finished, and the next hand opens a new one. This gap is a shared rule, applied consistently whether you play cash games, tournaments, or move between the two.
| Situation | What GrindLab does |
|---|---|
| You play hand after hand with no long break | Everything stays in the same session |
| A 25-minute lunch break | A new session starts when you come back |
| You leave a table for 10 minutes then return | Still the same session (under the gap threshold) |
| You deliberately stop playing | The current session is marked ended once the gap is reached, or immediately if you end it manually |
This split requires no configuration on your part. Once your hands are imported, they land in the right session automatically, which keeps My Hands clean and gives you a sessions list that is directly usable for review instead of a plain chronological feed.
Cash-game episodes: a layer inside the session
Cash games have a quirk: within a single session, you can play several tables, switch between them, or sit down and stand up multiple times. GrindLab applies the same 20-minute gap logic at the table level to split episodes inside the session.
Concretely, a single evening's cash-game session can contain several episodes if you multi-tabled across different stretches or switched tables along the way. This two-level granularity, session then episode, lets you zoom in and out: the session level for your overall result of the evening, the episode level to isolate one specific table that went badly.
Tournaments naturally stay attached to their own timeline since they have an explicit start and end. It is cash-game play that needs this extra layer to stay readable.
Current session: following your play live
While you play, GrindLab shows a current session with a blinking dot as long as you are active. This live session moves through three states:
- Active: you are playing, hands are coming in regularly, the dot blinks.
- Idle: the 20-minute gap has not been reached yet, but no recent hand has arrived. GrindLab waits to see whether you come back before deciding.
- Ended: the session is locked, ready to be reviewed in full.
One detail that matters for how smooth this feels: if you end a session manually instead of waiting for the automatic gap, it materializes immediately. No need to wait 20 minutes to see your final result, playing time, and hand count show up in the list.
Read your session and your curves
The Sessions menu: three views, one place
All this splitting logic would be pointless without a clear place to look at it. GrindLab's Sessions menu offers three views:
- All: your complete session history, cash games and tournaments mixed together, sorted by date.
- Last session: direct access to your most recent session, handy for reviewing right after you finish playing.
- Current session: available only when a session is live, with the real-time tracking described above.
It is the same reflex as opening your poker dashboard for the overview of your progression: sessions give you the level of detail right below that, the exact evening or morning of play.
Build your poker instincts. Practice equity and pot odds decisions in real time
Try it free →Net result: cash games and tournaments on equal footing
A session can mix cash games and tournaments, or contain just one format. Either way, GrindLab shows a consistent net result. For tournaments, that money result is derived at read time from your buy-ins and payouts, which avoids storing a frozen calculation that would go stale if you correct a buy-in afterward.
That means when you open a mixed session (say, two MTTs followed by a cash-game stretch), you see a single net-result figure for the whole thing, without having to add up two different sources yourself. It is the same consistent-reading logic you find on your winnings and EV curves: the format changes, the reading stays unified.
| Format | What makes up the net result | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Cash game | Sum of the winnings/losses of the session's episodes | Session view, and episode view for detail |
| Tournament | Payouts minus buy-ins, derived at read time | Session view |
| Mixed session | Cash plus tournament combined | Session view only |
Merge or unmerge: taking back control of the split
An automatic split is still an estimate. If you took a slightly longer break than usual without mentally leaving your session (an unplanned interruption, a phone call), the algorithm might cut in two what felt to you like a single continuous session. The opposite can also happen: you might want to split a session that GrindLab grouped together but that you consider two separate moments of play.
Either way, you keep control: merge two adjacent sessions into one, or unmerge a session into two if the automatic split does not match how you actually played. It is a one-off adjustment, not a reconfiguration: the 20-minute gap rule still applies by default, you only step in for the edge cases.
Sharing a session
Every session can be shared publicly via a link. That is the practical tool for showing a full evening to a coach, debriefing a friend, or illustrating a specific point of your progression without giving access to your entire history in My Hands. The link points to that exact session: its duration, its hands, its net result.
Turning a session into a review unit, not just a logbook
The classic tracking trap is turning sessions into a simple logbook: a line, a result, and on to the next one without ever coming back to it. A well-cut session only has value if it becomes the starting point of an actual session review.
The routine that actually works: at the end of a finished session, spot the 3 to 5 hands that mattered (the biggest pots, the hands where you hesitated), tag them during or right after the session, then replay them calmly in the Lab. The session gives you the context (how long, how many hands, what result), the tag gives you the entry points, and the Lab gives you the analysis.
This discipline matters as much for losing sessions as for winning ones. A session that ends in the green can hide -EV decisions offset by favorable variance, just as a losing session can reflect perfectly correct decisions that simply ran badly. A session's net result is a signal, not a verdict: it tells you where to look, not what to conclude from it. That is also why it is better to think in terms of bankroll management over dozens of sessions rather than reacting on the spot to a single one.
Conclusion
Automatic splitting into sessions and episodes is not a cosmetic feature: it is the infrastructure that makes review possible without manually reconstructing your timeline. The 20-minute gap gives you a reliable unit of playing time, the current session keeps you informed while you play, and the unified net result between cash and tournament gives you a consistent read regardless of format.
The real lever for improvement is the same as it was before the automation: open a finished session, spot what mattered, and go check the numbers. GrindLab handles the splitting so you can focus on that part.