How to use Universal Replayer

Once you've installed Universal Replayer, it will automatically open with a blank screen.

Configuring Universal Replayer

Go to View>Change Skin. Universal Replayer allows you to 'skin' the software to more resemble your poker client. Currently supported are Betfair, Full Tilt, Party Poker, PokerStars and Winamax. Plus there's a rather slick graphite colored one from the guys at Tiltbuster (table mods etc.)

Now go to Options>Settings. There's two tabs here. The 'auto play' tab allows you to set the time befor each stage of action in that hand happens. You can either stick with the presets or amend as you see fit. Now click on the 'rounds' tab. This relates to the bit of the screen at the bottom. What it does is gives you a quick view about where you made (green) and lost (red) chips. If you want to amend how it color-codes, here's where to do it (I've never felt the need personally).

Let's get scanning

OK so now that's done, let's tell Universal Replayer where your hand histories are.Go to Scans>Scanned folders>Browse (choose the correct poker room on the list first). Then navigate to the folder where they're stored (e.g. Full Tilt is Program Files>Full Tilt Poker>HandHistory>[playername]

TIP: Remember if you're using Holdem Manager or other software that archives and moves your hand histories, you'll need to 'point' Replayer in the direction of the main folder for it. 

Now it knows where to look for your hand histories, so click Scan>Scan.

The first time you run this it could take a while as it's scanning all of those hand histories in there. Use this time to make a coffee, sing a song, or laugh at Hellmuth's reaction to his AA being cracked.

Open them up

Now Universal Replayer has scanned them all, go to File>Open>Imported

Now you can either go to File>Open>Scanned and open a Hand History. Or you could just go to the folder in Windows Explorer and drag and drop a HH file in to Replayer.

Controls

UR is a really simple, well designed piece of software. Think of it as kind of like a video player. You've got play, fast forward, rewind etc (towards the bottom of the window), and you can even change the playback speed (to the right of the main controls). Below that you'll see  a series of small bars. Most of these are green, the rest will be shades of red and green. The green ones are where you gained chips, the pink/red where you lost them. Dark red indicates you lost a significant amount, dark green the opposite.

So you can just click on each bar to skip forwards to that hand rather than going through every hand.

Graphs

If you click on the 'graphs' tab you'll see (funnily enough) a graph of your chipstack during that game.

Summary

That's pretty much it, you can export a hand to a particular format (e.g. HTML or the Flop Turn River forum). Universal Replayer is a handy tool for evaluating your own sit n go games and will probably be something your SNG coach will use with you too. It pays to get in the habit of using this as well as Sit n Go Wiz frequently, to evaluate your own SNG skills.