  This paper introduces the Poker Hand History (PHH) file format, designed to
standardize the recording of poker hands across different game variants.
Despite poker's widespread popularity in the mainstream culture as a mind sport
and its prominence in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research as a
benchmark for imperfect information AI agents, it lacks a consistent format
that humans can use to document poker hands across different variants that can
also easily be parsed by machines. To address this gap in the literature, we
propose the PHH format which provides a concise human-readable machine-friendly
representation of hand history that comprehensively captures various details of
the hand, ranging from initial game parameters and actions to contextual
parameters including but not limited to the venue, players, and time control
information. In the supplementary, we provide 10,088 hands covering 11
different variants in the PHH format. The full specification is available on
https://github.com/uoftcprg/phh-std
