All of the hydraulic spool valves adopt radially grooved spools to avoid hydraulic locking. In this paper, a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT is used to investigate the accurate Poiseuille flow characteristics inside single groove. The stream lines, velocity and pressure distributions are obtained for various groove widths, depths and shapes. The stream lines are highly affected by groove shape and there occurred large vortexes inside groove beyond a certain ratio of groove width to depth. Especially the U shaped groove restrains the occurrence of vortex. Therefore the numerical method adopted in this paper can be use in optimum designing of multi-grooved hydraulic spool valves.