Hand reading skills.
I think this would make an interesting hand reading exercise. May only work well heads up. How about you play a game where you deal a flop, but no hands to people. Then every player selects their hand (and writes it down, I suppose). Betting progresses as normal. At the end of the hand, after betting but before showdown, each player declares what they believe the other to have. If they are correct, the other player folds. Everyone gets a chance to guess, and if all fold, the pot is chopped. If no one guesses correctly, the high hand wins. I wonder if this could be an effective way to hone your betting strategies and hand reading skills. You wouldn't always choose the nuts, since it would be too easy to have that guessed. But you'd want a strong hand anyway. I wonder how this flop would go: 7 6 9 rainbow. Do you choose T8, or maybe 99 or 77, what about pocket aces or kings? Maybe it'd be too hard. Perhaps you could disallow any pocket pair to be declared. Now it's down to straight, two pair, maybe top pair with open-ended draw, or add flushes and flush draws to the mix. I think when deciding your hand, you'd have to write suits down, but to guess a hand you'd only need to guess proper suit if dealing with a flush or straight flush. Maybe worth some fine tuning. Is there any obvious flaw to this I'm missing? I see it as a way to create those very hard decision hands on every hand, forcing you to the top of your game every hand. But if there's some obvious thing I'm missing that would break the game open for someone I'd like to know. Thanks ahead for any input.
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