Hand reading skills.

[DakotaKid]

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.

Interesting idea. If it was allowed, I'd always choose the nuts (or at least second nuts) because I don't think most (non 2+2) players can recognize them enough to guess them everytime and/or it would be -EV to pick anything but the nuts.

Flame away!

[DeeJ]

this sounds like a Sklansky question. I don't know the answer [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Aces McGee]

I actually think this would be counter-productive, because you'd be unwittingly conditioning yourself to always think that your opponents hit the flop hard.

-McGee

[DakotaKid]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that significant effort may be required to shift gears when sitting at a full table of average players. I think I'd only try this exercise against people I consider good players, so in terms of correlation to real games I would primarily find myself in big pots against these particular opponents when we are duking it out with legitimate hands anyway. The play itself in these hands wouldn't change much, we'd just be playing a lot more of them. Do you think there would be more of a shift from this type of game than there would from, say, limit to no-limit or hold'em to Omaha?

[stigmata]

You could probably adapt this idea to a quiz type thing. E.g. take some real life examples and score people according to how well they ranked peoples hands

[Nietzsche]

[ QUOTE ]
this sounds like a Sklansky question. I don't know the answer [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]
I hate Sklansky questions. Do you know why?

I think that you should give hand ranges. Obviously the more made your hand is, the smaller the range would have to be in order to be considered a correct guess.

ie a Jd-7h-2c flop. (ranges listed in rows, categories in sections)
Overs:
AK-AQ

Top Pair:
AJ
KJ-QJ
JT-J8
J6-J3

Two Pair:
J7
J2
72

Set
Gutshot
Backdoor Flush
Pair + Backdoor straight
etc.

I also think that guessing the exact suits should give a bonus if there is no flush draw on the flop or turn, and that guessing suited over non-suited should also incur a bonus.

I think hands can be lumped into categories instead of guess the exact cards, and certain groupings will be played the same way (ie "nut flush" or "non-nut flush" vs. "KTs")

I think it makes more sense to get practice by just playing how you normally do. After each round of betting you try and figure out what everyone has. Remember what you thought and continue on through the hand.

The difference could be made by making everyone show the hand they had at the end. In normal poker alot of the time you will never know their hand to see if you did guess right.