Best-Hand ( poker )


A cheating technique, necessarily involving signals, in which only the best hand among two or more partners is played in any one pot, thereby saving the others money when that hand is beat, and reducing the difficulties of figuring out who gets how much at split time. For example, Slim and Shorty are playing best-hand in a lowball game.
Slim is under the gun with a pat 7-6-3-2-A, and is about to open, when he sees Shorty signaling that he has a pat 6-5-4-3-2. Slim very carefully discards his hand. (He does not throw the cards wildly into the discards; they might bounce and accidentally turn over.
Slim would have a difficult time explaining to the other players why he wasn't even opening the pot with such a good hand). Shorty plays the hand, and likely wins it. If he loses, however, he doesn't cause Slim also to lose money to the holder
of the winning hand, thereby saving the cheating team half of what they would have lost. Best-hand is one of the most difficult scams to detect,
because the players are not raising for each other, nor are they performing any physical manipulations upon the cards. Even with careful observation, best-hand could easily be confused with the legitimate situation of players staying out of each other's way.