We get a lot of who wins this hand questions and they typically get closed as duplicates.
A new user answered one and someone commented we usually just close them as duplicates. I wanted to provide a meta link to the user that provided an anser but there was none.
What is the proper procedure for who wins this hand?
My two cents
I think the who wins this hand questions should be closed but I am OK if someone chooses to answer.
My other two cents is if you are going to answer then clean up the question with picture cards.
We have a standard page to refer hand reading questions. You can always add to it with outside links etc. It could use some and expansion on hand reading to make it more comprehensive. As of this writing that particular page has massive views over 50K. Which I think is about 45K more then any other question here.
Most people whom come here looking to ask a question like do pairs break ties with a flush, go read that page finding what they need to know. A few of the others just cant find the page or can't grasp what the five card rule is. So they post.
There is nothing wrong with answering the question, either as a comment or an answer. I do, and I try to be polite then refer them to the page. That's all good. Then I vote to close.
These questions and answers only lower the quality of the site and should really be closed. I think the majority of the people posting these questions are just being to lazy to do the little research needed to be done to figure out how to read a poker hand. These questions are as off topic here as "could someone explain how a mouse works" would be in super user, and as boring to answer. Hand reading is basic stuff that does not require anything like an expert in poker to answer. It is simple elementary stuff. It will be figured out quickly by even the totally clueless within a few hours of playing poker.
I don't see any problem with allowing these kinds of questions and letting people answer them, provided the question and answer(s) are written (or edited) to the standard expected. Remember that it's been stated before by Jeff and others running SE that a certain level of duplication is good - we often want to see a few different "flavours" of the same question to help people searching for answers to similar questions they might have.
I would also suggest that as one of the problems we have on this site is low engagement and volume of questions, this could be helped by allowing these technically duplicate questions to be answered specifically, as this would encourage the question asker to post more (hopefully more interesting and useful) questions, rather than giving them a negative experience on what is often their first contact with Poker.SE.
If we are going to close questions like this as duplicates (or define them as off-topic), we need a standard place to reference the question asker to, whether this be another question on Poker itself, or here on meta. That place to which we direct people asking "who won this hand" type questions needs to provide that person with sufficient information to be able to answer their own question.
Initially, perhaps this is just a Wikipedia page or something similar which explains how poker hands are compared at showdown, then if users are still unclear as to who should have won the hand, they can ask a more specific question, referencing the material they were directed to, all of which will help satisfy the "shows some research effort" criteria for good questions.
Over time, perhaps we can build a CW answer to a question which deals comprehensively and clearly with all necessary variables that affect who wins a hand, then we can close questions as dupes of that, or flag for closure as low quality (i.e. they haven't read the resource which is already available).
