New Variant of No Limit Hold 'Em?

Ok, hear me out. What if there was a version of NLH where you could have the option of trading 1 or 2 cards in the deck for the price of a small or big blind respectively? Here's a rough outline of how this would work:

(1) Everyone on the table is dealt 2 cards. The dealer then removes the top 8 cards which are reserved for the burn, flop, turn, and river cards. The remaining 26 cards are used for exchanging cards. Small and big blind ante are still the same.

(2) UTG is still first to act and has the following options: (a) Fold, (b) Bet, (c) Raise (if there was a previous bet), OR (d) Pay one small or big blind into the pot in exchange for 1 or 2 cards respectively. If the player decides on taking option (d), they will still be faced with the decision to take (a), (b), or (c) after seeing their new-ish hand.

(3) Once everyone has made their decision, the dealer then shuffles the deck with exchange cards, and then puts out a flop with the cards that were set aside from earlier. Here, step (2) is repeated where they have the options (a) through (d) once again.

(4) After the round of betting, exchanging, and folding is complete, a turn is shown on the board. From here on out, the game is played exactly as if it was a normal NLH game.

As you can see, it's very much inspired by draw poker, but instead of getting to exchange cards for free, you pay a certain price which goes directly to the pot. So imagine if everyone decided to exchange both of their cards before the flop. The pot would go quickly from 2.5 BB (2 big blinds plus 1 small blind) to 11.5 BB just from the card exchanges alone. Once you add in raises, 3-bets, and all-ins, it can quickly get out of control!

Intuitively, I would expect more players to see a flop. It's also interesting to start thinking about what ranges your opponents might have depending on the number of exchanges they had performed and what their betting patterns are post-flop. Note that the more exchanges that are done pre-flop, the deck will likely have worse cards than before. You might also want to come up with a modified pre-flop chart where you definitely want to make an exchange. For example, most of the time when you're UTG, you'll fold A2o. However, in this situation, you would definitely want to exchange the 2 for another card in the deck with the hopes that you get Aces. Even with a small improvement, you might be compelled to open or even raise to indicate to the everyone else that you now have a made hand. Bet sizing now becomes more dynamic as the action goes around the table. There's also more opportunities to bluff as well since everyone's ranges are understandably wider.

Some candidates for what I would call this:

• Swap & Stop
• Pomegranate
• Utah Throw Me
• Kimchi Fried Rice

Can you come up with something better?