I certainly felt as if I were sitting at that table. It threw my game off.
My group of regulars ask to see losing hands at the river, and if someone declines that their right, we let it go, but we encourage you to show in case you’ve misread your hand. For newbies sitting in, it’s helpful and keeps the game friendly.
Before we settled on Texas Hold’Em we used to play “dealer’s choice”, each player got to choose the game when they were dealing. I learned how to play stud games like Showdown and Omaha and pot games like Third Street and Guts. (My personal favorites were Guts and Three-Card Lowball.) But the majority of us usually balked at playing stud games like Follow the Queen or Baseball since there’s no skill involved and it’s just luck.
Sounds to me like this group of people you played with have only ever played poker amongst each other, and never been in a “real” game.
Because reaching across the table to turn over another player’s folded hand while that hand is still being played is a serious violation in a real game. You could get shot over that, and I’m certain a jury of poker players would be loathe to convict.
There’s a difference between a count of points and a poker hand, though. Every point value includes every lesser point value, but not every poker hand includes every lesser hand. What happens if you have one winning hand, but declare a different winning hand, for instance?
We all know what happens, the real hand is what winning is based on, but that’s not the discussion. You said before that “the cards speak” is “so fundamental that the game doesn’t even exist without it” All I was saying is you could certainly play poker with a rule that said if you underclaim your hand, then your stuck with that. The game could exist without “the cards speak” rule.