Yeah it's present since a very long time.
And good players were skipping regularly a while ago. If someone which never skip said they are good, they are just wrong.
If a player play without thinking when you skip, it just send wrong information to another player which have not way to know if the clue was a bluff or was a direct clue. (or you remove some bluffs which is either bad and/or extra complicated)
In a game of Hanabi you generally:
a) start at 8 clues, got plenty of clue to clue and save cards
b) then have a few clues left, and need to pay attention on when to use them
c) then have no clue left, and need to lose the least amount of useful cards possibles
d) then start to have some clues left, and at that point losing any useful card is usually bad
e) and if the game was in a great shape, finish by having a lot of clues left
In a/b/c, you usually want to be effecient, discard cards to let others be able to finesse/bluff cards.
In d/e, you want to not lose any useful card and manage the last turn. Doing some bluffs and finesses to be effecient is few useful because you will have lots of clues, and don't care much anymore about effeciency. And so stealing finesse's position shouldn't be a big deal, it's just a small upside to let a finesse/bluff happen[unless if the bluff can touch a useful non critical so non clueable card, then the bluff have more value]. That mean:
- you need to look for useful non critical cards you could have in your chop. If you find none, or assume from context it's unlikely (others players stealed your clue), then you can discard without much downsides
- you need to look for the hardest color to finish. Per example if a r3 has been discarded and if it's the only 2/3/4 missing, it's likely red will be the last suit played. So the player holding r5 really want to not draw both copies of r4. And someone holding r4 know that will be the card they will likely play during the last turn (depending of the time and clues remeaning, that could mean they don't want to draw a 5 neither).
- you need to look for player which got too many cards to play. If there is none, there is more cards to play between unknown cards, and so it's more likely you got more cards to play, and you should not discard and steal absolutely any clue. It's easier to see if you got two or more 5, then it's possible you have 3 cards to play in your hand, and you should try to steal a lot more (even rarely in early game and sometimes in mid game, if you see a clue anyone can give, you should put value on trying to clue it yourself). And if another player got lots of cards to play but none to play immediately, you should try to let him have a clue to do every single turn.
In end game, going from 2 to 1 card in the deck is the most important timing of the game if you got lots of clues to spare. To take back my example of r3 before, if r3 is still missing, you want for a player between r5 and r4 to discard/play to have a 50% chance to draw that r3, and then give clue until at least the turn of the player who hold r5. Having more players be able to draw r3 is often decided on how much effecient/how much you steal in good cases in mid game.
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In mid game, you can start to think of the opposite. Your previous player instead of clueing your next player a card not in finesse's position, decided to discard. That show to you that your chop card/your hand should be useful. So firstly obviously you start by clueing that or something else, and after that, since you got a sign your chop seem useful, you try to not discard anymore. In rare cases, if the whole board of everyone is trash, and you got lots of clues, that mean to clue trash cards to others even with few/no upside for that
[it conflict with trash push/trash pull so is illegal with hgroup, but legal with bga, and since it's likely you got a useful card in chop, it's few confusing]. Losing a useful 2 can be gamechanging.
To end on that, if a player steal a clue, it said to everyone between themselves and the clued's player, either if it's in early/mid game that they can discard safely, or either if it's in late game they think they could be holding/they hold more useful cards than them (to simplify: the player who gave the clue said to them they can usually discard twice/thrice).
Once there was ~2/3 steals done per differents players, now everyone know they don't hold any useful cards, and everyone can safely discard multiple times. (on those cases usually players will clue the player right before them, and now everyone can fully start preparing the last turn)
