The Cribbage Praxis

The astute parent, and player of cribbage, knows that the perfect time to introduce the game to his children is about the age of seven or eight, when they begin demonstrating an ability to do basic arithmetic in their heads. That this game is best taught as the child reaches the age of reason is not, in this writer’s opinion, coincidence, given the multi-dimensional nature of the game’s lessons.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, perhaps a brief examination of the game is worthwhile:

Cribbage was developed about three and a half hundred years ago in England and made its way into the colonies as a variation of a previous game. This previous game is of absolutely no importance. Today, cribbage remains a mildly popular card game played frequently by Naval crews and by submariners in particular. How it became a Navy game, I actually don’t know, but given the background of my mother’s family, we ended up with it as something of a traditional household game for that reason.

Like any card game, there’s a lot in cribbage that comes down to chance. This includes what cards you’re dealt in the first place, obviously, but—like many other games—the card revealed on top of the stack also plays a significant role in scoring. In this sense, cribbage doesn’t seem that much different from most other games of cards. Its most distinctive feature is what sets it apart: it has a pegboard for keeping track of your score. And the dealer gets two hands.

At the heart of cribbage, however, is not a simple game of chance. There’s more to it than that. At the heart of cribbage lay a microcosm of what seems to be the mystery of Being—particularly the relationship between providence and the individual will. The game is structured so as to have more or less equal parts of chance, strategy, and tactic: equally do the factors beyond your control, those of the cards dealt and the cards played against you by your opponent, impact the factors that you can control. In a more perfect way than do most other card games, cribbage encapsulates the idea of “do the best you can with the hand you’re dealt.”

Rules of the Game

In order to better explain this, reviewing the rules and the play of an average hand is in order.

The goal of cribbage is to be the first to score 61 or 121 points. The end point is usually decided on beforehand, but informal playing relaxes this a little. Traditional cribbage boards are made such that there are two sets of two rows of thirty holes. These are called streets. A normal game of two players involves advancing their pegs, exclusively, up one street and back the other. This tallies out sixty points. The question is whether to go up and back once—usually considered a half-game—or twice. Newer boards have taken greater liberties with hole design, but a relatively common one today is the spiral pattern. These are almost always 121 hole boards, but they’re easier to play on, since accidentally screwing up your score by advancing your peg in the wrong direction is impossible. On traditional boards, this is easier to do than most players want to admit—and everyone’s done it at least once.

A dealer is selected. The dealer shuffles the cards and deals out six cards to both players. In games with three or four players, fewer cards are dealt, but we can look at that later. The first part of the game consists in the players deciding to remove two cards from their own hands in order to create what’s called a crib, which is a second hand that the dealer gets to score at the end of the round. Sounds unbalanced, but we’ll look at that in a bit.

To explain fully what’s going on here, we have to remember a few numbers. Fifteen and thirty-one are of primary interest; cards whose values add up to fifteen score two points. An eight matched with a seven, for instance, or a four, five, and six matched to each other—any combination of cards that add up to fifteen earn two points. Face cards count as ten. Aces are always low. So if you have a sequence of four cards numbered eight, seven, seven, four, there are two fifteens that can be scored: one seven each matched with the eight. Counting ‘fifteens’ alone, such a sequence has four points.

Cribbage also scores pairs (worth two points a pair), flushes in the hand (one point per card, for a minimum of four), and sequences (one point per card, for a minimum of three). These rules stack. Three-of-a-kind is worth six, because you have three pairs to score. Four-of-a-kind is twelve according to the same logic. A flush can add up to five points if the stack card matches the suit in your hand. A run of four cards in the hand that also happen to share the same suit is automatically at least eight points: four for the run and four for the flush. Double runs, in which one card in a run of three is repeated—such as three-four-four-five—are automatically at least eight points: three each for the two runs of three, and an additional two for the pair. Triple runs and quadruple runs are scored according to the same principle. The scorings of ‘fifteens’ can be considered a layer of scoring on top of this simple yet thorough system.

To return to the action: when the players are deciding the crib, this scoring system is usually what’s foremost on their minds. Each player is deciding which of their six cards will constitute their own hand, which gets scored momentarily. By splitting two cards out of the six, they’re deciding which to score now, and if it is the dealer’s hand, which to store away for later in his crib—the other player is deciding which to give away. You can see, hopefully, what sort of strategy might be employed here; already the players have to presume information they don’t have access to (the opponent’s hand composition), contextualize it with information they do have (their own hand), and decide what to give the opponent that will maximize his own position while weakening the opponent’s. Their choices mostly come down to trying to streamline their own hand for two purposes: basic scoring and, as we will get to in a minute, the play.

The crib has been decided once both players have taken two of their own cards and placed them, face down, in the same pile. This pile will not be touched again until the end of the round. After the crib is decided, the non-dealer player cuts the deck and the dealer reveals the card on top. For brevity, we’ll refer to this as the stack card. This is the last act that ‘random chance’ has on the round. So ends the first stage.

Second stage of the round is called the play. Here, the non-dealer player begins by producing a card from his hand. The numerical value of the card is the only part here that’s important. The dealer responds by playing one of his own, adding to the number on the table. This continues until the value on the table reaches thirty-one, or to such point that no card can be played which won’t exceed thirty-one. During this stage of the game, if a card can be played, it must be. The last player able to play a card before hitting thirty one racks a point—if he hits thirty-one exactly, he scores two.

During the play, opportunities to score are numerous. Nailing the value 15 scores the player two points. Pairing the last immediately-played card racks two points. Three of a kind, played against one another in a row, racks six. Sequences, played in order and without deviation, rack points according the number of cards in the sequence. The scoring of the play mimics the scoring of the hand, though there are cases where house rules may apply.

The play stage introduces a tactical element that effectively combines the scoring of the individual hands. In a certain sense, there’s an obvious combativeness to it, as you try to open or respond to cards with ones that will prohibit certain responses. This is, of course, as you try to score as much as you can off of the opponent. In another sense, however, the conflict presented on this level can be taken as a cooperation on a higher level, in which the combined opportunities present in the players hands turn from exclusive to inclusive. However, the means of interaction requires the actuation of these opportunities to come about in sometimes unpredictable ways. This cannot said to be random, as obviously, the play is an attempt by both players, with limited information, to use tactics in order to rack the best number of points possible while blocking their opponent from doing the same.

The third stage begins upon the play having exhausted all eight cards on hand (those four in each of the players’ hands). Remember, the crib is untouched; it has nothing to do with the second or third stages of play. This third stage, however, is perhaps the simplest. Everything that was set up in the first stage is played in the second and then laid bare in the third.

Each player’s hand can use the stack card, which effectively turns their hands of four cards into hands of five; the stack card is obviously shared between the two players. This greatly increases the opportunity for good scores during the third stage of the round. This one card is frequently the difference between a low or decent hand (4-8 points) and a good hand (12-16). Whatever the stack card turns out to be cannot make a hand worse, although it’s not terribly uncommon for it to offer little in the way of improvement.

The non-dealer player scores their hand first. This can be one of the few natural advantages that non-dealers have, as it can result in pegging out before the dealer if the match is at all close. After he’s scored, the dealer scores his hand. In games of cut-throat, a slight variation of cribbage, players who miss points during the score can have their opponent take their points without elaboration.

The conclusion of the round is after the fourth stage ends, which is when the dealer scores his crib. This is done in the same way as he scored his main hand during stage three.

General Gameplay

There are several dimensions to consider when playing cribbage, even though actually playing the game only consists of the first two stages. The most basic, obvious dimension is how to deal with scoring your hand, which comes up in the first stage of the game. Stages two and three decide how to play stage one; after stage two, it’s just a matter of putting all the cards on the table.

When beginning to teach new players, deciding how to score the hand itself is usually given he most emphasis for stage one. While this obviously doesn’t go away for experienced players, the importance of stage three changes as one’s understanding of stage two deepens. At first, stage two’s play seems little more than an attempt to make work the items at your disposal—namely, the four cards you decided to keep from stage one, and which you probably decided on based on how they’d score in stage three.

Experience, however, will tell you that in relatively common circumstances, prioritizing certain kinds of cards specifically for use in the play of stage two can yield worthwhile early advantages. Likewise, making certain sorts of plays during stage two can also be beneficial at different parts of the round; riskier plays, for instance, tend to work better later in the game, depending on the point spread of the players and how close one is to pegging out. This is true also of deciding on riskier hands with the expectation of a good stack card.

There are some informal guidelines you learn when you play enough hands. One of them I picked up along the way is, “never split up a flush.” There are some situational exceptions to this rule, of course, tempered by how close victory or loss is, or how good a player the other person is. Generally speaking, however, flushes can introduce an element of randomness that can turn an automatic four-point hand into double or triple that based on the stack card; the usual randomness of a flush’s value spread can also benefit greatly during stage two.

Keeping sequences of three (or four) together is another one, although this is not quite as hard and fast. This depends more on making a gamble of what the stack card is going to be; hands with a sequence in them tend to be improved by the stack card much easier than those without; after all, a duplicate of any card in the sequence immediately gives you a double run (eight points instead of three, or ten instead of four). The opportunities for a stack card to make combinations of fifteen are also reasonably good.

There are two components to consider when splitting the hand in stage one. You’re mostly trying to prepare yourself for whatever the stack card is going to be, as the scoring of stage three grants the most points, but you’re also trying to anticipate what will play well in stage two. With regards to the former, any hand involving pairs, or sequences will usually do well, particularly if they involve a five of any suit. As all face cards carry a value of ten, there’s a much higher likelihood of having a ten as the stack card. That said, fives tend not to be great picks in stage two, because it’s rare for someone to play a ten right out of the gate, and being mid-valued cards, you don’t always get the opportunity to play it as a pair.

Relevant Praxis

Games image life, at least in some rudimentary way. We enjoy games, particularly board games and card games, not simply because they’re exciting, competitive, and a stimulating way to pass the time; they are these things because they condense some aspect of life into an easily communicable, easily comprehensible set of controlled rules. Following the rules teaches you a strategy, mastering the game’s strategy teaches you the relevant tactics, mastering the tactics teaches you the game; in mastering the game, you participate in a summarized version of being.

Some games encapsulate this in greater detail than others. Poker, for instance, is a highly rudimentary card game. The rules are open to handling many variations because they’re so simple. But poker is also first and foremost a game of gambling, which is an entire game unto itself and layered on top of the general rule set of poker. Board games like chess, to use an extreme counter-example, encompass rigidly-defined rules and offer highly complex game play. Both examples image some aspect of being, with poker emphasizing a tactical element that relies on chance, and chess emphasizing multidimensional aspects of strategy and tactics both.

What makes games fun is how well they allow the expression of individual will. Some will introduce an element of randomness, which we can recognize as mechanic that images a certain element of providence—those elements of life that we have no control over. The base structure of the game incorporates this providential aspect in order for a sense of the community’s general will to come through in the play itself: the interaction of two individual wills in combat, yet working together in tandem to the completion of the game.

Although it’s not completely unique in this regard, cribbage best represents the interaction of all three of these different wills: providence, the individual’s, and the community’s. It’s a game best taught to kids as they reach the age of reason on this very point. Not only does the child learn to grasp basic arithmetic, they unknowingly begin to incorporate into their reasoning some basic truths of life: you quite literally have to play the hand you’re dealt the best way that you can, even when the information available is incomplete, and even when the hand you’re dealt isn’t the best. But, as experience will show, it’s very rare to have completely worthless hands—just as it is to have perfect ones. And it is not uncommon for the providential revealing of the stack card, or the serendipitous events of stage two’s play, to turn an otherwise mundane hand into a spectacular one.

In learning to play cribbage, you learn that skill is something that can be learned through experience, and that it is an asset to offset what can seem like the randomness of life’s unpredictable situations. Some parts in life, like some parts in cribbage, can very easily be predicted. Other parts can’t. Some parts of life are the result of human wills interacting with each other in very obvious ways. Some aren’t. There remains, however, a providential aspect beneath all of it, and a good cribbage player, like a man who has trained his virtue, understands, at least on a rudimentary level, that cooperation with providence is necessary to win the game.