Cribbage Scoring: Fifteens, Runs, Nobs and the 29 Hand
Here is a cribbage hand worth seventeen points, and almost everyone who's new to the game counts it as nine. You hold the 5 of hearts, the 4 of spades, the 6 of diamonds and the Jack of clubs, and the cut turns up the 5 of clubs. Watch what happens when you count it properly. The 4-5-6 makes fifteen, and it makes fifteen twice, once with each 5, for four points. The Jack and a 5 make fifteen, and again there are two 5s to pair it with, so that's four more. The two 5s are a pair, two points. The 4-5-6 run counts twice as well, once through each 5, six points. And because your Jack matches the suit of the starter card, it earns one more, a point with the wonderful name of his nobs. Seventeen. The hand didn't change; the counting did.
That gap between what a hand contains and what a beginner sees in it is the whole learning curve of cribbage. The rules of play take five minutes. The scoring takes an evening, and it rewards you for the rest of your card-playing life, because our cribbage game counts everything for you, and the fastest way to improve is to understand what the computer just counted and why.
The full price list
Every scoring combination in the show, which is the count at the end of a round, uses your four cards plus the starter as one five-card pool.
- Fifteens: two points each. Every distinct combination of cards totalling exactly fifteen counts separately. Face cards count ten, aces count one. A hand of 7-8-8 hides two fifteens, not one, because each 8 forms its own.
- Pairs: two points. Three of a kind is six points, because it contains three distinct pairs. Four of a kind is twelve, six pairs. Nothing is capped; the arithmetic just follows the combinations.
- Runs: one point per card. Three or more consecutive ranks, suits irrelevant. A run counts once for every way you can build it, so 4-4-5-6 scores two three-card runs plus the pair, eight points in all before you even look for fifteens.
- Flush: four or five points. All four hand cards in one suit score four, five if the starter matches too. The crib is stricter: it only scores a flush when all five cards, starter included, share a suit.
- His nobs: one point. The Jack in your hand matching the starter's suit, as in the opening example.
- His heels: two points. If the starter card itself is a Jack, the dealer pegs two immediately. Same Jack, different job, different name; cribbage is over three hundred and fifty years old and its vocabulary shows it.
Stack those rules and you get the famous ceiling: the best possible hand is three 5s and a Jack, with the fourth 5, matching the Jack's suit, as the starter. Four ways to pick three 5s that total fifteen, four Jack-and-5 fifteens, twelve for four of a kind, one for nobs. Twenty-nine points, and most people who play weekly go years without holding it.
Pegging is a separate wallet
Before the show comes the play, and it scores from its own price list. Cards go down alternately with a running total that must never pass thirty-one. Landing the total exactly on fifteen pegs two. Exactly thirty-one, two. Matching the previous card makes a pair for two, a third matching card six, a fourth twelve. Completing a run of three or more in the play, in any order over the recent cards, scores the run's length. When your opponent can't play without busting the limit they say go, and you peg one, or two if you then land exactly on thirty-one. The last card of the round pegs one.
Two practical habits follow. Leading a 5 is nearly always a gift, since any face card answers it for fifteen. And holding on to cards that give you answers, a spare pair card, a run extender, matters more than dumping high cards early. If you enjoy this kind of short-horizon arithmetic duel, Gin Rummy scratches a similar itch with a different deck of decisions.
The crib, and choosing what to throw
Each round both sides discard two of their six cards into the crib, a third hand that scores for whoever dealt. That one rule creates cribbage's central dilemma: when it's your crib, you can salt it with a pair or a 5; when it's your opponent's, every discard is a small act of damage control. Throwing a 5 into an enemy crib is the classic beginner leak, since 5s combine with the deck's sixteen ten-value cards more readily than anything else. Keep your hand's structure, feed the crib rubble, and accept that the dealer's extra hand is why the deal alternates.
Why the counting order can decide the game
One detail looks ceremonial and isn't. At the show, the non-dealer counts first, then the dealer's hand, then the crib. In a race to 121 that order is the tiebreaker: if both sides have enough points on the table to finish, the non-dealer simply gets there first. Endgames turn on it, and strong players steer toward being the counting side when the finish line is close. Our implementation walks the count in exactly this order, which is worth watching once you're pegging past the nineties.
Scoring is the deep half of cribbage, but it isn't the whole of it; the same five cards can be a good hand or a bad one depending on what you kept, what you fed the crib, and what the pegging cost you on the way. If you want the fundamentals from the top, the rules live on the game page itself, and the wider family of tricks, tempo and table sense is all over our card room, from the shedding races of President to the trick counting of Spades. Cribbage just happens to be the one where the arithmetic is the game.