Cribbage strategy: the discard and the play
Good cribbage is two decisions made well: which two cards you throw to the crib, and which card you play at each count. The discard is the bigger one — the gap between a good and bad throw is often more than a whole hand of pegging. The table below gives the exact average crib value of every possible two-card throw, computed by enumerating all 58,800 ways each throw can meet two opponent cards and a starter — the same arithmetic the opponent in our game uses.
The discard: throw to the crib like it matters
Keep the four cards that score with the starter, but always price the two you throw. To your own crib, 5s and touching cards are gifts to yourself. To your opponent’s crib, the safest throws are wide, unconnected cards — king with anything far from it — and the most expensive mistake in casual play is tossing a 5 because it "wasn’t doing anything".
- A pair of 5s is the best possible crib throw (8.99 points on average) and the worst possible gift. Never throw 5s to your opponent unless the hand you keep is overwhelming.
- The best cheap throws to an opponent’s crib average around 3.4–3.6: 10-K, 9-K, 8-K, 6-K — high, wide, and unconnected.
- 2-3 (6.84) and 7-8 (6.77) are quietly excellent throws to your own crib: they make fifteens with the ten-cards that fill every deck.
- When the values are close, keep the hand that pegs: low cards and touching cards give you plays at every count.
| Throw | A | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | J | Q | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 5.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 5.5 | 5.7 | 4.3 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 3.8 |
| 2 | 4.4 | 5.8 | 6.8 | 4.9 | 5.8 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.3 | 4.0 | 3.9 |
| 3 | 4.6 | 6.8 | 6.2 | 5.5 | 6.4 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.4 | 4.0 | 3.9 |
| 4 | 5.5 | 4.9 | 5.5 | 6.1 | 7.0 | 5.0 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.4 | 4.0 | 3.9 |
| 5 | 5.7 | 5.8 | 6.4 | 7.0 | 9.0 | 7.1 | 6.4 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 7.0 | 7.3 | 6.9 | 6.8 |
| 6 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 5.0 | 7.1 | 6.3 | 5.5 | 4.9 | 5.6 | 3.8 | 4.1 | 3.7 | 3.6 |
| 7 | 4.1 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.2 | 6.4 | 5.5 | 6.1 | 6.8 | 4.4 | 3.7 | 4.0 | 3.7 | 3.6 |
| 8 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 5.8 | 4.9 | 6.8 | 5.6 | 4.9 | 4.3 | 3.9 | 3.7 | 3.6 |
| 9 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 4.4 | 4.9 | 5.5 | 4.9 | 4.5 | 3.6 | 3.5 |
| 10 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 7.0 | 3.8 | 3.7 | 4.3 | 4.9 | 5.5 | 5.0 | 4.1 | 3.4 |
| J | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 7.3 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 3.9 | 4.5 | 5.0 | 5.9 | 5.0 | 4.3 |
| Q | 3.9 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 6.9 | 3.7 | 3.7 | 3.7 | 3.6 | 4.1 | 5.0 | 5.2 | 4.0 |
| K | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 6.8 | 3.6 | 3.6 | 3.6 | 3.5 | 3.4 | 4.3 | 4.0 | 5.0 |
The magic eleven
Sixteen of the 46 cards you cannot see are worth ten. Keeping cards that total 11 — like 4-7, 5-6, or A-4-6 — means that whenever your opponent leads or answers with a ten-card, you make fifteen. It is the single highest-value pegging habit a improving player can adopt.
- Roughly one unseen card in three is a ten-card (16 of 46). Plan the play around that, not around hope.
- Never lead a 5 — any ten-card answers it for fifteen. Our hard opponent prices this risk on every single play rather than following the maxim blindly, and reaches the same conclusion.
- Lead from a pair: if your opponent pairs your lead for 2, you take 6 with the third.
- A lead of a 4 or lower is safe — no single card can make fifteen on top of it.
- Hold low cards for the endgame of each count: they win goes, last card, and thirty-one.
- Count what is gone. If both 5s you can’t see are already played, ten-cards are safe in a way they were not a moment ago.
Board position: when to peg and when to hide
Because hands are counted in a fixed order — pone first, dealer second, crib last — the same score is not worth the same amount everywhere on the board. As pone, you count first: if you can reach 121 in the show, aggressive pegging is unnecessary risk. As dealer near the end, you count last, so you must peg out or arrive close enough that hand-plus-crib gets you home before your opponent counts.
A serviceable rule: on your deal you would like to be at or past 96 (needing hand + crib + pegging), and off your deal past 105 (your hand counts first). Behind those pace lines, play on: take every pegging exchange. Ahead of them, play off: dodge runs and pairs, keep the count awkward, and make the hand end quietly.
What is the average cribbage hand worth?
- Just under 8 points before the cut, and the crib averages around 4.85 — that figure is the mean of the full discard table above. The dealer’s whole deal (hand, crib and pegging) averages roughly 16 points; the pone’s roughly 10.
Should you ever throw a 5 to your opponent’s crib?
- Almost never. Every throw containing a 5 averages 5.7 or more in the table above, against 3.4–4.0 for wide high-card throws. Only a kept hand that outweighs that gap — a guaranteed double run, say — justifies it.
Is cribbage a game of luck or skill?
- Both, in a proportion the discard table makes concrete: the cards you are dealt are luck, but every deal contains fifteen possible throws whose long-run values differ by several points, and pegging adds another skill layer. Between the same two players, better discarding wins over any reasonable number of games — our hard computer opponent beats the deliberately naive easy one in essentially every match, on nothing but these decisions.
Where these numbers come from
The discard table is not copied from a book. It was computed by this site, by brute-force enumeration: for each of the 91 rank-pairs, every possible pair of opponent discards (1,225) times every remaining starter (48) — 58,800 crib deals — scored exactly with the same open scoring code the playable game uses, then weighted for the chance the thrown cards share a suit. The result reproduces the classic tables in the cribbage literature to the decimal, which is exactly what you want a verification to do. The script (scripts/crib-values.mjs) ships in the site’s source, so anyone can rerun it.