First to 121. The opponent counts its discards properly — and so will you, because every hand is shown.
If you've never played, this is everything you need. Five minutes, and the game will count for you while you learn.
| Thing | Points | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Fifteen | 2 | Every combination that adds to 15, not just pairs of cards. Face cards are ten each. |
| Pair | 2 | Three of a kind is six (that's three pairs), four of a kind is twelve. |
| Run | 1 per card | A run of three with one rank doubled scores twice — that's a double run, worth six. |
| Flush | 4 or 5 | Four in hand is four, five with the starter is five. In the crib, four scores nothing. |
| His nobs | 1 | A jack in your hand matching the starter's suit. |
The full walkthrough, with the traps everybody falls into, is in how to count a cribbage hand.
Most free cribbage sites give you a bot that discards on instinct. This one does something specific: for each of the fifteen possible discards, it computes the expected value of the hand across all forty-six starters that could still turn up — exactly, not by sampling — and then adds or subtracts the likely value of the crib depending on whose crib it is.
You can watch the effect. Deal it three fives and a jack, and as the dealer it keeps 5-5-5-K and quietly slides the jack into its own crib. As your opponent, the same cards, it keeps 5-5-5-J instead — holding the jack for nobs, because now the crib is yours and it isn't giving you anything. That's not a lookup table. That's a machine doing the same arithmetic a good player does in their head.
Three fives and a jack in your hand, and the fourth five cut as the starter, in the jack's suit. Sixteen from the fifteens, twelve from the six pairs, one for nobs. It comes up about once in every 216,000 hands, so if you get one, tell people.
There is no way to score exactly 19 in cribbage. Which is why, when a player has a worthless hand, they'll tell you they've got nineteen. It's the oldest joke in the game and it never stops being used.