Would you play a casino game based on cribbage?

The Game Room
1

Recently, I visited my local casino. They had a new table game: Cash Crib, based on the game of cribbage. (The inventor demonstrates the game in this YouTube video.) Anyway, I watched the play at the casino, and understood absolutely nothing. The dealer (my Friendly Neighbourhood Dealer, as I call her, as I know her from being dealt hundreds of blackjack hands by her at her table) helpfully gave me a rule sheet provided by the game’s inventor. It made no sense to me at all.

Now, it must be said, I don’t know the game of cribbage. A few players obviously did, and they were doing the best they could with the cards they were dealt. Some were doing very well; others, less so. But a few players were just as clueless as I was, and gave up.

I’m wondering if this game is likely to be a success. The casino thinks it will be, since they got it. But there seem to be a few things that strike me as not being terribly conducive to its success:

– The dealer has a subjective choice as to what to discard. There is no bright line rule, such as “dealer must draw to 16 and stand on 17” to adhere to. I assume the dealer was trying to make the best hand possible, but it would seem to me that an unscrupulous dealer and a player confederate could manipulate this to their advantage.

– It is slow. There is a lot of arithmetic happening, and from what I could see, it takes time for players to count their point values, discard, and count again; and bet. Then the dealer does the same thing, counting out each player’s hand to see whether it beats the dealer’s. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a run of three, and that makes…,” the dealer intoned, constantly adding point values.

– Perhaps because of the time required to do all this arithmetic while trying to play the number of hands that would ensure a decent ROI, there is little to no time for the dealer to explain what is happening to players unfamiliar with the game. My Friendly Neighbourhood Dealer has always been very good about explaining blackjack to newbies, but she simply had no time to do that with this game. In short, this game requires a pre-existing knowledge of the game of cribbage. It cannot be explained quickly to a raw newbie, as blackjack or roulette can; and it is not a variation of an existing casino game, like Caribbean Stud, Ultimate Hold’em, or Spanish 21, where players understand the basics if they understand the originating game.

I have no stake in this game (pun fully intended), so I don’t really care whether it succeeds or fails. But what do you think? Would you play this game if it appeared in your local casino? Why or why not?

2

I wouldn’t play it for the same reasons you mention. I don’t know cribbage, and have no clue how to play this game “properly”. I like games where I know at least the basic strategies and percentage plays. Mostly I play blackjack or three card poker. Very rarely, I’ll play the PASS line in craps, or try a Hold Em tournament.

3

The most important criterion in selecting a casino game is the house advantage (“vigorish”). For reasons you’ve implied (slowness, opportunity for fraud) I’ll guess this to be a high-vigorish game, even without inspecting the rules. So no, I doubt it’s a good game to play. (It might be fun to analyze, but I’d want written rules for that, not just a Youtube.)

Ignoring games of skill (i.e. poker vs people), the low-vigorish casino games are Baccarat, Craps (betting Pass/Come, Do Not, and Odds), and of course Blackjack.

Higher-vigorish games may be good if the payoffs are high. Thus, playing a single-number at roulette and certain Keno tickets are much better “investments” than many people think. (Please use SEARCH before arguing this point, as I’ve explicated it at least twice here in Game Room, and won’t try again.)

4

What pun?

I would try it,I love the game of Cribbage and am very good,but I doubt that gives me any more of an advantage as far as the house is concerned.

5

Especially since good cribbage skills are particularly useful in the pegging round, which this game doesn’t have, nor does it have any crib, so that element of discard strategy is also useless.

6

I haven’t watched the video, but given that I enjoy both cribbage and gambling, I’d definitely give it a go, for small stakes, perhaps if I was already up for the night.

7

As a cribbage fan I’d definitely want to play this. If it’s pacing is slow, that’s an additional benefit even if the house has a large advantage. In a casino that comps drinks, a nice leisurely pace is a serious bonus to a me as I’m not typically there to win, I’m there to have a good time. Losing at a 55% clip isn’t so painful when you only squeeze in 25 hands an hour compared to a 51% clip on blackjack at a 100 hands and hour.

That said, without the pegging portion I’m not sure how much fun and how similar to the real thing this would be. I don’t have time to watch the video right now, but I suspect it’s going to be as much “cribbage” as Caribbean stud is “poker”.

8

The rules of cribbage are here, the scoring chart is at the bottom.

It’s not really that different from blackjack, since it appears that the game is just a different way of adding up the total. You don’t add 9 to 8 to 4 to get 21, you have the more complicated cribbage style of scoring.

What I don’t like is that complex scoring means more chance for error. I guess it’s unlikely, but there’s a whole set of rules in Cribbage regarding players failing to take all the points from their hand, and what to do about it.

Edited to add, the rules seem to require 3 bets per hand, Go, Open and Show, so the slower play doesn’t necessarily mean fewer bets per hour.

9

So far, the game does seem to be popular. I was at the casino again yesterday with a friend, and the cribbage table was crowded. I don’t know if that’s because a lot of people who play cribbage have been waiting for a table game just for them, or whether it’s just a new game people want to try, but it there were a lot of players.

10

I’d enjoy calculating strategy and vigorish just for fun. (I already have the hand-scoring subroutines from earlier Game Room threads. :rolleyes: ) But I really can’t figure out the rule details from the page. What is difference between payoffs on “Open” and “Show” ? Is an Open bet mandatory for the “Go” bet? Near end of page is “if the dealer qualifies” a misprint for “if the player qualifies” ? Et cetera.

11

It’s a shame the creators of this game didn’t have much higher payouts on 28- and 29-point hands. Someone who looks at this layout might say to themselves, “Huh, 28 points pays out 50 to 1, 29 pays out 100 to 1. That’s not too bad.” But if they’d made the payouts 500 to 1 and 1,000 to 1…now they’d be getting some real action. I’ll have to run the odds but it seems to me that 28 and 29 aren’t anywhere near that likely to come up.

12

I don’t gamble, but a gambling game based on cribbage sounds more interesting to me personally than one based on poker or rolling dice. I like cribbage.

13

Pursuant to the post I made above:

This site claims that the odds against a 29-point hand in a two-handed game are 216,580 to 1. Since there are 15 times more ways to get a 28-point hand (a 28-point hand is 4 fives and any 10-point card, but a 29-point hand can only be 4 fives and Jack of same suit as starter aka Nobs…there are 16 ten-point cards in total and only one of them is the Nobs), I would assume that the odds against a 28-point hand are 14,468 to 1. So even my suggestion of 500-1 and 1,000-1 sound like bad odds to me.

But that’s not all. In a two-handed cribbage game you get six cards and discard two. In Cash Crib you only get five cards and discard one, just like in three-handed cribbage. This site notes that in 3-handed cribbage your odds against a 29-point hand are down to 649,740 to 1, and therefore your 28-point odds are 43,316 to 1.

In other words, when you play Cash Crib, you will get a 50-to-1 payout on a 43,316 to 1 chance, and a 100-to-1 payout on a 649,740 to 1 chance. I am not exactly chomping at the bit to play this game.

14

Why would the number of hands dealt affect the possibility of point value in your own hand?

15

I should have made this more clear. In two-handed cribbage, you receive 6 cards and discard two to the crib, so you’re left with four. The dealer turns the “starter” card to bring your hand to five cards. But in three-handed cribbage, you receive 5 cards and discard one. Obviously it’s much harder to get three fives and a ten card (or, much more rarely, four fives) which you’re going to need to have a shot at a 28- or 29-point hand when you start with only five cards as opposed to six.

16

Roger that. Thanks

17

I wonder if this is a function of available equipment? At my local casino, the dealer uses a shuffling machine, which spits out five-card hands (just as it would for, say, Caribbean Stud). No idea if the machine can be adjusted to deal a six-card hand. Of course, the dealer could shuffle and cut without a machine, and deal six-card hands, but then we’re looking at the question of time again.

Regardless, those odds on getting a 28 or a 29 are pretty high, and the payoffs for those point values absurdly low, comparatively speaking. How do the other point value-odds ratios stack up against the Cash Crib payoffs, do you know? (I’m having a hard time following the information on your linked sites.)

18

I used to love playing cribbage. While this “cash crib” is interesting and more to my liking than Blackjack, it’s really not cribbage. The fun part of cribbage for me is counting against the other player in the beginning.

I couldn’t help but notice the dealer consistently lost in the promo video. I doubt that’s the case in real life.

Bri2k

19

I don’t see that being a problem. Pai Gow Poker hands have seven cards apiece, and the shuffling machine spits out those just fine. Six shouldn’t be too difficult.

To me that’s going to be the death knell for Cash Crib. The game already has two strikes against it in that it’s a slow game that not everybody knows how to play. Sure, you could say the same thing about Pai Gow Poker. But at least the odds are good at Pai Gow (2.5% edge in favor of the dealer). When you realize that the 100-1 payout has odds of 600K+ to 1, you’re going to start wondering about the rest of it. And, for cryin’ out loud, why not inject some excitement into the game? Why not offer payouts of 10,000-1 for a 29 hand? That’s still a very large house edge, and it offers the prize of “win $50,000 on a $5 bet.” But the way the game is…there’s a bit of novelty in it but I can’t see it holding up to repeated plays.

I’ll have to search around for that. Outside a computer program I can’t imagine how to do it…the odds are going to be tough to figure because there are so many more ways to come up with a point total of (say) 8, you have a choice in making your discard, etc. But I’ll say that it also looks like 24-point hands, which are also relatively rare in cribbage, are also seriously undervalued in Cash Crib. IME I’ve seen 24-pointers about once every 250 hands, so a 15-1 payout pretty much sucks.

20

Wizards of Odds have not posted odds on this game yet. And at least not that I can find. I used to play a lot of cribbage when I was younger. Probably 5000 to 10000 hands. I have never seen a 28 or 29.

If the $5 bet was just for the premium, I am sure the odds would be much greater. Like the fortune bonus in pai gow poker.