Muggins is my name and Cribbage is my game...

…and I win 90 per cent of the time…
Well, 53.253% of the time, according to my chief opponent, which is this computer with a built-in cribbage game and more statistics than baseball, to which I can say without fear of redress, (or of getting punched-out were it not an, ahem, gentleman’s game…) “Why, you double-dealing son of a bitch! Where’d you get that %$#@&!$ card from?”

When first I discovered I had this Medieval game on my computer I got beat a lot, 2/3rds of the time and more, in lots of a 100. I couldn’t take it, I was solitary & morose, a loser, my self-worth diminished before my tired eyes.

So I started playing best out of three series instead and for some reason I’m way ahead. Now I understand the lassitude, the ennui, which I figure was the end result of the mental stress & strain of this form of intellectual exercise and, yes, physical exercise too, for up and down the room stride I before pitching the next card; it is not a decision to be taken lightly – you could get ‘Fifteen-two’d’ right into another defeat, not a pretty sight, and also it is good for vocal training as I shout & hector and badger & taunt my worthy opponent, this accursed Dell Omniplex 560,the anti-Christ. More about that later…)

I’ve yet to catch it making an error in scoring or anything else, it seems to be the real thing and there are a nearly endless myriad of combinations, are there not? How many different configurations of cards must there be with 52 cards? I suppose the number is actually not infinite being as there are numbers at both ends…what would it be, 52 to the 52nd power is the number of possibilities? I never got past basic arithmetic so I don’t know the answer but it’s a lot, and I’ve yet to see two games alike…(merely finite myself how would I ever remember?) & don’t forget changing the suit is the same thing as changing the number so the possibilities go on…

It’s a very old game is cribbage, I said Medieval and so be it having been put together most thinkingly by one Sir John Suckling – yes poor guy, that was his name and probably how the game came peripherally to be invented as he sat brooding in his lonely stone tower afraid to go out because the neighbor kids called him ‘Piggy’ and said he ‘sucked’: enter cribbage, like about 1542 or something like that?

Is that Medieval or do we have to go back to the Magna Carta for Medieval, anyway a long time ago, and nothing about the game has changed since then except then you played with five cards now you play with six.

...thus ends your cribbage tutorial, something like that…