Cribbage Is the Card Game That Is the Most Like Real Life
Of all the card games I play, cribbage feels the most like life. Maybe of all the games I play of any kind, cribbage seems the most like life. Cribbage is more like life than the board game called Life. For several months now, I have been playing cribbage regularly against my teenage daughter. The game has never yet turned tiring for either of us, and I think this feel of familiar harmony is part of the reason. Cribbage has a soulfulness arising from its resonance with the ways and the walk of the life we are actually living. In searching out that soulfulness, in identifying the notes of harmony between life and cribbage, here is what I see:
1. Every hand is unfair.
In cribbage, the dealer has way more privilege and possibility than another player. The game is fair overall because players take turns being dealer. But still, in this game, just like in life, there is no moment when each party at the table has equivalent cards and stakes, or even the same motivation. Every encounter is lopsided.
2. The mix of luck and choice favors luck slightly.
I have come to think that luck—or, alternately, what is chosen for us rather than what we choose—is more important in accounting for what we come to in life than the choices we make. I cannot go too far in crediting myself for the good in my life given the good fortune that, for example, I was born in America in the twentieth century, or that I was wired with the mix of aptitudes and talents I have, or that I met and was helped by some valuable people along the way. Then as well, while I do not dwell on this as much, some strikes and burdens that were not my fault have also limited my way. Yet the role of my choice and determination plays in, too, and this factor is also enough to matter. I might once have said that these two factors weigh equally, but I am not so sure about that now. The ratio instead might be 60-40 favoring luck over choice, or maybe 55-45. And cribbage is like this, too.
The cards dealt in a cribbage hand mean a great deal, yet there is also room for considerable power in how one plays them. Specifically, there are two parts of the game where choice affects the outcome: the discard and the play. These are the topics of the next two points.
3. What you give up is a vital strategic choice.
In the two-person version of cribbage, each player gets six cards and gets to see all of them, but then must give away two of them for the crib belonging to the dealer. How perfect is this? How true?
Our lives are lived in loss. Life is lived in accumulation, too, for a while, but loss is the experience that persists longer and ultimately wins.
In life (as in cribbage), we cannot keep all the cards we are dealt. I do not know why life is set up this way, but it is. Discernment, and a life well lived, therefore entail the habit and the practice of deliberate surrender, finding the way to be clear-eyed and graceful about giving up good things for the sake of protecting, accepting, or more fully holding the good things we will keep with us longer. Giving up and giving away are vital parts of the game.
4. Others’ choices shape the field.
The part of cribbage called “the play” involves revealing cards to the other player and scoring according to patterns in the cards revealed as well as the progress of the running tally. The result (a facet not unique to cribbage) is that the competition is, in a sense, collaborative. The strategy leading to success is not just concerned with the first action I will take. I succeed instead by anticipating the other’s response, and preparing my next action in response to that response.
5. The game can be won in increments.
People say life is short, but what they mean is that our psychological experience of it compacts it into shortness. My high school years seem recent because the mark of those years is still near in my mind. In the actual living, though, life is long. It is long enough that sadness, for some, can turn into long sadness that shapes a person with its weight. It is long enough that we can meet despair multiple times, and even screw up various times on top of that, yet still eventually find the way to a place that is good. It is long enough that the state of things at any particular passage of life is not enough to account for where else all of us might find ourselves later on.
Cribbage, too, is long. At 121 holes in length, the game’s peg board provides enough distance and duration to overcome any particularly good round for one player that left another player far behind. Through patient, methodical, consistent good play, gaining ground round by round, we can often find our way back ahead to a win.
6. Every hand is a new shuffle.
This was the aspect of the game my daughter first noticed when I taught it to her: Does any card game involve so much shuffling as cribbage? Players don’t carry the baggage of past hands into the next hand, because the entire deck is shuffled anew after every round. This part of the game is also kind of perfect, because this part, too, is much like life.
Oh, we all carry baggage, to be sure. We all go into the next round from the position on the board we came to in the past rounds. But memories are short, expectations are open, and the events surrounding our lives keep on changing in ways that confound our plans—frequently for the better. The context keeps shifting. The shifts are reshuffles, leaving us holding different hands than what we held before.
My daughter beat me the last time we played. She beat me so beautifully that thinking about the win brought me to this essay. In that game, I did methodically keep after her throughout, closing by increments the gap she had opened up with one early lucky hand, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough by precisely one point—my last hand got me to the 120th hole and no farther. I searched for another point (nobs?), and it was not to be found. With her turn, we watched her win.
Every hand is a new shuffle. One day, she and I will play cribbage no longer. This game, and its resonance with real life, is teaching me why I should enjoy this game.