Toss & Tally — App Documentation

A cribbage training tool built around one idea: don't just tell the user what to do, show the math and explain the reasoning — for both discarding and pegging, for correct plays as much as mistakes, and for the strategy layered on top of the pure math.

Tabs are two levels. Five at the top: Intro; Drills, which groups Discarding, Pegging, Full Hand (both combined) and Challenges (the timed drills); Games (play a full hand-by-hand game to 121 — heads-up or interactive 3-/4-handed); Reference, which groups Theory (pace/score context — the Twenty-Six Theory material), Tables (crib matrix, master discard tables, card frequency), Glossary, Play Log (real-game tracking, including saved games with per-hand records) and this Guide; and Settings, which holds the app-wide options.

Selecting a group opens its first entry — Drills opens Discarding, Reference opens Theory.

The Guide and the version history used to be links in the header beside the version tag. Both now live under Reference, and the version tag is plain text. The version history is shown in dev mode only: it is a generated page that the mobile build does not ship, so offering it everywhere would advertise something one platform cannot reach.

New to cribbage? Read section 1 — the rules first. It is a plain reference with no strategy in it. Then come back to section 2 for what each tab of the trainer does. Every term the app uses is defined in the Glossary at the end, and those entries are exactly what the app's own in-panel "read more" links open.

Already play? Go straight to section 2 for the tabs, or section 3 for the strategy the app teaches and the evidence behind it.

Printing this Guide. Use the Print / Save as PDF button in the banner at the top, or your browser's print command, and choose Save as PDF if you want a file. The banner stays put as you scroll, so the button is always within reach. If you opened this guide from the game, a Close and return to the game button sits beside it, and it puts you back in the hand you left — your game is still running in the tab behind this one, so nothing is lost and nothing restarts. It prints on US Letter at a 1 inch margin all round, with a running header ("Toss & Tally — Guide" and the version) and a running footer carrying the site and "Page N of M" on every page. Everything prints whether or not you have it open on screen: collapsed sections are expanded automatically and an active search is cleared first, so you never get a partial document. The banner, the contents sidebar, the search box and the buttons are all left off the printout.

You do not need to change anything in the print dialog — leave Headers and footers switched off. The page builds its own numbered sheets rather than relying on the browser, so the margin, the header, the footer and the numbering are the same whatever your dialog is set to, including Margins: None. Turning the browser's own headers on simply stamps a second set of numbers, plus the title, URL and date, on top of these.

What's new. The per-version changelog lives in version-history.html, reachable from Reference → Version history in dev mode. It is generated from the update logs, so it is always current. It is deliberately not repeated here: this Guide describes the app as it stands today, not how it got here.

Every section sits under an uppercase title (like "Play log"); the Settings section is collapsible (open by default); and the "You are" dealer status is shaded green (dealer) / amber (non-dealer) as a board-awareness cue, echoed on the deal badges.

A small version tag sits above the title. It reads the current version at runtime from version-history.html but is plain text — it is no longer a link, and neither the changelog nor this Guide is reached from the header any more. Both live under Reference: the Guide entry opens this page (which links back to the app), and Version history appears there in dev mode only.

This doc has six parts: 1 the cribbage rules (reference, not strategy), 2 how to use the trainer tab by tab, 3 the strategy and theory the app teaches and why, 4 the sources behind the numbers, 5 what genuinely differentiates this from a typical cribbage app, and 6 a glossary. Build and validation history is tracked in the repo's backlog.md and the per-version update-vN.md logs.

1 · Cribbage rules (reference)

This section is deliberately kept out of the live guidance panels — game rules and strategic advice are different things, and mixing them into in-the-moment tips makes both harder to scan. This is the rules reference; strategy is section 3.

Basics of scoring

Every way a point is scored in cribbage, in one place. The play (pegging) and the show share most of these combinations; the paragraphs below spell out when each applies. (In the app, Reference → Tables → Hand scoring shows the same list — tap any row for a real card example.)

Card values: Ace = 1, cards 2–10 count face value, Jack, Queen and King each count 10. Suit matters only for flushes and nobs. In the crib, a flush needs all five (the four crib cards and the starter) — there is no four-card crib flush.

How runs and pairs combine. When a hand holds a run and a duplicated rank, you score the run once for each distinct sequence the duplicate makes, plus the pair(s) — this is where new players most often undercount:

• Double run of three (e.g. 2-2-3-4): two runs of three (6) + one pair (2) = 8.
• Double run of four (e.g. 2-3-4-4-5): two runs of four (8) + one pair (2) = 10.
• Triple run (e.g. 3-3-3-4-5): three runs of three (9) + pair royal (6) = 15.
• Double-double run (e.g. 3-3-4-4-5): four runs of three (12) + two pairs (4) = 16.

The app always counts these for you; the totals are here so the numbers are never a mystery.

Pegging scoring

What scores during the play (pegging), so you can follow the count as it happens. The running count never passes 31, then resets for the next series.

Runs count in any order among the most recent unbroken stretch of cards; a card that breaks the sequence ends the run. (His Heels pegs at the cut, before the play proper — listed here because it is the dealer's peg for the Jack starter.)

Card values. Ace counts 1, cards 2 through 10 count their face value, and Jack, Queen and King each count 10 — collectively "ten-cards". Suit matters only for flushes and for nobs. These are the values you add up during the play to reach 15 and 31; they are not the same thing as the points a card is worth at the show.

The deck and deal. Standard 52-card deck, no jokers. In the two-player game — the one these rules describe, and the one the strategy in section 3 assumes — each player is dealt 6 cards. Each player then discards 2 face-down to a shared crib: a third hand, over and above the two players' own, that belongs to the dealer. That leaves 4 cards each to play and to score with.

(Historic note: cribbage began as a five-card game — 5 cards dealt, 2 to the crib, 3-card hands, and game to 61 — which the modern six-card, 121-point two-player game above has largely replaced. Don't confuse it with the modern 3-player game, which also deals 5 cards but keeps 4 (one discard to the crib) and still plays to 121 — that's a live variant, covered under "Game" in section 2. The old five-card game, with its 3-card hands and 61-point target, is mentioned here only for completeness; Toss & Tally plays the six-card two-player game and the modern multi-handed variants.)

The app also plays 3- and 4-handed games and several variants. Those change only the deal and the crib — how many cards each seat gets, how many go to the crib, and who owns it — and are described under "Game" in section 2. Everything below (the cut, the play, the show) works the same way in every variant.

The cut / starter. After discarding, the non-dealer cuts the remaining deck; the top card of the bottom half becomes the starter and is turned face-up. If the starter is a Jack, the dealer immediately scores 2 points — "two for his heels." (Whether this can complete a win outright is a house-rule variation; see below.)

The play (pegging). Starting with non-dealer, players alternate playing one card face-up, announcing the running total (the count).

• The count may never exceed 31; a card that would push it over can't be played — that's what "legal" means in this context, a rule about the running total, not about conduct.
• 15 for the count hitting exactly 15: 2 points.
• 31 for the count hitting exactly 31: 2 points.
• Pairs: matching the rank of the card just played: 2 points for a pair, 6 for three of a kind ("pair royal") played consecutively, 12 for four ("double pair royal").
• Runs: 3 or more cards forming a sequence of consecutive ranks, in any order, among the most recent unbroken stretch of cards played: points equal to the run length. 5-4-6 scores 3, and a 7 played next extends it to 4. A card that is not part of the sequence breaks it — 5-4-9-6 scores no run.
• Go: you must play whenever you legally can — you cannot pass or call "go" while you still hold a card that keeps the count at 31 or under. Only when you can't play without exceeding 31 do you say "go"; your opponent then plays on for as long as they legally can, scoring 1 for the go — or 2 if they bring the count to exactly 31. The count then resets to 0 and play continues with whoever did not just take the go or the 31.
• Last card: when every card has been played, whoever laid the final card scores 1. If that card made exactly 31 it has already scored 2, and does not also score for last card.
• Play continues until both hands are empty.

The show (scoring hands). Each player's kept 4 cards are scored with the starter added as a 5th card, non-dealer first, then dealer, then the crib (counted as the dealer's own, using the starter as normal): 15s (2 each), pairs, runs, a 4-card flush (all one suit, 4 points; 5 if the starter matches too — a crib flush needs the starter to match, no 4-point option), and nobs (1 point for holding the Jack matching the starter's suit).

Winning. First to 121 points wins, whether reached during play or the show. Under the ACC tournament convention (verified against the ACC Policy Manual, Ch. 6, and modeled in the Game): a win is worth 2 game points, a skunk is worth 3, and a loss is 0.

The board's four streets, and the three skunks. A 121-hole board is laid out in four "streets" of 30 holes, and the skunk tiers are simply which street the loser failed to leave:

Hole 91 is the skunk line: reach it and you cannot be skunked. Hole 90 is sometimes called the stink hole for sitting one point short of safety, though that name is more often given to hole 120 — losing 121–120 by a single point.

What a game is worth is a setting — Match scoring, in the Settings tab. It governs every game point the Game awards, the Match Log records and a best-of-N series totals. Two rulesets:

ACC scoring is why a double or triple skunk is labeled but still scored as 3: ACC recognizes win 2 / skunk 3 / loss 0 and no tier beyond the first. That is deliberate, not a missing feature. Standard free play (the default, from the Casual rules preset) scores an ordinary win lower and does escalate the wider margins.

Three settings control skunks (Settings, under Special): Skunk (on by default — turn it off and every win counts as a plain win, in every game), Double skunk (on by default, shown only while Skunk is on — turn it off and the double and triple levels count as an ordinary skunk), and Captain's game skunk at 30 (on by default, shown only while Skunk is on and a Captain's game is selected).

The short Captain's game (to 61) has its own line. The 121-hole lines above would call almost every Captain's game a skunk, so in the short game the line is the halfway mark: a loser on 30 or fewer is skunked, with no double or triple skunk. The ACC rulebook defines a skunk as winning by 31 or more points and has no 61-point or Captain's rule, so this is a house line; turn the setting off for no skunk in the Captain's game.

Skunk applies to every game. In the 3-handed, 4-handed and Captain's games the result is judged for you: your side against the highest-scoring other side, with the same lines as above (the short Captain's game uses its own line of 30). The result is what the Match Log and any best-of-N series record.

Two things the app does not model, whichever you pick: under ACC, bracketed playoff matches are played straight up (a skunk counts as a single win, not 3), and some free-play house rules end a match outright on a triple skunk. The app always plays a best-of-N series to its full length — read the label and apply those yourself if you play that way.

The Pegging drill instead treats each round independently, starting from a generated Situation Score rather than a carried-over total.

Common house-rule variation modeled in this app: many casual groups don't allow "two for his heels" to complete a win by itself, so the app caps the heels bonus by default: it can't push a score to or past the out (121, or 61 in a short Captain's game) on the cut alone. This applies to every game and variation. Note that the ACC tournament rules (rule 6.3.b) go the other way — the dealer may peg out into the game hole by turning a Jack starter — so turn Cap his heels off (Settings, under Special) to play by the ACC rule. It is on by default.

Penalties & tournament conduct (reference). Sourced to the ACC Official Cribbage Tournament Rules, 2025 (cribbage.org/rules/ — the current edition; there is no 2026). Most of these are human-play conduct rules with nothing for an auto-scoring trainer to enforce; they're listed here for completeness, marked by whether the app models them.

• Muggins (Rule 10) — modeled, opt-in. If you undercount your own hand and your opponent calls it, the missed points go to them. Pegging-out is mandatory; muggins does not apply to missed penalties, missed-muggins, his heels, or backward-pegged points. The Game's muggins mode implements the hand-count side of this.
• Overpegging (8.4.c) — conduct. Peg more than you scored, short of claiming the game, and on the opponent's discovery the peg goes back and they score the amount of the error; if you spot it yourself you may correct it without penalty, but you must tell your opponent first. (Players call this "hauling lumber"; that is table slang and not a term the ACC rules use.)
• False claim of game (8.4.b) — conduct. The claim cannot be corrected and judges are summoned. The offender's front peg goes back to the points actually scored, the opponent is awarded the number overclaimed, and the offender takes a 15-point backward penalty — which applies even if the award puts the opponent out.
• Renege (7.3) — conduct. Failing to play a legal card scores the opponent 2 per playable card; not callable once the count is ≤ 21 and moving on.
• Shuffle / cut infractions (2.1 / 5.2 / 6.1) — conduct, 2 points each.
• The 19-hand penalty — modeled, optional house rule (default off). "19" is cribbage slang for a hand that counts zero (19 is an impossible score). ACC Rule 8.2 imposes no penalty for a zero hand ("the pegs must not be touched"), so this is off by default; when the Game's 19-hand setting is on, a scoreless hand or crib pegs that player 19 backward — a real score reduction (floored at 0), not a cosmetic move.

Impossible scores. A single 4-card-plus-starter hand can never total 19, 25, 26, or 27 — these are the classic "impossible" counts (a "19" is the common byword for a zero hand). Likewise there is no flush in a 24-point hand. The maximum is 29 (5-5-5-J with the matching-suit Jack cut).

2 · How to play / how to use the trainer

Discarding

Deals a random 6-card hand. Pick 2 to discard, then submit.

• Exact hand EV — averaged over all 46 possible starters (the 52-card deck minus the 6 you were dealt), not sampled.
• Exact crib EV — enumerated over every disjoint (opponent-discard, starter) combination from the unseen pool, so the Crib column carries no sampling noise. Sampling survives only where the number is not displayed: the optional live estimate that updates as you select cards, and the opponent simulations inside a running game.
• Full ranking of all 15 possible discards, expandable — the whole decision space, not just best-vs-chosen.

• "Why this number" panel: breaks hand EV into points already locked in by the kept 4 (15s/pairs/runs/flush, before the starter) vs. the average bonus the starter adds; looks up the discard's exact crib value; explains why the top pick beats the runner-up by category (15s/pairs/runs/flush vs. crib side), not just that it does.
• Reconsider discard: return to card selection on the same dealt hand. The original submission stays fully counted in your stats and play log — reconsidering doesn't erase it, it just lets you try again, logged as a separate attempt.
• Live EV estimate while selecting (optional), session streak (color-coded dots: green = optimal, amber = rank 2, red = rank 3+), accuracy %, and a full play log of every hand — not just misses — each entry color-coded and card-suit-colored to scan quickly.
• "What actually happened" panel: one real random draw of the starter and two opponent cards, so you see actual variance next to the EV average. It's a single draw — don't over-read one outcome against the EV numbers; the EV is computed over all possibilities precisely so a single lucky or unlucky cut doesn't mislead you.

Pegging

One continuous flow per hand — deal, then pre-play analysis, then live play, then post-play analysis — not separate modes to switch between.

Setup (persistent settings, like a dealer-mode preference):

• Dealer mode — Random / Manual / Alternating, plus a "You are" Dealer/Non-dealer toggle that's always visible and tracks the actual role live outside Manual mode.
• Crib discard — Auto-crib: both you and the opponent are dealt 6 and auto-discard your best-EV keep (same math as the Discarding tab). Choose your discard: you're dealt 6 and pick your own 2 to the crib (the starter isn't cut until after you confirm, same as a real hand); the opponent still auto-discards either way.
• Win-proximity warning toggle, and a toggle to dim cards you can't legally play (off by default).

Pre-play analysis, shown before you touch a card:

• Pegging potential with this hand — a 200-trial simulation against real dealt-and-auto-discarded opponent hands (not random 4-card draws), reporting average and max pegging points achievable for both sides with your actual kept cards.
• Pegging guidance — collapsed by default, expand to view. A suggested opening lead, shown as a headline plus bullet-point reasons (not a paragraph), and any named trap pattern detected in your hand (own separate "show details" toggle, since those are denser reading than the lead suggestion). The lead suggestion draws on two distinct sourced mechanisms depending on the hand — see "Lead selection" under Pegging strategy below for what actually drives the pick. A short definition of the live Losers / Winners counts (see below) sits in this panel's footer as well, so the definition lives in documentation/guidance rather than cluttering the live hand display.

Live play:

• Turn-by-turn against a greedy-heuristic opponent (always takes the biggest immediate score — explicitly not expert play).
• Each round starts from a Situation Score — a randomly generated but plausible mid-game board position, not always 0–0 — so pegging happens with real stakes. It drives the Offense / Defense tag in the Starter · Situation Score · Count block and the guidance panel's lead mode. See "Situation Score" below for what those numbers are (and aren't).
• Every legal card in your hand shows a two-number Losers / Winners read (compact form under the card: Out N · Win N). Losers counts the unseen cards that let the opponent score on their immediate reply — lower is safer. Winners counts the likely replies after which one of your own remaining cards scores — higher is better when chasing points. The check mark follows the current mode: minimum Losers on Defense, maximum Winners on Offense. If the opponent is close to winning and the safest-by-Losers card still risks letting them peg out, a warning flags the safer alternative even at a higher raw count. Full definitions and sources: "Losers" and "Winners" under Pegging strategy below.
• Play log shows exactly why each score happened (which pair, run, 15, or 31), not just the running count.

Post-play analysis, once the hand ends:

• Your total pegged points vs. the simulated average, same for the opponent.
• Whether your lead matched the suggested card, shown as the same headline-plus-bullets format as the live guidance panel, with the actual risk-score comparison if you led something else.
• A full play-by-play breakdown: every one of your plays, the count before and after, how many legal options you had, and whether a higher-scoring option existed at that exact moment (and by how much, if so).

Full hand (1+2)

The Discarding flow plus pegging trap notes and lead guidance for the specific hand kept — one continuous decision instead of two separate skills. No live board score exists in this tab (it's evaluated before any game starts), so the lead suggestion here always runs in neutral mode — see "Offense / Defense mode (the Street coach)" below.

Scenario

Set up an exact position and learn how to play it — a specific hand, or a game grabbed midway — then replay it as often as you like. Build the position by tapping a zone (Dealer hand, Pone hand, Crib, Cut, Pile), then tapping a suit and the ranks to drop cards in; a small "paste text" box takes the same position as a text string (D: dealer hand, P: pone hand, C: crib, CUT: starter, DP:/PP: scores, PC: the pile of cards already played). Where the position starts is inferred from what you enter: 6-card hands start at the discard, 4-card hands with a pile resume mid-pegging, and 4-card hands with a cut jump to the show (scoring). Choose who plays each seat — you both, you one side with the app playing the other, or the app playing both while you watch — and turn best-move guidance on or off. It reuses the same engine, discard evaluator, pegging recommender and count as the rest of the app, so the numbers match everywhere.

A Seats toggle switches the builder to 3 or 4 seats (or Captain's, via a Captain's seat picker at 3 seats) — a seat-indexed text syntax (S1: through S4:, plus C: crib, CUT:, DEAL: the dealer's seat, CAP: the captain's seat, and S1P:..S4P: per-seat scores) alongside the two-player D:/P: syntax. Multi-seat positions score the show only — no discard phase and no mid-pegging resume, unlike the two-player builder — since scoring a set-up hand is the point, and reconstructing a partial multi-seat pegging sequence would need real new engine work. Any position — two-player or multi-seat — can be saved by name for later, reloaded, or copied as text to hand to someone else, who pastes it straight back into the box.

Game

A real playable game, hand by hand, first to 121 against the app's opponent model (see "How the opponent plays" below). Each hand runs the full cycle — deal, discard 2 to the crib, cut, peg, then an auto-counted show (non-dealer hand, dealer hand, crib, in proper order) — and the dealer alternates each hand. The optional game clock times the whole game against the ~15-minute ACC pace benchmark, and the decision clock times individual decisions; each has independent Show and Record options. A finished game can be saved to the Match Log as a game record with per-hand detail.

Two live players (hot-seat). With Players = 2, turn on "Play a live friend on this device" to play a real two-person game — no AI. You are your Settings-tab name and settings (e.g. Mike); the game adds a second name for your friend. Both names are entered at the start, and each name is its own profile — its own skill level and its full set of coaching settings (Show guidance, Interactive coaching, Street coach, Live tips, Discard coach, Pegging coach), saved under that name in local storage, so each player returns to their own setup and keeps their own game record (history). A head-to-head record (e.g. "Mike 2 – 1 Sarah") shows in the setup once you've played. Everything is shown by name — never a generic "you."

Because both hands are private, the game passes the device: after you discard, a "hand it to your friend" screen appears so they pick their own two cards without seeing yours; during the play, each turn shows a hand-off screen naming whose turn it is, and reveals only the hand — and the guidance — of that player, tuned to their own profile. When a player finishes their play, their guidance is cleared before the hand-off, so no one sees the other's read. Play it seated across a table, passing the phone back and forth, or set it on a larger screen. The show reveals both hands together for the count. (Hot-seat is the two-player game only; the 3-/4-handed games remain you-plus-AI.)

3-handed variants (v14). With Players = 3, a variant selector chooses how the hand is dealt (Standard is the default, so nothing changes unless you pick another):

• Standard (random crib card) — the classic cutthroat: five cards each, one card dealt straight to a 4-card crib, rotating deal, everyone to 121.
• Strategic Crib — Trash Pile (aka Linda's Way) — six cards each and no random seed. The dealer tosses two to the crib; each non-dealer tosses one to the crib and one to a burn pile — so you can trash a dangerous card (a lone 5) instead of feeding the dealer's crib. The crib/burn split is decided for you to starve the crib (the more crib-friendly of your two discards is the one burned). Individual, to 121.
• Strategic Crib — Deep Deal — the same no-luck idea without a burn pile: the dealer is dealt six (tosses two), each non-dealer five (tosses one). No seed card. Individual, to 121.
• Crib Pickup (a studio3607 house variant, v17.36) — the round's Crib Player (CP, the "dealer" role) is dealt nothing at all. The other two seats are each dealt seven and toss three into a shared pool; the CP picks up all six pool cards, keeps four, and chooses the starter — cut the deck, or pick one of the two leftover cards directly. There is no crib to score here; the pool became the CP's hand. Individual, to 121. An original studio3607 adaptation of a documented community house rule, never presented as a traditional or ACC rule.

In Captain's, the two AI partners now also coordinate what they throw away (v15.3). Both of them toss into the same crib and it is always the lone player's, so choosing those two cards together — rather than each deciding alone — stops them accidentally handing over a strong crib between them. It applies only when the computer plays both partner seats; if you are a partner, each seat decides on its own. Worth about a third of a point a game to the partnership.

• Two-against-one (Captain's) — one lone player (the permanent dealer) races to 61 while the other two play as a partnership to 121; the lone player deals six and tosses two, each opponent tosses one, for a 4-card crib. Pick which of the three seats is the lone player. Captain's is a strictly three-player game, but you can start it from either the 3-handed menu or the 4-handed menu (choosing it from 4-handed simply drops the table to three seats — there is no four-player Captain's).

4-handed (2-v-2). With Players = 4, two partnerships of two race to 121 together, each pair's scores merged onto one shared side (so this is a 2-track game, not four — see "Boards" below). Team composition: name Team 1 and pick its two teammates from a picker listing all four Settings players; the remaining two automatically become Team 2. Each side is dealt five and tosses one to the shared crib (four discards fill it exactly — no random seed card, same as 3-handed standard). The dealer seat rotates through all four players in turn, so a teammate deals every other hand rather than the team dealing on alternating full rounds. Peg color is shared per team (teammates share one track and one color) while each player keeps their own name and name color — set both in Settings.

4-handed, Individual (four separate sides). The third 4-handed option alongside Standard (2-v-2) and Captain's: no partnerships — each of the four players pegs their own track and races to 121 alone (a 4-track game; see "Boards" below). Dealt and scored exactly like Standard 3-handed, just with four seats instead of three: five cards each, everyone tosses one to a shared 4-card crib (no random seed card), and the dealer rotates through all four seats in turn.

The best-of-N match tally on the board. While a best-of-N match is active in any 3-/4-handed or Captain's game, a small badge sits in the board's middle, showing the match format and each side's games won ("legs") so far, with its skunk count alongside when it has one. Game play only — the drills never show it.

Both no-seed "Strategic Crib" variants use the same pegging and counting as the standard game — only the deal changes. In partnered games (Captain's and 4-handed 2-v-2) the AI partners now coordinate on defense — they favor safe, blocking cards when an opponent is ahead of pace or within peg-out range, rather than each pegging purely for its own score. (This is a defensive bias; against a lone Captain's structural edge it sharpens the partners' play without fully evening the odds.)

The peg board. Below the scores, a visual cribbage board shows a 0–121 track for each player (or, in 3-/4-handed, one track per seat / per partnership). On each track a filled bar and a peg mark the running score, and the number is shown both in the left gutter and floating at the peg. Three dashed vertical lines mark the street boundaries — the skunk line at 91, the double-skunk line at 61 and the triple-skunk line at 31 (a trailer left short of one of these when the winner hits 121 is skunked, double- or triple-skunked accordingly); the solid line at 121 is the finish. A small green diamond in the right margin, past the 121 line, marks the dealer for the current hand — it sits on the dealing player's (or dealing partnership's) row and moves to the next row as the deal rotates. An optional par-hole ladder (Settings → "Par holes on the board") overlays the Theory-of-26 milestones for pacing. The peg glides to its new hole as you score rather than jumping.

Board options (Settings). Show the cribbage board turns the whole board on or off (Game, multi game, and Pegging drill); with it off, only the numeric scores show. The board itself is chosen in the Boards section below.

Boards

Toss & Tally draws the pegging board a few different ways. You pick a Category (the theme) and, where it matters, a Style (the specific board); the app then fits the board to your game.

The rule: tracks = sides. A board has one track per scoring side, and a partner team is one side. So a 2-track board fits a 1-v-1 game or a 2-v-2 partnership; a 3-track board fits three sides; a 4-track board fits four individual players. The app picks the board that matches your game automatically; where a category has more than one board for that count, the Style row lets you choose (e.g. Classic four-player: straight or S-curve).

Categories

• Compact — the built-in linear peg meter. Drawn by the app, so it fits any game (2, 3 or 4 sides) and always works. Carries the par / skunk milestones.
• Classic — the traditional hole boards: two-player, three-track, and four-track (straight or S-curve).
• Racetrack — three boards (Oval, Square, Round), each three tracks, each with its own saying you can edit.
• States — Arizona and Minnesota (two-track, so 1-v-1 or 2-v-2). Drawn in native portrait orientation rather than auto-rotated to landscape, matching the artwork.
• Twenty-nine — the "perfect 29" themed two-track board (1-v-1 or 2-v-2).
• Captain's — Three-track and Compass boards for the Captain's game specifically: the lone captain versus the two-player team, whose scores merge onto one shared side, so these are 2-track boards like any other 2-side game — but they only offer themselves when the game actually is Captain's, so a plain 1-v-1 game (also "2 sides") never silently picks up Captain's-themed art. The Compass board is also drawn in its native orientation, not auto-rotated.

Finish & par. Wood and Stain set the board's finish, and Par holes can be shown on every board — the pace milestones you'd hold if you were exactly on par (see Par in the glossary).

Racetrack sayings. Each racetrack carries a saying in its infield, and you can replace it with your own — each racetrack keeps its own. Edit it in the box under the Racetrack style (it starts filled with that board's lines), one line per row; each line fits what the art allows. A size slider scales the text, and Reset restores the board's original saying.

Theory

Twenty-Six Theory pacing — this content sat under a confusing "Game" heading before the playable Games tab existed. Enter who dealt first, the deal number, and both scores; get a live comparison against Colvert's par-hole table with a plain-language read on leaning offensive or defensive given the actual gap.

Reference

The lookup shelf. Tables covers the scoring reference in order:

• Pegging scoring — every way points are scored during the play (fifteens, thirty-one, pairs, runs, go, last card, his heels), tap any row for a real card example. A Combinations section shows the same numbers when scores stack in one play.
• Hand scoring — every way points are scored at the show (fifteens, pairs, runs, flushes, nobs), tap any row for a real card example. A Combinations section shows double/triple runs with their pairs; a Special section covers His Nobs and His Heels.

• Hand lookup — pick any 4-card hand plus a starter and see every real scoring outcome it can produce (flush eligibility, His Nobs, and — for each — how many of the actual 52-card deals produce that exact condition). Computed live by brute-force suit enumeration and scored with the app's own engine; no data file is stored.
• The full 13×13 crib discard-value matrix (91 unique rank pairs), computed by full exact enumeration, not sampled. Color-coded heatmap; toggle between dealer framing (find high) and pone framing (find low).
• A card-frequency table — how often each rank tends to be held in a kept hand (opponents keep 5s and Jacks disproportionately, for instance). This is the data behind the Winners look-ahead's reply weighting.
• A glossary of the cribbage terms used across the app.

Drills

Three focused practice modes, picked with the buttons at the top of the tab:

• Counting speed — a timed hand-scoring drill; see "Counting-speed trainer" below for the two modes.
• Discard quiz — you are dealt six and pick the two to throw; the app grades the choice against the full 15-option ranking, using whichever opponent crib model is selected.
• Masters' problems — a set of published problem hands from the strategy literature, with the reasoning shown after you commit to an answer.

Session streak

A running readout of how the current practice set is going, shown beside the drill. Each dot is one of your last ten hands this set — green when you found the top-EV play, amber when you were one step off, red when you were further away — and the percentage is how often you have hit the best play. Use New set to clear it and start a fresh streak.

Match Log

Persistent record of real games at the table, separate from in-app practice stats: live point-by-point scoring during a real game or log one after the fact, per-opponent win/loss and average margin, inline edit/ delete, survives across sessions via artifact storage.

Per-hand detail. Each saved game (2-player and 3-/4-handed alike) expands to a ▸ detail row per hand: the real cards kept and tossed, the card-by-card pegging sequence, and the show broken down into its actual scoring combinations (fifteens, pairs, runs, flush, nobs) rather than just the totals. A 2-player hand also shows the toss decision's quality — its rank among every possible discard, and the EV gap to the best one, the same read the drills have always given, now on real games too. Add a note on any hand directly in its detail row; it saves as you leave the field.

Replay a hand. A 2-player hand with its kept cards recorded carries a ▸ replay this hand link — it hands the exact position (both hands, the crib, the cut, and the scores going into that hand) to the Scenario drill and re-scores the show live, so you can review it the same way you'd review any Scenario position. (3-/4-handed hands aren't replayable this way — Scenario only models a two-sided dealer/pone hand.)

Printing a record. Tick the entries you want and use Print selected. It prints the same way the Guide does: US Letter at a 1 inch margin, a running header, and a running footer carrying "Page N of M" — so a multi-game record stays in order once it is on paper. As with the Guide, leave your print dialog's Headers and footers option off; the margin here comes from the page itself, so a dialog set to Margins: None cannot strip it. A Summary / Full detail toggle controls how much of the above goes to paper — Summary is the classic one-line-per-hand printout; Full detail adds the kept cards, the show breakdown, the discard read and any notes, so a long game prints as much paper as you actually asked for.

Find. A search box and a date range narrow the games, drills and journal entries below all together — search checks the opponent's name, any note (game-level or on a specific hand), a drill's own summary line, and a journal entry's title and body, so typing what you remember about a hand is usually enough to find it again.

Journal. Beyond the notes attached to a specific hand, + Journal entry adds a free-text entry of your own — a title, the date, and as much or as little as you want to write, optionally linked to a specific game or drill session if it's about one. Use it for anything that doesn't belong to a single hand: a pattern you noticed across a session, a reminder for next time, or just a thought worth keeping. Journal entries get their own row in Show, alongside Games and each drill.

Categories. A row of checkboxes (2-player games, multi games, Discarding drill, Pegging drill, Full Hand drill) lets you pick which kinds of play to include, then Select these applies that pick to the same selection Print and every export below read — so "what to include" and "which format" are two separate choices.

Export / Import. The app keeps everything local by design — nothing is transmitted anywhere on its own. To move a log between devices (for example, a game played on mobile that you want to review on the web version), JSON selected or JSON all downloads a .json file carrying the full record, and Import from file reads one back in. Importing only ever adds games it doesn't already have — it never overwrites an entry already in your log, so importing the same file twice is harmless. Reading a file doesn't import it right away: a panel shows how many entries it holds broken down by category (games, each drill, journal entries, even a best-of-N match series someone else sent you), plus a date range, so you can bring in just the part you want — Import matching — or everything at once with Import all.

CSV selected / CSV all downloads four linked spreadsheet files (sessions, hands, seats, plays) instead — built for real analysis in Excel or Sheets: every value its own column, so you can filter and pivot directly rather than reading text. A "seat" here is one player's scored hand within a round, with the crib shown as one more row of its own (it belongs to the dealer, but it's not any one player's hand); the fourth file lists every individual pegging play. The two formats serve different jobs — .json is what you re-import to review or replay a game in the app; the CSV files are for counting, summarizing and spotting trends outside it.

Settings

The app-wide options, set once here instead of being repeated on every tab. A tab may override a default locally, but this is where the defaults live.

• Sizing — Display size (Auto rescales the whole UI to fit the window and keeps fitting as it resizes; Manual pins a Scale with a slider) and Content width (a comfortable reading column, or full width). One scale moves cards, text and spacing together, and the choice is remembered.
• Welcome — the short guided welcome shown when the app opens (after the Toss & Tally splash screen): the goal, card values, a hand in three moves and an overview of the two-player board, ending with a link into How to Play. Show welcome turns it on or off (on by default); Auto-advance every sets how many seconds each step stays up before moving on by itself (5 by default, 2–30). The Show welcome button ("Play welcome screen now") opens it right away, without changing the setting, — it is also on the first How to Play screen.
• Cap his heels (under Special) — on by default. When the cut card is a Jack the dealer pegs 2 ("his heels"); with this on, those 2 points can never by themselves take the dealer to the out in any game or variation, so the last point has to be earned in the play or the show. Turn it off to let a Jack cut win the game outright.
• Rules preset (top of Special) — one tap sets every rule switch together. Casual (the default): his heels capped, Standard free play scoring (1 / 2 / 4 / 4), skunk and double skunk on, Captain's skunk at 30 on, played cards face down, Muggins off. ACC tournament: the dealer may win on heels (rule 6.3.b), ACC scoring (2 for a win, 3 for a skunk), skunk and double skunk on, no Captain's skunk (the ACC has no rule for it), played cards face up (rule 7.1.d), Muggins on (rule 10). Change any single switch afterwards and the picker shows Custom; nothing is lost.
• Skunk, Double skunk and Captain's game skunk at 30 (under Special) — three settings, all on by default. Skunk off: every win is a plain win. Double skunk off: double and triple count as an ordinary skunk. Captain's game skunk at 30 sets the short game's own skunk line (loser on 30 or fewer); it is shown only while Skunk is on and a Captain's game is selected. See Scoring rulesets for the numbers.
• Adjust sizes in place — every control on this panel also opens in a small floating window that stays on top of whatever tab you are looking at, so you can watch the cards or the board change as you drag instead of switching tabs to check. It holds the display size, the content width and all seven element sliders, plus its own tab picker. Drag it by its title bar to wherever suits you; it opens beside the app rather than in a screen corner, it can be collapsed to just its title bar, and it stays where you put it between visits. Everything in it is the same control as on this tab — move either and the other already shows the new value.
• Board — a two-step Category → Style picker. The Category is the theme (Compact · Classic · Racetrack · States · Twenty-nine); the Style is the specific board within it. The board is chosen automatically by the game's number of scoring sides — tracks = sides, so a 2-track board is for a 1-v-1 or a 2-v-2, a 3-track board for three sides, a 4-track board for four individual sides — and where a category has more than one board for that count you pick the Style. Compact is the built-in linear meter and always fits; the Classic, Racetrack, States and Twenty-nine boards are drawn artwork. A live preview sits beside the picker, and Wood + Stain set the board's finish. Par holes can be shown on every board style. Racetrack boards carry an editable saying — each racetrack keeps its own, edited in one box (pre-filled with that board's lines), with a size slider and a Reset that restores the board's original.
• Play surface — Card spacing (Stagger / Across), Played Card Display (Face Up / Face Down / Dimmed) and Dim illegal cards.
• Drills — Who deals in drills (which sets whose crib it is in the practice hands) and the Player 2 (opponent) crib model used to estimate crib EV: Realistic (calibrated to published master discard tables) or Random. This choice feeds every crib-EV number the app shows; see "Crib EV" in the glossary.
• Coaching and Guidance — In-drill and In-game coaching (Show guidance / Interactive coaching), plus the shared Coaching panels defaults that every tab inherits and can override. Your seat's skill level sets the starting default; you can flip it either way.
• Play Logs — record the full play log (every deal, decision and outcome), and auto-save finished games to it.
• Hand count (Game) — automatic counting, or step through pone → dealer → crib with a stop at each; plus Warn near game end (within 8 points).
• Special — Match scoring (ACC tournament / Standard free play) and Muggins.
• Opponent skill (Game) — Beginner / Average / Experienced / Expert, set per player; see "How the opponent plays" below. It is the same control on the tab's in-play panel and here — change it in either place. A change takes effect on the next hand.
• Reset to defaults and Download game settings — two separate actions at the bottom of the page. Reset puts every setting here back to how the app ships (saved games and the Play Log are untouched). Download saves everything on this page — names, board, coaching, skill levels, clocks and more — exactly as it stands right now, to a file you can keep or share (for example, to set up the same look and feel on another device). It's separate from the Play Log's own export: this is your setup, not your game history, and it's download-only for now — there's no matching import yet.
• Clear saved data — below those two. One checkbox for each kind of data the app keeps on this device: the Play Log, a game in progress, saved scenarios, friend profiles, Settings, Board choices and the diagnostics log. Check what you want gone and tap Clear selected; nothing is deleted until you confirm, and the app then reloads. Settings and Board choices go back to the shipped defaults. Updating the app always keeps your data and a fresh install starts with none, so this is the way to clear what a device has accumulated.

How the opponent plays

One baseline model with two documented departures, stated plainly so you know what you are practicing against. The baseline holds in the Pegging drill, the Full-hand and pegging-potential simulations, and the heads-up Games tab:

• Discarding: best-EV. The opponent keeps the 4 cards that maximize expected hand-plus-crib value (hand-minus-crib as pone), using the same hand-EV and crib-EV math as the Discarding tab.
• Pegging: greedy. It always plays the card that scores the most points right now. No look-ahead, no baiting, no board awareness.

The two departures, both deliberate and both described where they apply:

• Skill tier. Four tiers, weakest to strongest: Beginner (the easiest — mis-discards often and plays random pegs, good for learning the flow of the play), Average (leaks some safe pegs and takes a sub-optimal keep now and then), Experienced (best-EV discards, greedy pegging — the default), and Expert, which adds board awareness on defense — see the next paragraph.
• Multi-handed seats. In the 3-/4-handed games the opponent seats use a crib-aware, skill-tiered toss — loading a crib their own side owns, starving one it does not — rather than the flat heads-up best-EV toss. In Captain's the two AI partners additionally coordinate their two throws with each other instead of each deciding alone.

The Expert skill tier adds one piece of board awareness — it plays off defensively when it's ahead (it won't hand you a pair when protecting a lead, except to match the cut), so pair-baits land less often against Expert than against the greedy Experienced / Average / Beginner tiers. But no tier is a fully adaptive opponent: none of them adjust to your tendencies over a session. That makes the opponent a consistent, repeatable training baseline (see the opponent-skill note under "Not currently modeled" in section 3).

What no tier does — bluffing and lead-reading. The opponent plays a value-and-defense model, never a deceptive one. It won't lead a King (or any card) as a bluff — a deliberately weak-looking lead meant to induce a scoring reply it can then punish — and it never reads meaning into your leads to set a counter-trap. Both are real advanced-human tools; against this opponent a bluff lead is just a weak lead, and your own leads are safe from being "read." Practice them knowing the trainer won't fight back in kind.

Skill levels

Every activity carries a Skill Level Selection — two pull-downs, one for you and one for the opponent — and each activity keeps its own. You can be a Beginner at discarding, Average at pegging, and something else again in a full game; the opponent's level is set the same way, per activity. The four levels are the same everywhere: Beginner · Average · Experienced · Expert.

The opponent level sets how well the computer plays (see "How the opponent plays" above). Your level does two things. It seeds whether the in-game coaching starts on or off — a Beginner is coached by default, an Expert is left alone — and it pitches how the coaching is delivered: a Beginner gets more of the fundamentals in plainer words, an Expert gets the terse call and the number. You can change either level at any time, and turning coaching on or off by hand always overrides the default.

The levels live in each drill's In-play options and in the Games in-play panel; the Challenges tab has its own. (Matching the challenge content to each level — easier hands and more time for a Beginner, harder problems for an Expert — is planned but not yet in place.)

The two coaching switches beside the levels — Show guidance and Interactive coaching — work in the drills, not just a game. In the Discarding and Full Hand drills, Show guidance names the recommended best toss (with its expected value) and the crib strategy while you are still choosing, and Interactive coaching adds a nudge on the toss you have picked — a warning when it falls well short of the best, or a check-mark when you are close. The Discard coaching box (the balk and small-hand notes shown after you toss) has its own on/off in the same place, on by default.

Situation Score

The You / Opp numbers above a Pegging-drill hand are the Situation Score: a randomly generated but plausible mid-game board position, as if dealer and pone had each pegged and counted their way partway up the board. It is not a running tally of your drill hands — each new deal gets a new situation. The point is context: the right pegging play changes with the board. Behind, you play on (offense — chase points, weight Winners); ahead, you play off (defense — protect the lead, weight Losers). See "Offense / Defense mode (the Street coach)" in section 3 for how the app reads the board.

Counting-speed trainer

A timed hand-scoring drill — count a hand's 15s, runs, pairs, flush, and nobs against the clock. It ships as the Counting speed drill in the Challenges tab and runs in two modes: race (type the final total) and guided (step through the hand category by category). The clock does not run on its own: it starts when you touch the first card (or type your first digit), and a Start / Stop button lets you pause and resume. Each new hand starts stopped. See "Drills" above.

3 · Cribbage strategy & theory

Everything below is either exact computation (labeled as such) or a named, sourced heuristic — never presented as if all of it carries equal certainty.

Discard strategy

The core tension: cards that score well in your own hand aren't always safe to keep vs. what's left over feeding the crib, and whether that crib is yours (dealer) or your opponent's (pone) flips the incentive. This app resolves that by exact hand-EV computation plus crib-EV estimation, not a static "always keep this, discard that" chart — see the Discarding tab notes above, and the Tables tab for the full exact reference table.

"Intrinsic points" — why this app is already ahead. A common manual adjustment taught for comparing discards is to subtract the points a held pair or Jack would score in your hand anyway, so you don't double-count them when weighing the crib. That correction only exists because people rank crib tables in isolation. Toss & Tally never needs it: it ranks every discard on total EV (hand ± crib together), so a card's in-hand value and its crib value are already combined once, not twice. The manual "intrinsic points" step is a workaround for a problem the exact-EV model doesn't have.

Pegging strategy

Several distinct layers, each sourced separately:

• Named trap patterns (Magic Eleven, the dealer/non-dealer 5-traps, the Jack trap, the 4-5-6 entice-run) — specific card-combination plays from Colvert's tips, pattern-matched against your kept hand.
• Lead selection — not a single flat formula. The app evaluates each card in your kept hand by three distinct, separately sourced mechanisms and picks the lowest combined risk:
• Same-rank pair in hand (Colvert Tip 8, "The end game: defensive pegging"): quoted directly, "the rule to remember in defensive pegging is to always lead a card, preferably from a pair... if [opponent] pairs the lead, the game is over as you score pairs royal for six points." Modeled as an exact hypergeometric expected-value term — probability the opponent holds a matching card × the net swing if they take the bait (+6 pairs royal for you, -2 pair for them) — not a flat bonus. Exception: a pair of Jacks does not get this treatment. The Jack trap already covers that specific case with the opposite advice — lead a non-Jack, save the pair to try tripling a lone opponent Jack later — so Jacks are carved out of the generic pair-bait term to avoid the guidance panel contradicting its own Jack-trap note in the same hand. (The Jack-trap note itself has been attributed at different times to Colvert's Tip 5 and to Michael Schell, and neither was ever checked against the author's own text. The attribution has been dropped rather than a name chosen — the play stands on the arithmetic of the count.)
• No pair or run connection at all — a true "sleeper" (Colvert Tip 1, "Sleeper cards"): quoted directly, a sleeper is "a card that is a mismatch in a good cribbage hand" (e.g., the 7 in a 7-J-Q-K hand) — lead it to camouflage your hand's structure from the opponent. No penalty applied to this card; it's the default best pick when no pair exists.
• A full 4-card run with no true mismatch card (Colvert Tip 1, second half): when the hand is a complete sequence like 9-10-J-Q, Tip 1 instead says to lead from the low end while "playing offense" (see offense/defense mode below) — maximizes pairing chances on the reply and reduces the opponent's shot at a 31 follow-up. Colvert doesn't attach a number to this preference, so it's applied as a small tie-breaking heuristic, not a computed value like the pair-bait or 15-risk terms.
• 5-or-ten-card 15-gift risk, unchanged from prior versions: an exactly-computed hypergeometric probability that leading a 5 or a ten-card (10/J/Q/K) hands the opponent an immediate 15-2, since those two values complete each other. Sourced to CribbageCorner.com's basic strategy page.
• Offense / Defense mode (the Street coach) — whether you're currently "playing on" (offense) or "playing off" (defense), read from the board against the unified Theory-of-26 par ladder (the same the Theory tab uses). v11.6 — the margin method: at any par hole you're ~50% to go out on the expected count, so the player closer to their nearest role par hole values a point more. You closer → play on (chase points, weight Winners); opponent closer → play off (protect, weight Losers). This corrects the old "behind par → on / ahead → off" rule, which misreads cases like you 1 ahead of par, opponent 9 behind (you should play ON to consolidate, not OFF). The mode gates the run-end lead preference above, decides which of the two per-card counts is emphasized and check-marked, and shows as a colored Offense (green) / Defense (amber) tag in the Situation Score block. The Discarding and Full-hand tabs have no board position to draw on and always run in neutral mode.
• Losers — counting losers (defense) — the first number under each legal card: how many specific unseen cards would let the opponent score on their immediate reply. Lower is safer; when playing off, take the minimum-Losers card. This is Colvert's counting losers — earlier versions of this app called it "outs," renamed because poker trained everyone to read more outs as good, and here they're bad. The computation directly mirrors the book's own worked examples (e.g., "only two 8's are outstanding") — verified to match exactly, see notes. Classic opening-lead reference values: leading a 5 ≈ 19 losers (every ten-card makes 15, plus the pair), a face card ≈ 7 (four 5s plus the pair), a 4 = 3 (only the pair — no reply can make 15) — the arithmetic behind "never lead a 5" and "a 4 is a safe lead."
• Winners — counting winners (offense) — the second number under each card: a depth-2 look-ahead, Colvert's counting winners, the offensive mirror of Losers. The app weighs the opponent's likely replies to the card by the card-frequency hold rates in the Tables tab (opponents don't hold all ranks equally), then counts the replies after which one of your own remaining cards scores. Higher is better when playing on. One realistic look-ahead — not a naive next-card count, and not a full game-tree search.
• Score-context overrides — the percentage play isn't always the right play. If the opponent is close enough to winning that even a small response could peg them out, the app flags when the safest card by Losers count still carries that risk, and surfaces a safer alternative even if it has more losers.
• Dealer vs. pone pegging tradeoffs — as dealer, you can play a little safer since you also have the crib; as pone, pegging points matter more since you don't.

Leading & responding — the masters and the data

Your lead depends on your objective. For the same hand, the best lead changes with what you need. From 6-7-8-9 (a very common pone hand), Cribbage Pro's data across tens of thousands of games says: lead the 8 for the most net points; lead the 7 on a "Hail Mary" when you need a big count (the only lead that ever pegs 11); lead the 6 when you need exactly one point. When the dealer plays a 7 on your 8, play the 9 for the run of three — the dealer completes a run of four only 42% of the time.

Trap with low cards when you can. From 4-5-6-6, lead the 6 — the "non-dealer 5-trap": 6, your other 6, then the 4 (run of three + 31), then the 5 (15). Against a dealer holding only ten-cards and 5s (~9% of hands) you peg about 7 to their 1. Don't lead the 4 from this hand (no edge either way), and never lead the lone 5.

Leading ten-cards (10 / J / Q / K). The masters disagree, and the disagreement teaches the trade-off. Colvert and Barlow lead the King — the ten-card the dealer is least likely to hold, so it's hardest to pair, and it keeps your J-Q connected for a later trap. Rasmussen and Schell lead the Jack — dealers throw Jacks to their own crib, so they rarely hold one, and a sharp dealer expects the "safe" King and may bluff-pair it. Two rules both camps share: from 10-10-J-Q, never play a 10 then a Queen (the gap reveals you hold the missing Jack — play the Jack first); and to invite a pair on offense, lead from the end of a run (from 9-10-J-Q, lead the 9).

Should you pair the opponent's lead? Pairing banks a sure 2 — but if they hold a third of that rank they answer with pair-royal for 6. Cribbage Pro's data gives the odds a random opponent holds that third: below one-in-three for a lead of 3, 4, or 8 (worth pairing), but high for aces (~50%) and 5s (~45%) (leave those). Any lead matching the cut is safe to pair. Skilled opponents lead from a pair more, so be warier pairing a good player's 5, 9, or Jack. (The Pegging and Games tabs surface this live as a "Pair the X?" read.)

Position overrides the odds. Chambers and Colvert are absolute here: when you're ahead on the board and playing defensively, never pair a lead — a pair-royal retaliation "may well be fatal" to a lead you should be protecting. Pairing courts variance, which is an offensive weapon — save it for when you're behind and need the swing. Barlow pushes the other way for the trailer: a net loss of 4 on a triple exchange "is not a disaster," and some pairs carry their own insurance — pair a 2 while holding a 9 and, if they trip it, your 9 makes fifteen-two to cut the loss to 2.

Pairing vs. the fifteen. Given a choice between pairing and bringing the count to 15, prefer the 15 — it scores the same 2 but changes the rank on the board, denying the immediate triple. The exception is defensive: off an 8, don't play a 7 for 15 while protecting a lead — it opens a run to a 6 or 9; "play off" and choke the sequence instead. (v12: the Expert opponent now plays all of this — it pairs 3/4/8, refuses 9/J and 5s, takes a cut-matching pair, never pairs while ahead, and prefers a 15 to a pair.)

Responding as dealer (net-pegging data): holding 5-10-J-K and the opponent leads a King, play the 5 — don't pair (+2.2 net; nearly half of players pair and lose ground); holding 4-5-6-J and they lead a 6, play the Jack (+2.4); holding 7-8-9-9 and they lead a 3, play the 9. Small edges compound — an extra two points a game is worth roughly +3.5% on your win rate.

Not yet computed live, per hand — the Guide teaches the principles above; these are the automatic per-hand recommendations still to come:

• Recovery-based leads. The book shows leads chosen specifically because a different card in your hand punishes a pair-response to the lead (e.g., leading a 7 where your Ace recovers a fifteen if the 7 gets paired). The app's lead-risk score doesn't currently look ahead this way — it scores the lead card itself, not what your hand can do after a specific bad response.
• Anticipated-response leads. Similarly, some leads are chosen because a specific response is statistically likely and your hand is set up to punish that response specifically, not just any pair. Not modeled.
• Ten-card lead order. When holding multiple ten-cards, which to lead first matters in the book's examples — but the reasoning shifts based on the rest of the hand in ways that weren't safe to generalize into a single rule from the examples available without risking a wrong or overfit recommendation. Left unbuilt rather than guessed at.
• Opponent skill dial (built). The opponent has a skill dial — Average / Experienced / Expert. Experienced is the core model (greedy max-immediate pegging + best-EV discarding, see "How the opponent plays" in section 2); Average sometimes mis-discards and misses safe pegs; Expert (v12) plays a bounded 2-ply look-ahead — it maximizes net pegs (what it scores now minus what you can peg back), weighting the pairs-royal risk by the empirical trap table, so it pairs 3/4/8, refuses 9/J and 5s, respects a cut-match, never pairs while ahead on the board, and prefers a 15 to a pair. Head-to-head it out-pegs both Average and Experienced — with one variant exception (v15.1): in Captain's, the partnership races to 121 while the lone player needs only 61, and playing safe is a bad trade for a side that has to out-score a shorter race. Expert partner seats there drop the defensive discount and play for points. As of v15.1 they no longer trailed Experienced; as of v15.2, with a misfiring defensive trigger removed, they out-score it there. The "never pair while protecting a lead" rule still applies to them. One practical note: because the Average and Experienced models take a pair-bait almost every time they can, the pair-bait EV term above is closer to true for them than against a human — or against Expert, which now declines the trap.
• Offense/defense nuance. The mode switch now reads the board against Colvert's par-hole table rather than the earlier bare ahead-or-behind rule — a real improvement, but still not the whole story. General pegging discussion (see Sources) stresses that playing on vs. playing off also depends on endgame specifics and opponent tendencies, none of which is modeled yet.

Twenty-Six Theory (game pacing)

Colvert's finding that the dealer's "free" crib means the initial non-dealer is structurally behind pace for the whole game. A dealer averages ~16 points a hand and a pone ~10, so each player expects 26 points per full round — one hand as dealer plus one as pone, 16 + 10. (It is 26 each across the round, not 26 shared between the two of you.) That yields a single unified par-hole ladder — absolute board positions you want to be at at the start of a turn: 17 · 43 · 69 · 95 as the dealer, 7 · 33 · 59 · 85 · 111 as the pone, each rung 26 apart. Extend either ladder one rung backward and you get the ideal starting position: −9 for the dealer (17 − 26) and +7 for the pone. The 16-point gap between those two is exactly the dealer's per-hand edge. v11.6 — the margin method (per r/Cribbage / mastahX420, cleaner than a fixed per-hand schedule because it survives leap-frogging 26 ahead): each turn, compare your distance from your nearest role par hole vs. the opponent's distance from theirs, and let the closer player's point win — you closer → play on, opponent closer → play off. There are really two board-position questions: margin from par governs "trading points" (whether to pair / make 15 / complete a run — known exchanges), while how far ahead or behind overall governs "taking risks" (gambling a good card into the crib, counting on the cut). Both the Theory tab and the Pegging/Game Street coach read from this one ladder.

The dealer advantage, in numbers. The positional edge is large and well-measured: from large-sample human play (Fuller Systems), the dealer wins ≈ 55.5% of games, and having the first deal is worth ≈ +11% wins — a gap that holds up consistently across skill tiers. That's the concrete reason the deal and the crib matter so much, and why the initial non-dealer has to play catch-up all game.

Skunk avoidance and skunk pursuit

Once a game is lopsided, the skunk lines change what "playing well" means for both players — and they do it before the game is decided, which is what makes them a strategy topic rather than a scoring footnote. The lines sit at 31 · 61 · 91 (see the streets table in section 1).

Trailing badly — play for the line, not the win. If the opponent is close to pegging out and you cannot realistically catch them, the goal stops being the game and becomes the nearest line above you. A skunk costs a game point under ACC (3 against 2) and considerably more in casual or stakes play, so points that are worthless for winning are still worth having. That inverts your normal discarding: keep high-variance hands that might produce a big count rather than safe ones that reliably produce a small one, and peg aggressively, because a card that risks giving up 2 is cheap when the alternative is finishing three holes short.

Leading heavily — the line is worth playing for. With a large lead, check whether the opponent can be trapped behind a line before you peg out. Sacrificing a point or two of hand value can be correct if it leaves you safer pegging cards and denies them the run of points they need to cross. Be honest about the trade, though: under ACC the double and triple tiers pay nothing extra, so pursuing them is worth real risk only under a ruleset that scores them, or for the satisfaction. Chasing a double skunk and losing the ordinary skunk is a bad trade.

Where the app helps. The board draws all three lines, so you can see which one is live. The Street coach's on/off read is driven by par-hole pace rather than by skunk lines, so treat it as advice about the game — when you are playing for a line instead, you are deliberately overriding it.

4 · Sources

Cribbage is an old game and its facts belong to everybody — the rules, the odds, the point values. What follows is the other part: whose work this app leans on, what of theirs is here, and how it reached us. The third column is the one worth reading. There is a real difference between a book we opened, a page we read online, and a bulk scrape we mined for ideas, and collapsing all three into the word "sourced" would flatter the weakest of them.

Where a source's exact page or URL was not recorded at the time, this says so rather than inventing a citation that looks checkable and is not.

On the Colvert attribution, because it has already gone wrong once. An earlier version of this app credited a sleeper-card idea to Tip 1 without anyone having read Tip 1 — the online excerpt carries tip titles in its navigation, not the full text. That attribution shipped across five releases before the physical book was consulted and it turned out to say something different. Tips 1 and 8 are now typed from the book, and the losers-counting logic was checked against one of the book's own worked examples and produces the same number. The lesson is built into how this section is now laid out: what we have actually read is stated separately from what we have only heard.

On the master tables — changed 2026-09-03. These three tables were reproduced in full in Reference → Tables. They no longer are. The app now shows an Agreement view instead: how closely its own Realistic model matches the published consensus, discard by discard, in bands rather than values — RMS 0.228 across all 91 discards, largest single difference 0.469, none over half a point.

The calibration claim is unaffected, and is arguably better made: "our model agrees with the three published masters to within a quarter of a point on average, and here is where it differs" shows the calibration doing work, where five side-by-side tables invited you to check it by eye.

A per-cell exact deviation was deliberately not used, because it is invertible — publishing our value and the difference lets anyone reconstruct theirs exactly, which would have republished all three under a thinner disguise. The bands bound the difference without yielding the value.

The authors are still credited on that screen, by name and method. Removing the values is not removing the people: their work remains the benchmark this model was fitted against.

General web references were used as cross-checks during development. Where they disagreed with each other or with exact computation, the computation won; several such disagreements were found and none of them were carried into the app.

Where the app itself says this. Credit is not left to this page alone. The About panel on the Intro tab names the major sources; Reference → Tables carries a byline under the master grids naming their three authors and the compiler; the card-frequency table and the Glossary say where their material came from. Each links back here.

Credits — whose work is in this app

The short version, for anyone who wants the names without the table: DeLynn Colvert · Craig Hessel · Bruce Bowman · George "Ras" Rasmussen · Michael Schell · Dan Barlow · John Chambers · the American Cribbage Congress · Fuller Systems (Cribbage Pro) · CribbageCorner.com · Cornell University · the Vashon/Wennstrom Cribbage Club · and the contributors to the r/cribbage thread cited above.

The trap patterns, the par ladder and the master tables are theirs. The engine, the models fitted to those tables, the drills, the coaching and the writing are this app's own.

Validation history — what has been checked against what, and the honest list of what has not — is kept in the project's development notes (toss-and-tally-notes-v9.md, the last of that series; the running queue since then is backlog.md).

5 · What actually differentiates this from a typical cribbage app

(Market-checked, Aug 2026: live discard expected values are not unique — Cribbage Classic surfaces "all possible expected hand values for all discard pairs," and Cribby and various web calculators do similar. So "shows discard EV" is not the differentiator; the points below are what is genuinely less common in cribbage tools.)

1. Exact crib EV against a realistic, calibrated opponent — not a random crib. Hand-EV calculators are common; the harder, rarer part is the crib. Toss & Tally enumerates crib EV over every opponent-discard-and-starter combination and weights it by a Realistic opponent model calibrated to the published master discard tables — where most tools assume a uniform/random opponent throw. Hand EV (all 46 starters) and crib EV are both exact by enumeration (no Monte-Carlo jitter), with the full 15-option ranking shown, not a single black-box pick.

2. Reasoning attached to every result, right or wrong. Most trainers only explain mistakes. This one explains correct picks too — why the optimal choice actually wins, by mechanism, every time.

3. A zero-noise exact ranking. Because both hand EV and crib EV are enumerated rather than Monte-Carlo sampled, the 15-option ranking carries no estimation jitter: two discards that are genuinely equal in value tie to the decimal instead of showing a mystifying gap, and any real difference you see (a flush, a suited crib toss) is a true edge, not sampling noise.

4. Sourced, attributed strategy content, separated from computed EV — every named pattern says where it came from and whether it's exact math or a heuristic layered on top, including when two sourced heuristics turn out to conflict (see the Jack-trap/pair-bait carve-out above) and which one wins.

5. A pegging simulator that explains its own scoring and its own statistical reasoning — every play shows which combination scored, every legal option shows its Losers and Winners counts, every finished hand gets a play-by-play review.

6. Discard and pegging practice aren't siloed — the Full-hand tab runs both on the same kept cards.

7. Real-game tracking, not just practice stats, via the Match Log.

8. Reconsidering a discard doesn't corrupt the numbers — the original attempt stays counted; most simple trainers either skip undo entirely or silently skew their own stats when it's used.

9. Verified, not just plausible, reference data. The crib-value matrix was cross-checked against Cornell's published probabilities and multiple external sources, catching a real error in at least one commonly cited external discard chart. The same instinct extends to smaller decisions — the win-warning threshold, the lead-risk weighting, and the losers-counting logic are all grounded in actual computation or verified against the book's own examples, not picked as round numbers.

10. Two opponent models, and the master tables behind them. Crib EV can assume a random opponent (a clean uniform-random enumeration, zero sampling noise) or a realistic one (the pone balks, the dealer loads). The realistic model isn't hand-waved: its throw weights are calibrated so the dealer case reproduces the published master discard tables of Craig Hessel, Bruce Bowman, and George Rasmussen — to about 0.23 points RMS against their average, roughly half the error of the random assumption. The Tables tab shows an Agreement view of exactly how well it matches them, discard by discard, alongside the app's own realistic and exact tables. Most trainers bake in a single hidden crib assumption; this one names both, lets you toggle between them, and shows how it was tuned against.

6 · Glossary

Quick definitions for the terms the trainer links inline. Throughout the app, a dotted-underline term opens a small popover with a one-line version and a "Read more in the Guide →" link that lands on the matching entry below.

Discard

The two cards you throw from your dealt six. They form the crib — yours to build when you're the dealer, the opponent's to feed when you're the pone (which is why balking matters).

Hand EV

The average points your four kept cards will score, computed exactly over all 46 possible starter cuts. Shown as the Hand column in the discard ranking.

Crib EV

The average points your two discards are worth in the crib, computed over every combination of the opponent's two crib cards and the starter. Added to your hand EV when you're the dealer, subtracted when you're the pone. Shown as the Crib column. How the opponent's two cards are modeled is set by the Opponent model (below).

Opponent model

Two ways the crib EV can treat the opponent's two crib cards. Realistic (the default) weights them by how a real opponent discards — as dealer the pone balks (hoards 5s and Jacks, dumps low/safe cards into your crib); as pone the dealer loads their own crib. Those weights are calibrated so the dealer case reproduces the published master discard tables (Hessel / Bowman / Rasmussen — see the Tables tab). Random (exact) instead assumes every unseen card is equally likely — a clean uniform-random enumeration with zero sampling noise. Switch it in the discard settings; the two differ most on 5-hungry discards (5-10, 5-K), which a random opponent over-feeds and a real pone will not.

EV

Expected value — the total a keep is worth: hand EV ± crib EV. The ranking sorts all 15 discard options by this number.

Rank (optimal)

Where your chosen discard falls among the 15 options by total EV. Rank 1 is optimal; the difference between rank 1 and your pick is the EV you left on the table.

Magic Eleven

Colvert's heuristic: four cards that can total 11 (or 21) tend to make fifteens and peg well, so they're strong to keep.

Small-Hand Rule

Our name for a common principle, not a term borrowed from a particular author: when your six cards are weak, keep the four that peg and balk safely rather than reach for a marginal count — a small, safe hand outperforms a fragile larger one.

Balk

As the pone, deliberately throwing low, disconnected cards (never a 5) into the opponent's crib to starve it of points.

Losers

Unseen cards that would let the opponent score on their immediate reply to a card you play — a defensive count; fewer is safer. This is Colvert's "counting losers" (formerly labeled "outs").

It is an exact count of cards, which is why it's worth trusting. In a 3- or 4-handed game more than one opponent plays before your next turn, so it adds up every one of them and is shown tagged field — a bigger number there means more seats can hurt you, not that your card is worse.

Winners

The opponent replies (weighted by how likely they are to hold each rank) after which one of your own remaining cards can score — an offensive, depth-2 look-ahead; more is better.

Unlike Losers, this is a weighted estimate rather than a card count, and with 3 or 4 players it stays keyed on the opponent who plays immediately before you (plus your partner's help in a 2 v 2) — which is why it barely grows when Losers does.

Reading the two together: compare each number across your own cards — fewest Losers for the safe play, most Winners for the aggressive one. Don't compare Losers against Winners; they count different things and don't share a scale.

Offense / Defense

The Street coach's read on how to play the hand: on (chase pegs and points) when you're behind par, off (protect the lead — deny fifteens, pairs, and runs) when you're ahead.

Par

The pacing concept: the score you would expect to hold by a given deal in an average game, from Colvert's Twenty-Six Theory. Behind par, press; ahead of par, protect. The specific number par resolves to for a given deal is the par-hole, below.

Sleeper

The safest opening lead — a card with no pair or run connection to the rest of your hand, so leading it reveals nothing about your structure (Colvert Tip 1).

Starter

The card cut from the deck after the discards and turned face-up. It is never played during the pegging; it acts as a shared fifth card for every hand and for the crib at the show. Also called the cut or the turn-up.

Crib

The extra hand the dealer scores at the show, built from the cards the players discard. In the two-player game each player throws 2, making a 4-card crib. It is yours to build as dealer and the opponent's to starve as pone — which is why the same two cards can be a good throw on your deal and a poor one on theirs.

Pegging (the play)

The play phase, in which players alternate cards and call the running count, scoring for 15s, 31s, pairs, runs, the go and the last card. Named for the pegs moved along the board as those points are scored.

Play surface

The area where cards are laid during the play (pegging). Each side plays a card in turn and the running count builds toward 31; when it reaches 31 or both sides call "go", the count resets and the next series begins on the same surface. In the app the play surface shows the cards played so far, in a row per player, and you can set how they are spaced and what happens to a completed series (Settings → Card spacing and Played Card Display).

Played Card Display has three modes:

• Face Up — completed series stay face-up. Best for ACC tournament practice, where full board fidelity and seeing every played card matters.
• Face Down (the default) — completed series turn face-down, as in real play where the board is cleared at each reset. The classic tactile feel of clearing to zero.
• Dimmed — completed series are grayed but still visible, while the current 31-count cards stay clear. Arguably the best digital choice: the history stays available for planning, with a clear cue to which cards belong to the active count.

When a series completes under Face Down or Dimmed, it is held face-up for a moment first — the Card hold setting (Instant / 3s / 5s / 10s) — so you can read what just scored before it gathers into the pile and the display rule applies. A short countdown shows under the surface; press the space bar — or tap the countdown on a touch screen — to hold it in place. Playing your next card ends the hold at once. Starting a new hand clears it immediately.

Whichever display you choose, each player keeps their own pile. Cards are never tossed into a single shared pile in the middle of the table: each player keeps their played cards in a row in front of them, so at the end of the play everyone can gather their own four cards back for the show.

In a 3- or 4-handed game the seats you are not playing toss to the crib automatically — you only make your own discard.

The pile

The cards already laid down in the play, in order — what has been played so far. In the Scenario tool a PC: line (or the Pile zone in the builder) lists them so you can resume a hand from mid-pegging; they are cards played out of the two hands, not a separate holding.

In the Full Hand drill the same five-second timer bridges the two halves: after your discard commits, the drill auto-advances to the play so you are not made to click through. Press space (or tap the countdown) to hold, or Play the hand → to go straight in.

Dealer / pone

The dealer deals the hand and owns the crib. The pone is the non-dealer, who leads the first card and counts their hand first at the show. The deal alternates, so each role comes round every other hand. Almost every strategic asymmetry in cribbage traces back to which of the two you currently are.

Ten-card

Any card worth 10 in the count — 10, Jack, Queen or King. There are 16 of them in the deck, more than any other value, which is why a ten-card lead is safer than it looks and why throwing a lone 5 is so dangerous.

Muggins

The rule that lets an opponent claim points you failed to count in your own hand. Optional everywhere: the ACC calls it "the only optional rule" and plays it only when the tournament organizers announce it in advance (Rule 10.1); when it is in effect, everyone plays it. The app implements it as a scope: Off / Hand / Pegging / Both.

The count

The running total of the cards played during pegging; it may never pass 31. Landing exactly on 31 scores 2; forcing the opponent to call "go" scores 1.

The out

The game target — first to 121 points wins ("the out"). Where a score shows "N to win", N is how many points that player still needs to reach 121; the win can come during the play or the show.

Go

Called when you can't add a card without passing 31. The last player able to lay a card takes 1 — or 2 if that card lands on 31 exactly — then the count resets for the remaining cards.

His Heels

Also called nibs: the dealer scores 2 when the starter card cut is a Jack. (Distinct from His Nobs, the 1 point for holding the Jack that matches the starter's suit.)

His Nobs

Often shortened to "nobs": 1 point for holding the Jack whose suit matches the starter. Scored in a hand or the crib at the show, never during the play. (Distinct from His Heels, the dealer's 2 points for cutting a Jack as the starter.)

Pair royal

Three of a kind, worth 6 — it contains three separate pairs. Four of a kind, a double pair royal, is worth 12.

Run

Three or more cards in consecutive rank, regardless of suit, scoring one point per card. During pegging the cards can be laid in any order as long as an unbroken sequence is present.

The show

The scoring of each hand after the play — fifteens (2 apiece), pairs, runs, flush, and His Nobs. Pone shows first, then the dealer, then the crib; that count-first order is decisive near 121.

Element sizes (the view model)

Seven things are sized independently: the text, the cards, the board, and then each boxed region on its own — the starter block, the play log, the coach panels and the Settings panel. They all scale from one base, each with its own ratio on top, so turning up the coaching you are reading does not enlarge the cards you have already got the size you want. The base is solved from your window; a ratio then scales that one element. Because nothing carries a hardcoded pixel size, the proportions hold at any window size, and raising one element does not distort the others — moving the text slider will not resize your cards.

Each slider is a ceiling, not a fixed size. It raises the cap the automatic fit is allowed to reach; the fit still has the last word, so no combination of settings can produce a layout that does not fit. Set them in Settings → Element sizes, where a live line tells you the pixel sizes your current settings produce.

Your adjustments are remembered on this device and layer over the shipped defaults. Reset genuinely forgets them rather than writing today's defaults back, so if the defaults improve later, those improvements still reach you.

Where the page sits. The app is a fixed reading column, not a full-bleed layout — the column's width is exactly what the automatic fit solves against. Page alignment in Settings puts that column on the left (the default) or centered. It only moves the column; it does not change how wide it is.

How far the sliders go. Deliberately further than the automatic fit would ever choose on its own, including below the size the auto-fit will shrink to. Asking for smaller text is a choice; the app quietly shrinking itself to unreadable is a bug — the two are held to different limits on purpose.

The automatic fit shrinks; it never inflates. It is driven by your window's width and tops out at the normal size — a wider monitor gives you more room around the page, not bigger type. If a window is too narrow for the reading column, the fit comes down to suit. Window height plays no part: most tabs here are documents meant to scroll, and forcing a long reference page onto one screen would shrink the text past readability. If you want everything larger, raise Text & panels — an explicit choice, and it is remembered.

Match scoring ruleset

Which scoring table decides what a finished game is worth, set in the Settings tab. ACC tournament: a win is 2 game points, a skunk 3, a loss 0 — and because ACC recognizes no tier beyond the first, a double or triple skunk is labeled but still scores 3. Standard free play (the default): a win is 1, a skunk 2, and a double or triple skunk 4. The choice applies to the Game, the Match Log and any best-of-N series; it does not change how the game is played, only what the result is worth. See Skunk for the margin tiers themselves.

Skunk

Winning by a wide enough margin that the loser is left short of a board landmark. Three tiers, one for each 30-hole "street" the loser failed to cross: skunk (loser ≤ 90, short of the skunk line at 91), double skunk (≤ 60) and triple skunk (≤ 30). Under ACC tournament scoring a skunk is worth 3 game points against 2 for an ordinary win and 0 for a loss; ACC recognizes no tier beyond the first, so the app labels a double or triple skunk and still scores it as 3. Casual and stakes rulesets do escalate them. See also Par-hole and Twenty-Six Theory for the pacing that tells you early whether a skunk is in play.

Par-hole

The specific board hole that par resolves to for a given deal and role: 17 · 43 · 69 · 95 as dealer, 7 · 33 · 59 · 85 · 111 as pone. It is the reference point behind the Street coach's on / behind / ahead read. See also Par and Twenty-Six Theory.

Crib-value matrix

The lookup table of average crib value for each discard pair (5-5 is the richest toss), used to rank what you feed your own crib and what you balk from the opponent's. Cross-checked against Cornell's published probabilities.

Card frequency

How often each rank tends to be held or played, used to weight the opponent's likely replies when computing the Losers and Winners counts.

Fifteens

Every distinct combination of cards that adds to exactly 15 scores 2 — a single card can take part in more than one fifteen. The Locked-in 15s line in the ranking detail is the fifteens your four kept cards already make on their own, before the starter is cut; those points are guaranteed no matter what turns up.

Pairs

Two cards of the same rank score 2. Three of a kind (a pair royal) is 6 and four of a kind is 12, because each counts every underlying pair. Locked-in pairs are the pairs already sitting in your four kept cards, before the cut.

Flush

Four cards of one suit in the hand score 4; if the starter matches that suit as well, 5. (The crib is stricter — it scores a flush only when all five cards, starter included, share a suit.) Locked-in flush means a four-card flush already complete in your kept hand, before the starter.

Crib flush

When your two discards share a suit they give the crib a head start toward its five-card flush — the only flush the crib can score. The Suit / crib-flush chance line is the small average value that same-suit toss adds; discard two different suits and a crib flush is impossible, so it reads as zero.

Best possible cut

The most your kept hand could score if the single most helpful starter were cut, shown with a count of how many of the unseen starters reach that peak. It's the ceiling on this hand's show — useful next to the floor for seeing how much the cut can swing it.

Worst cut (floor)

The least your kept hand can score across every possible starter — the guaranteed floor. It's the cut where the starter adds no points beyond what your four cards already lock in; your hand never counts less than this, whatever turns up.

Cuts that beat the floor

How many of the unseen starters would score more than the floor. A high count means most cuts help the hand (it's cut-hungry — hold out for the swing); a low count means the hand mostly stands on its locked-in points regardless of the starter.