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The Best Cribbage Hands to Keep

When you choose which four of your six cards to keep, you are choosing between fifteen hands whose value you cannot yet see — the starter has not been cut. So we computed it: the expected score of all 1,820 four-card combinations, against every starter each could meet.

The twenty-five best keeps

Expected points at the show, averaged over every possible starter. A dash in the flush column means the combination repeats a rank, so it cannot be a flush.

How to read these numbers

Each figure is an expectation, not a promise. Keeping 4-5-5-6 does not score you 15.96; it scores 12, or 16, or 24, depending on the cut, and 15.96 is what it averages over all of them. That is exactly the right way to compare two keeps before the starter is known, and exactly the wrong way to think about any single deal.

Two things these numbers deliberately do not include:

• The crib. This is the value of the four cards you keep. The two you throw go somewhere, and where they go changes the right answer completely — see the discard guide. A keep worth half a point less is often correct if the alternative hands your opponent a 5.
• Pegging value. Cards that combine well during the play are worth real points that never appear at the show. Low cards and cards that make 15 and 31 peg better than a hand of tens, and a hand of four court cards pegs particularly badly.

So treat the table as one input of three. It is the one you can compute exactly, which is why it is worth having — but a player who optimises it alone will discard badly.

Why 5s dominate the list

Nineteen of the top twenty-five keeps contain at least one 5, and the top five all contain three of them. The reason is arithmetic rather than tradition: sixteen cards in the deck are worth ten, so every 5 has sixteen partners waiting to make a fifteen — far more than any other rank can claim.

Four 5s (22.67) is the best hand in cribbage by a distance of six points, and it is worth noticing why it beats 5-5-5-J at 16.53 despite the Jack looking useful. The fourth 5 adds a fourth pair-partner (four 5s contain six pairs, worth 12) and a fourth way to make fifteen, while the Jack only ever makes fifteen with a 5 and picks up the odd point for nobs. Court cards are interchangeable for fifteens, which is why 5-5-5-10, 5-5-5-Q and 5-5-5-K all score identically at 16.29 — the Jack's tiny edge over them, 0.23 points, is exactly the chance of his nobs.

The 7-8 family, and why it is the best non-5 hand

The best keep containing no 5 at all is 7-7-8-8, worth 14.83 — ninth overall, and ahead of a great many hands that look prettier. It is worth understanding because it comes up far more often than three 5s ever will.

7 and 8 make fifteen together, so a hand of two 7s and two 8s contains four different fifteens (each 7 with each 8) for 8 points, plus two pairs for 4, giving a guaranteed 12 before the cut — and any 6 or 9 turns it into a double run as well. Its neighbours in the table are the same idea one card off: 6-7-7-8 (14.79), 7-7-7-8 (14.67), 6-7-8-8 (14.63).

The general principle is worth more than the specific hands: pairs of cards that add to fifteen multiply. Two 7s and two 8s give four fifteens, not two. The same applies to 6-6-9-9 and, most famously, to any hand built around 5s and tens.

What a run is actually worth

Beginners tend to overvalue four-card runs, which look like a lot of points and often are not. Here is every four-card run, mixed suits and as a flush:

A four-card run is worth 4 for the run itself and then lives or dies on its fifteens. 6-7-8-9 is the best of them at 10.57, because it contains 6+9 and 7+8 — two fifteens built in — while 10-J-Q-K is the worst at 6.55, because four ten-value cards cannot make a fifteen with each other at all, and need a 5 from the cut to score one.

That is a four-point spread between two hands that both look like "a run of four", and it is the sort of thing that decides games. The lesson generalises: a run's value is mostly the fifteens it happens to contain, not the run.

The flush is worth less than you think

Making a four-card hand a flush adds at most 4.12 points — the 4 for the flush itself, plus a small allowance for the one-in-twelve chance the starter matches and makes it 5.

Four points is not nothing, but it is less than the difference between a good keep and a mediocre one, and chasing it is a common way to lose points. Keeping a bad flush over a good mixed hand — say a flush worth 4.5 over a 7-8 combination worth 14.8 — costs you far more than the suit gains. And in the crib a four-card flush is worth precisely nothing: only a five-card flush counts there, so throwing two suited cards to your own crib buys you almost nothing.

The exception is when the flush is free — when the four cards you were keeping anyway happen to share a suit. Then take it, obviously.

The worst hands in cribbage

The worst keeps in the game average around 1.5 points, and they share a recipe: no 5, no pair, no run, no two cards adding to fifteen, and a King or Ten occupying a slot that could have held something useful. 4-7-10-K and 3-6-10-K are the joint worst at 1.52.

Notice how many of them contain both a 10 and a King. Two ten-value cards in the same hand are nearly dead weight: they cannot make fifteen with each other, they cannot pair each other, and they need very specific help from the cut. If you are ever choosing which of two similar cards to throw, the second ten-value card is usually the one.

Using this when you discard

You will not memorise 1,820 numbers, and you do not need to. Four patterns carry most of the value:

• Keep 5s. Nineteen of the top twenty-five contain one. If you are deciding between two keeps and one holds a 5, that is usually the answer — and it is certainly the answer for what to throw when the crib is your opponent's.
• Look for pairs that make fifteen. 7-8, 6-9, 5-10 and their doubles multiply rather than add. Two 7s and two 8s are worth more than a run of four.
• Count the ten-value cards. More than two is usually a warning sign; they cannot combine with each other, so the whole hand leans on the cut.
• Do not chase the flush. Four points maximum, nothing at all in the crib, and never worth breaking a genuinely good hand for.

And then remember what the table leaves out. The right discard depends on whose crib it is, on how the cards will peg, and late in a game on what each player needs to win. This page tells you what your four cards are worth; it does not tell you what to throw. That is the discard guide.

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