I finally tracked down an American Cribbage Congress (ACC) game from 2017 in Reno, Nevada. It was an hour-long match between just two of the many competitors. They played 4 games in approximately one hour.
What amazed us was that they could play each game in about 15 minutes despite socializing with others, getting interrupted, chatting with others, and shuffling the cards between 5 to 10 times!
The video doesn’t have very high resolution and it was hard to see the cards. The cribbage board they began with evidently had very small peg holes and they finally had to get a replacement. They seemed to almost get in each other’s way tossing the cards they scored back and forth to each other and getting interrupted occasionally, inquiring about beverages and also by officials who asked them to keep track of their activity (probably scores) for some purpose or other, possibly statistics.
We were surprised to see how fast they were at pegging and counting hand and crib scores. The high number of times they shuffled didn’t seem to add much time to the games. We couldn’t hear any shuffling machines clanging in the background. We don’t know why one player had a toy eagle figurine on his side of the board.
We tried to play 4 games in an hour and couldn’t manage it except for the last one, which we did finish in 15 minutes (necessitating supplemental nasal cannula oxygen)—but the other 3 were about 20 minutes each on average. We changed our automatic shuffling routine by using it twice instead of once per deal and also let each other cut the deck after shuffling. The shuffler jammed a couple of times but was pretty reliable. We thought shuffling twice helped mix the cards a little better because we got more variation in the cards dealt. But so far, consistently playing a game in 15 minutes is beyond us.
Would we have been kicked out of the auditorium (which was fairly noisy), tarred and feathered, run out of town on a rail?
Possibly, but we’ll never know.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 