16 Jun 2025 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Today’s essay by Dr. Moffic was pretty interesting about the role of video gaming in health for men and women. Computer games were emphasized but it got me thinking about hands-on games that you might thing of as being more old-fashioned—like cribbage.

I wrote a post about cribbage already today, but there’s another angle on it that’s readily adaptable to considering its role in promoting mental health for both men and women.

That reminds me that until yesterday and today, I was on a major losing streak in cribbage with Sena. Cribbage wins and losses seem to occur in streaks and I was beginning to wonder if I’d lost my touch.

There’s a cribbage connection with the electronic gaming realm in that we also play the computer video cribbage game Cribbage Pro. There are three levels, Standard, Challenging, and Brutal (the toughest opponent). We always play Brutal, and often win. There’s a way to play internet cribbage on Cribbage Pro, but we don’t. I prefer playing live. I think the popular view of cribbage is that it’s an old guy’s game. I suspect people think it’s a card game old men play on their lunch hour at the factory.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s very popular with women and kids and my guess is that no matter what your gender preference is, there’s a greater diversity of cribbage players out there than anyone realizes.

Playing cribbage promotes and maintains brain health by requiring you to practice basic arithmetic by counting your scores and pegging. You lose a little of that in Cribbage Pro although you can turn on the feature allowing manual counting of scores.

And the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) accommodates internet cribbage tournaments. It’s very popular and competitive. By the way, expanding on my other post today about how to verify your luck in getting a 29 hand in cribbage, you can easily prove it on Cribbage Pro by taking a screen shot of it!

Computer games are fine, but I like to manually shuffle the cards for cribbage. Sena likes to use the shuffling machine—which is very loud but gets the job done. I’ve not yet found a way to “accidentally” lose the shuffling machine (Can’t imagine where it went; must have grown legs and walked downtown!).

We always help each other count our scores. The one time we tried muggins rule, which involves penalizing each other for missing scores by taking them from each other, we just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And it wasn’t as much fun.

There are local cribbage clubs that you could get involved in although they might be hard to find. The nearest one to us is several hours away.

I used to play computer games years ago (although not Nintendo), but nowadays I feel more like Agent K in Men in Black II as he’s trying to quickly learn how to steer a spacecraft using what looks like a PlayStation 2 controller (I used to have one of those).

after K turns on the auto pilot during the chase…

Agent K: It is not automatic pilot.

Agent J: He doesn’t work when we’re in hyperspeed.

Agent K: I could really use a steering wheel!

Agent J: We don’t have no damn steering wheel! This is what we got! [turns off auto pilot] Didn’t your mother ever give you a Gameboy?

Agent K: What is a Gameboy?!?

Sena and I were talking about the elusive 29 hand score in cribbage and I wondered how you could ever verify it. Let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine anybody filming themselves playing cribbage in order to catch it on tape.

Just for the sake of completeness, here’s a video of how to count the 29 score. You can see from the comments that it is indeed possible to get the 29 hand in your lifetime—if you’re an extraterrestrial from a galaxy where the typical lifespan is several hundred years.

As noted in the video, the odds of getting a 29-score hand are 1 in 216,580. I have rarely seen news stories that highlight this happening at some hardware store in East Overshoe, name-your-state where a couple of guys are playing cribbage on their lunch break. One supposedly gets a 29 hand. He calls up the local news announcing that and a reporter hustles over to snap a photo of the guy holding up the perfect hand with a nob jack and three 5 cards next to a card deck showing the obligatory 4^th turnup 5 card.

How hard would it be to set that up?

OK, I’m not saying they’re making it up, but it’s not impossible to prank everybody by staging this as an April Fool’s joke. Would it be worth doing? No, not in my opinion.

I’ve never seen a story about anybody making a video of a cribbage game in which somebody gets the 29 hand. That would be interesting! But who would ever do that? You could make video recordings of your cribbage games every day for your whole life and never get a 29 hand. But a lot of people have a “29 hand cribbage” story. In fact, in the video above you can find a few comments about it. Is it just lore or are people telling tall tales or what?

There might another way to increase your chances of getting the 29 hand. You could become a vampire. That’s right; vampires can live for hundreds of years or even longer, provided they don’t get exposed to daylight or take a stake through the heart. Being immortal would give you more time to play cribbage. The only hitch is that you have to let a vampire bite you, making you a loathsome creature only able to get around during the night, when most people are sleeping. And somebody would probably invent cribbage pegs shaped like little crosses and there you go.

There might be another solution. One is to require the person who claims to have gotten a 29 hand to take a lie detector test. Sound good?

But lie detector tests are probably not infallible. You can even find instructions on the web claiming you can learn how to outsmart them. Believe it or not, there’s a Wikihow on “How to Fool a Polygraph Exam.” And even if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used as part of the exam, everybody knows AI lies! Besides, there’s a bigger problem with lie detector tests. They would take all the fun out of the thrill of getting the 29 hand and telling everyone the story about it!

And after all, it’s the stories about getting the 29 hand that carry the day.