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 4th 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.
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