Yesterday while playing cribbage, Sena and I accidentally switched non-dealer and dealer roles during the cut and pick the starter card phase of the game. I was dealer and by mistake cut the deck. Sena was non-dealer and by mistake picked the starter card—which happened to be a jack.
At that point we both realized this was wrong. I was the dealer and should have got the two for his heels, but I was also guilty of cutting the deck which the non-dealer is supposed to do. Sena, for whatever reason, picked the starter card, compounding the mistake of switching roles. This actually would have resulted in her getting 16 points!
At first, she suggested she get the two for his heels points and proceed. I thought this would compound the mistake further and thought we should reshuffle and redeal—which she did after a fairly long discussion. We kept our original hands and cribs and just repeated the cut and picked a new starter card the way it was supposed to be done—nondealer (Sena) cut and dealer (me) picked the starter card. In all fairness, we’ve both done this in the past but caught the mistakes before it got as far as it did yesterday.
However, we then looked for any rule which would cover what we should have done. I couldn’t find one either on the American Cribbage Congress website rulebook page or anywhere else. The link takes you to the ACC 2025 version of the tournament cribbage rules; which gives the cut card rules starting on page 28 of the flipbook. It covers the mistakes of the dealer turning up the starter card before both players discard to the crib, nondealer looking at the bottom card of the upper pack when making the cut, and the dealer placing the cut card in his hand and not showing it to the nondealer. It doesn’t cover the wild mistake of both dealer and nondealer accidentally switching roles either by somehow switching to a parallel universe or by extraterrestrial intervention.
We also tried to ask Artificial Intelligence (AI): What happens in cribbage if the dealer cuts the cards by mistake and the non-dealer turns up the starter card by mistake?
AI answer: “In cribbage, if the dealer cuts the deck by mistake and the non-dealer mistakenly turns up the starter card, the dealer loses the deal and the crib. The non-dealer then becomes the new dealer, and the cards are dealt again.”
I couldn’t find anything on the web which supported the AI answer or its detailed explanation. Long story short, I think this might be an example of an AI confabulation (some would call this a hallucination).
However, when I searched again asking the same question, AI gave a different answer:
“In a friendly cribbage game, if the dealer cuts the deck and the non-dealer turns up the starter card by mistake, the cards should be reshuffled and re-dealt. There is no penalty for this mistake as it is considered a misdeal.”
The explanations for the AI answer make sense but tend to sound like rephrasing of the initial answer and there are links which don’t seem connected to the answer. And if I search again, I get a slightly different answer and the explanations are not really connected to the original question.
But we reshuffled and redealt. I sent a question about this to the relevant ACC representative who takes general questions about cribbage. If I get an answer, I’ll pass it along.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 