Invisible to us anyway. We’ve been excited about filming our first Cribbage Rumble game and we thought the first video we got on March 25, 2026 was too disorganized and chaotic to accept.
It’s a good thing I didn’t discard the clips—because Sena got a 29 hand. The trouble was we both failed to notice it! We have video evidence of the whole thing. It’s funny and spooky to watch.
OK, it’s time to start making excuses for why we didn’t see the 29 hand. We were playing Cribbage Rumble on our new board from Michaud Toys, so we were focused on the many zones and traps rather than thinking about anything so rare as the 29 hand showing up.
There’s no reason not to expect that a 29 score could happen in a 6-card cribbage game, but our focus was not on that. It was on avoiding things like Blue Time Traps and Blue Penalty Boxes.
Despite our focus on trying to score Sena’s hand, I think we failed to notice the obvious because the context was on Cribbage Rumble, not the rare 29 hand, the odds of which are 1 in 216,580 against getting.
I think that’s why our attention was on the four 5 cards and trying to count the 15s for 2 (which make 8 points) and the other 15s for 2 with the Jack (which is also 8 points). I knew that the four 5s is 4 of a kind which makes 12. In fact, when I said near the end of the video that I remembered seeing something “maybe once before in my life,” all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind. That would have got us to 28 but we didn’t process that. We could see only parts of the elephant.
I think the other reason we didn’t react to it was that we’d played Cribbage Rumble all afternoon and into the early evening. We were tired.
It wasn’t until the next day that I used the skunkeddotclub scorer (just out of curiosity) to see what the total score was. It was 28. Then I added the 1 point because of the nob Jack (same suit as the club 5 card) and came up with 29. The scorer doesn’t deal with suits.
It still didn’t click. I told Sena that her hand’s total score was 29, in a totally offhand way. She didn’t really react to it, either.
Early this morning right after I first woke up, I began to wonder whether the score was an “alternate” way to score the famous and elusive 29 hand in 6 card cribbage. Over a few minutes, it finally dawned on me that thinking of it as “alternate” didn’t make any sense. It just was the 29 hand.
That’s when I got excited and told Sena about it. I said something confusing at the end of the video when I said something about seeing the hand “maybe once before in my life” but all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind (scores 12 points). I still didn’t see that 29 hand at the time.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 