I just have a few remarks about the Iowa State Fair Cribbage Tournament which took place today. I don’t have the results and it could be a week before anything is announced about the winner. Here are the rules:
Note the $1 entry fee and you have to bring your own cribbage board, cards, and pen. In the past there have been as many as 200 entrants (that was in 2015). We’ve never entered.
I also wanted to let you know that Sena has started a new cribbage tradition. Whenever she wants to play cribbage, she just puts the deck of cards in our automatic shuffler and makes a racket.
Today we used the automated card shuffler Sena ordered. I couldn’t find a company name or anything else from the box about where it’s made. We know it’s loud, but it does the job.
We’re not sure why it’s so noisy. It sounds like a bunch of pots and pans falling out of the cupboard during a tornado.
It was our first time using it and, while it felt like it was faster, it probably wasn’t according to my stopwatch. It took 22 minutes for us to play a cribbage game and manual shuffling took 25 minutes the other day (Big Time Bigfoot Cribbage Game). On the other hand, I think it randomizes the cards better than we do manually.
We kept starting to shuffle manually just because we’re so accustomed to doing it. It actually isn’t hard to set the cards into the feeder on top of the machine. In fact, you don’t have to be fussy about squaring up the deck before placing it in the shuffler. It’ll also shuffle two decks at once. It came with a charging cord so you don’t need batteries.
I don’t know if the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) allows automatic card shufflers in tournaments. I’ve never entered a tournament, but in photos the players are packed in cheek by jowl. And if you had one as noisy as ours for thousands of players, the din might be loud enough to set off alarms.
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