Cribbage analysis results and software

Cribbage Hand Analysis

I have written software to assist me in performing statistical anaylses of cribbage hands. The first task which I undertook was to calculate the average value of 4 randomly generated cards with one randomly chosen turn-up card. The results, after analyzing about 1.2 million hands, were:

Total points	15s	Pairs	Runs	Flush	His Nobs
4.77	2.61	1.18	0.87	0.04	0.07

These numbers are probably accurate to within +/- 1%. After completing this analysis, I extended the code to analyze randomly generated hands of 5 or 6 cards. The code then determines which card to throw out, optimizing for in-hand points, and then returns the average number of points of each type for that hand against the possible 47 or 46 turn-up cards. I did this for a large number of hands again, and the results were:

# cards	Total points	15s	Pairs	Runs	Flush	His Nobs	# hands	# counts
4	4.77	2.61	1.18	0.87	0.04	0.07	1,234,806	1,234,806
5	6.63	3.41	1.55	1.42	0.16	0.08	30,492	7,200,000 (approximate)
6	8.27	4.03	1.90	2.00	0.31	0.08	21,780	15,000,000 (approximate)

Conclusions that can be drawn from these results:

When playing with 3 or more players, and thus you have less than 6 cards to work with, expect more points from pairs than from runs.
When playing with 4 cards, expect more points from getting his nobs than from flushes.
Average hand values: 4 3/4 for 4 cards, 6 3/5 for 5 cards, 8 1/4 for 6 cards.

The code which I used, written in Java using Java 1.4 features, and run under Java 1.4.1_01, is available under GNU public licence.

Home	Last updated on Sunday, November 3, 2002