Cribbage Hand Calculator

How do you count a cribbage hand?

You count five cards: the four you hold plus the cut card that everyone at the table shares, which the American Cribbage Congress calls the starter. Points come from five sources, and one card can earn from several of them at once. A five that helps make a fifteen can also sit inside a run and form a pair.

The range on the runs row is the length of a single run. Duplicate a rank inside one and every distinct way of picking the cards forms its own run, with the pairs scoring besides, and the four shapes this produces are common enough to carry names. The double run works through the arithmetic behind each.

Those totals bundle the runs and the pairs together, and any fifteens in the same cards score on top. A shorter run sitting inside a longer one never scores separately.

Most players call the sources out in a fixed order, fifteens, then pairs, runs, the flush and nobs, but that sequence is table convention rather than a rule. The rule named order of counting settles a different question: which player counts first. For the scoring itself with worked examples, see how to score a cribbage hand; counting fifteens covers the source with the most combinations to track.

Why does the crib count differently?

Only one rule changes between your hand and the crib: the flush. In your hand, four cards of the same suit score four points, or five if the cut matches as well. In the crib, four of a suit score nothing at all, and only a five-card flush counts, so the cut has to match the four cards the crib was dealt.

That difference is why the calculator asks which one you are counting: leave the toggle on Hand while scoring a crib and it will hand you four points the rules do not award.

One near miss catches players out in hand and crib alike: three cards of a suit plus a matching cut score nothing, because a flush has to start with four cards of one suit in the same hand or crib. The crib flush explains where the restriction comes from.

What is the highest possible cribbage hand?

The highest possible hand is twenty-nine points, and exactly one layout reaches it: you hold three fives and a jack, and the cut is the fourth five, in the jack's suit. Those cards make fifteen eight different ways for sixteen points, pair the four fives six ways for another twelve, and add one for nobs.

Try that hand above: the five of hearts, diamonds and clubs, the jack of spades, and the five of spades as the cut. The ACC puts the odds of a twenty-nine at 216,580 to 1.

Twenty-eight is the next total down and far more common, at odds the ACC gives as 15,028 to 1, and it uses the same recipe: all four fives plus one ten-point card. Every arrangement of those five cards scores 28 no matter which one is the cut, the 29 above being the single exception, and nothing at all falls between 24 and 28.

The plainest form is four fives in your hand with a ten, jack, queen or king as the cut. A cut jack counts there like any other ten-card, because nobs needs a jack you hold rather than one that is cut. The cut jack does give the dealer two for his heels, but that is a pegging score and no part of the 28. More on both totals at the twenty-nine hand.

Which cribbage totals are impossible?

A hand can never come to 19, 25, 26 or 27. The ACC lists the totals a hand can take as 0 to 18, then 20 to 24, then 28 and 29, and those four numbers are the gaps in the list. No rule forbids them; they are simply sums that fifteens, pairs, runs, a flush and nobs cannot combine to make out of five cards.

Nineteen is the famous one: common usage has made it the name for a hand worth nothing, so a player who announces a nineteen has scored zero. The nineteen hand works through why the gaps fall where they do.

How does this calculator count?

The calculator runs a port of the scoring engine we wrote for the Nobs cribbage app, held to that app's own test cases so the two never disagree about a hand. Its answers are also checked against a second, independently written scorer over ten thousand random deals, counted both as hands and as cribs. The same test suite asserts that no deal ever produces one of the impossible totals above. Every line in the breakdown maps to a rule explained on this site, so any total it gives can be re-derived by hand from how to score a cribbage hand.

What the calculator scores is the show, the count made once the play is over. Pegging during the play follows its own rules: there, fifteens and thirty-ones come from the running count rather than from combinations in the cards you hold, and a flush does not score at all.

Selecting a line in the breakdown outlines the cards that earned it, which is usually the fastest way to find where an unexpected point came from.

By the Nobs Cribbage team Last reviewed 2026-08-12