Cribbage Competitive Matchmaking - Active Times of Day

I was recently asked, and have been asked in various ways before, about what times of the day are most active in Cribbage Competitive Matchmaking. The goal here is to provide some insight into that question, and to help people find the best times to look for a match, particularly if you have a more flexible schedule and just want to know when is best to log in and play.

First, a few important notes. All times are in UTC, so you will need to convert to your local time and consider things like Daylight Saving Time if that happens in your part of the world. Second, I realize that in sharing this information it could make the busy times even busier and the less active times even harder to find a match. However, I hope that in the end this is beneficial to everyone.

Here is the current activity for Spring 2023, by hour of the day (again, in UTC).

As the chart shows, this is just so far this season, which has only been a few weeks. Still, I think it is pretty accurate. The reason for that is, this was the same season last year, as seen below for Spring 2022:

To add a little more color, here was the previous season, Winter 2023:

Some brief thoughts on this. Note that the 9th hour UTC in the winter (no DST) is 1am PST (4am EST), while the 8th hour in "spring" is still 1am in Pacific time, but that is in PDT (due to DST). You subtract 8 from UTC time to get PST, and subtract 7 to get PDT. So things don't really change much from season to season. That said, around the 14th hour through to about the 3rd hour (the next day) UTC time, there is the highest amount of activity in the matchmaking system. To do the math for you, that would be from 7am PDT (10am EDT) to 8pm PDT (11pm EDT) as the most active. The highest points are really from around 21/22 to 2, if you are looking for the height of activity.

Lastly, with respect to the day of the week, as I'm sure you are all thinking of that as your next question, things are surprisingly "flat". Saturday, Sunday and Monday see maybe just a slight increase overall for the entire season, and sometimes Wednesday does as well. So Tuesday would be the "worst" of the days, but not by a lot. I have no idea why Wednesday sees a spike from time to time, but, it does, and then often climbs a little through Thursday and Friday into the weekend. If I wanted to play when most everyone else is, I would not worry about the day of the week so much, but then try for a time around 2pm to 7pm Pacific time, 5pm to 10pm Eastern.

Again, I hope this information is helpful, and can be used to bring more people together to find the best challenging, and fun matches!