Competitive Cribbage - Summer 2022

It is time for the Cribbage Pro Summer 2022 Season of Competitive Matchmaking! If you are here primarily for what is new/changed, then scroll down to the final "News for The New Season" section below. The Spring 2022 season has fully wrapped up, and as usual it was entertaining to watch the rise and fall of different players throughout the season again. I still find myself cheering for different players on and off throughout the season. I admit I also often wish I could personally participate, but  we have a rule that employees/contractors are prohibited from this and Contest play (and from the leaderboards entirely, in case you were wondering).

The Top 50 had quite a few new faces yet again this season. It is great to see all the new challengers working so hard to make their way to the top! Everyone loves an underdog, I suppose. Things just seem to be getting more and more competitive, so thank you to all for participating and bringing your friends! Thank you also to everyone who participated in this great game of cribbage, even if you didn't quite make the Top 50. I hope you enjoyed the journey.

In 1st place for Spring 2022, we have "Mrpadre" for the first time! It is nice to see Mrpadre back this season, as they were in the top 10 last season as well! 2nd place is "ernie313", and ernie313 has been in the Top 50 many times in the past as well, finishing last season at 33rd. In 3rd we have "Dhrun", who was in 2nd last season and also becoming a regular around these parts. Other interesting movements in the Top 50 included "WhyADuck" who has placed in the Top 50 before, but wasn't there last season and is 4th this season, and "Br1Guy" who we have definitely seen before, moving up just a bit from 13th to 9th! "scoot1234" came up from 28th last season to finish 19th this season, while "jjonell" came from 42nd to finish 36th.

Everyone who finished the season in the Top 50 ("Recent" list), has been awarded both a special in-game "board peg" as well as Cribbage Pro Gold that can be used in the Cribbage Pro Contests system and then redeemed for cash (awards must be used at least once in a Contest to be cashed out to USDC, see the full terms and conditions for details). If you are awarded Gold, and are not sure what it is good for (or how to access the Contests system), read through the links above or email us any time if you have questions. On iOS you will need the "Cribbage Pro Contests" version of the app, and on Android you need to install the game using the Amazon Appstore. As it looks like many are not using the Cribbage Pro Gold they win (which makes it kind of a useless prize for them), this part of the prize may change for the Summer 2022 winners (please email us your suggestions). The Cribbage Pro Gold awards are as follows (not cumulative):

• 4 Gold for Top 50
• 7 Gold for Top 25
• 10 Gold for Top 10
• 20 Gold for 3rd Place
• 30 Gold for 2nd Place
• 50 Gold for 1st Place

The top finisher is awarded the "crown" board peg, and all others in the Top 50 are awarded a "star" board peg. These pegs are shown to everyone when playing in online multiplayer games, and they are permanent, so if you see your opponent has one of them you can know that they have earned it by finishing in the Top 50 in competitive play.

Remember: Complete 10 matches per week! See the FAQ for details.

Here was the final Top 50 for Spring 2022:

1	Mrpadre	26	koala29
2	ernie313	27	nvsru911
3	Dhrun	28	Domerzag
4	WhyADuck	29	gotupeggd
5	Gssj21	30	wfdove
6	nob4one	31	aela
7	iPeg	32	cyrusg
8	scout3	33	sagdog16
9	Br1Guy	34	Dempegs
10	shudbgolf	35	Legonaut
11	wightness	36	jjonell
12	PALONSO	37	bbaer1
13	236Postie	38	farleysma
14	VGKnights	39	pscohen
15	Cutch13	40	Paludeja
16	hillchem	41	vhray
17	nhguy	42	IAMFAST
18	hunterIT	43	Buikemad
19	scoot1234	44	SH00TER
20	cribfan44	45	james500
21	lbolt58	46	dph
22	UberPooch	47	jehcjehc
23	BigD4Life	48	brewski42
24	jwr13	49	dkatz1877
25	TC2	50	yank29

The levels in Competitive Matchmaking are available in the FAQ.

News for The New Season

Some of you have been asking, and patiently waiting, for some bigger changes. However, there will not be big changes for this season.

During the Spring 2022 season, while you were all playing (and we were watching all the ups and downs and crunching the numbers), we spent a lot of time working on several different ways to bring ideas around a single game match to the competitive system. The idea was to lighten the games required, and the time needed to participate, as not everyone is able to do so with a 3 game match. Ultimately, it just didn't work out as hoped, and so we couldn't release it.

We worked through several different ways to try to provide for a single game match, but in testing and analysis, it just could never provide good results. What I mean by that is our system simply could not accurately isolate the skill from the luck with just a single game, even if the total number of games played went up significantly (which it is also unclear if that would be the case). Playing more games against other players just doesn't compensate. This means, among other criteria, that it couldn't accurately predict the winner (meaning the skill calculated isn't good enough), or then subsequently calculate the skill rank adjustments to be made reliably as a result, when tested against real world game data. Either the skill ranking system we use (even with various tweaks/changes to it), or the game of cribbage itself, just doesn't allow for it to happen. I personally try to hold a high standard for everything we do, and if anything can't be shown to meet or exceed that standard, no matter if we have spent a lot of effort on it, we will not release it.

As we have tested lots of different skill ranking systems before selecting the one used today, I honestly don't think that is the problem, but likely this is just the nature of cribbage that there can often be a non-trivial amount of luck in a single game. Frankly, the "Best of 3" isn't perfect (and I think there are things we can still do to help more there), but given the limitations (like the amount of time people can play), it ends up being a good compromise. So, because of all that time working on these things that didn't result in changes this season, we decided to not make any other core changes. There just wasn't enough time. There are some minor things, but mostly just around making the system more reliable, and bug fixes. So, we have decided to put this task aside for now, and to move on to other improvements that many are also asking for.

As a reminder, if you have played a few seasons here and have some thoughts on what you would like to see around prizes, structure or anything else, please email us at support@FullerSystems.com with your suggestions.

Calculating the Odds of Winning a Cribbage Game – Part 1

A Guest post by Donald E. Heller

As an almost life-long and daily cribbage player, one of the things I enjoy about the game is the ebb and flow of a typical match. At any point in time, player 1 can have a strong lead, looking like a lock to win the game, and then player 2 can get two or three great hands and pass her opponent to go on and win the game.

As this occurs, I often think about what the odds were of player 1 winning the game given the score and position on the board. For example, if I am ahead of the other player 90 to 75, what are the odds that I will win the game? This calculation is similar to what sports websites often do for games in progress. One example from ESPN is shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1: ESPN win probability chart for Major League Baseball (screenshot courtesy ESPN)

In this game, in the top of the 4th inning and none out, and Cleveland ahead 2-0, ESPN calculates that Cleveland has a 67.3% chance of winning the game. This is based on the score and point in the game, along with ESPN’s calculations of the skills and track records of each of the two teams and their respective players.

Is it possible to calculate similar odds of winning in cribbage? My curiosity led me to a web search, but I could not find anything along the lines of what I was looking for. Being a user of Cribbage Pro, I reached out to the team there to see if they knew of anyone who had ever done these calculations. They did not, but said that they were willing to share some data with me if I was interested in doing the calculations myself. Being an experienced quantitative researcher, I agreed to take on the challenge.

Fuller Systems (the developer of Cribbage Pro) generously provided me with the data necessary to do the calculations from their log files of Cribbage Pro users. After providing me with a small sample file of anonymous data (data that couldn’t be tied back to any Cribbage Pro user), I worked on extracting the data and analyzing it. I was able to do the odds calculations I had hoped for, so Fuller Systems then provided me with a set of larger files – 72 files, each representing a consecutive hour’s worth of log records from Cribbage Pro games over the course of three days, and containing the step-by-step records of games played on the app. These are massive files, each one of the 72 with over one million records in it. In order to make the data analyzable in Stata, the statistical software that I use, I had to extract samples from each game and then combine these samples from the 72 files into a single, smaller file that could be analyzed to do the odds calculations.

This smaller file represented over 600,000 games that were completed during the 72-hour period for which Fuller Systems provided me with the data. From the scores at each point in time, and knowing who won each game, I was able to calculate the odds of each player winning the game given the score.

There are certainly some limitations to these calculations. I did not know anything about the players, so I could not conduct a sophisticated point-in-time prediction for each game that takes into account the skill and track record of each player, similar to what ESPN does in its predictions. So these predictions are what I would describe as “player-neutral,” i.e., they only relate what we know about a score at a given point with who won the game in the end, but nothing about the skill of the players.

Another limitation is that I did not calculate the odds for every potential score. To keep the analysis simple, I analyzed scores that were reasonably close and would typically be found in games. In other words, I did not calculate the odds of winning when the score was 115 for player 1 to 60 for player 2 (though one could intuit that player 1 would have very high odds of winning the game and skunking player 2).

With these caveats, table 1 shows some examples of what I found. The full table can be found here (note: in the table the “Win %” is the percentage of games won by player 2; the win percentages were calculated only for those scores that had at least 100 occurrences in the data).

Table 1 – Odds of winning for a variety of scores

Player 1 score	Player 2 score	Odds of player 2 winning
30	40	61%
60	70	78%
60	80	84%
90	91	54%
90	95	61%
90	100	76%
100	110	78%

In general, the wider the margin between the two players, the greater are the odds that the player who is ahead will win. But this pattern, however, is not perfect. Figure 2 below provides one example. As noted, the closer player 2 is to winning when player 1 has a score of 100, the greater the odds are that player 2 will win the game. But you will note the interesting dip starting when player 2 has a score of 117.

Figure 2: Calculated odds that player 2 wins the game when player 1 has 100 points

The reason for this can be found in the laws of probability. For example, if you flip a true coin, you know the odds are 50 percent that it will come up tails, and 50 percent that it will come up heads. If you flip it ten times, you would expect five heads and five tails. But if you conducted this experiment of ten coin flips a number of times, you would probably find that it was not always split 50 percent between heads and tails. And if you conducted 100 coin flips, the same would be true – you would likely not have exactly 50 heads and 50 tales.

The same is true in the game of cribbage. While you would expect that a wider lead would lead to an increased chance of winning the game, this is not necessarily always true, even over the hundreds of games represented by each of the scores in the table. Another reason for this is that the scores used in my analysis are taken at random points in time, e.g., at the end of the hand, or during the counting of a hand, etc. So who wins the game could be impacted by who has the deal and who is counting when the score in the analysis was used.

Part 2 of this post will explore this phenomenon further. For now, I hope that you enjoy using the table to look up your odds of winning the game as you play cribbage. But remember – these predictions are not perfect, and as they say, your mileage may vary!

Donald E. Heller is a retired professor and college administrator, and lives in San Francisco. He was taught the game of cribbage as a child, and plays daily with his wife as well as on Cribbage Pro.

Competitive Cribbage - Spring 2022 Season

It is the time you have all been anxiously waiting for, a new competitive season of Cribbage! Welcome to the Spring 2022 Season of Competitive Matchmaking for Cribbage Pro! Where we are, it is definitely that time of year again, and spring has sprung. I know for many there are a few more weeks of winter weather, but here the flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing and I am sneezing - it is springtime! The Winter 2022 season has completed, and if you had any bets placed on who was going to be at the top, there were not a lot of surprises this time around. Overall, the Top 50 leaderboard still had some new faces, and the season had more matches played than any of the previous 3 seasons! It was a fairly hard and long battle for many to reach their rankings. As always, continue to tell your friends about competitive cribbage, and take advantage of those prizes! Thank you to all who were once again able to participate in this great game of cribbage! For those who couldn't make the commitment to Winter 2022, I hope you can find the time to join in the fun this season.

In 1st place for Winter 2022, we have "iPeg". Welcome back, iPeg! 2nd place is "Dhrun", and I admit I was kind of rooting for Dhrun this season. In 3rd we have "nob4one", which is someone we have seen around these parts before too, and great to see come up from 13th last season. Other interesting movements in the Top 50 included "hillchem" moving from 15th to 7th, and "Yompopo" who came all the way from 41st to 12th! The next biggest moves between seasons were "Br1Guy" who rose 24 places from 37th to 13th, and "RatKing" from 32nd to 14th!

As with past seasons, everyone who finished the season in the Top 50 ("Recent" list), have been awarded both a special in-game "board peg" as well as Cribbage Pro Gold that can be used in the Cribbage Pro Contests system and then redeemed for cash (awards must be used at least once in a Contest to be cashed out to USDC, see the full terms and conditions for details). The top finisher is awarded the "crown" board peg, and all others in the Top 50 are awarded a "star" board peg. These pegs are shown to everyone when playing in online multiplayer games, and they are permanent, so if you see your opponent has one of them you can know that they have earned it by finishing in the Top 50 in competitive play. The Cribbage Pro Gold awards are as follows (not cumulative):

• 4 Gold for Top 50
• 7 Gold for Top 25
• 10 Gold for Top 10
• 20 Gold for 3rd Place
• 30 Gold for 2nd Place
• 50 Gold for 1st Place

Remember to complete your 10 matches per week. See the FAQ for details. Play early, and play often!

Here was the final Top 50 for Winter 2022:

1	iPeg	26	IAMFAST
2	Dhrun	27	jjpears20
3	nob4one	28	scoot1234
4	flashmatt	29	Looie3nba
5	yank29	30	gmric5
6	Mrpadre	31	Freddie69
7	hillchem	32	SergeLam
8	ryguy2021	33	ernie313
9	TC2	34	SH00TER
10	Domerzag	35	Podracer
11	lbolt58	36	fab50
12	Yompopo	37	yvanobc12
13	Br1Guy	38	kb92129
14	RatKing	39	konadive
15	pileated	40	dixietix
16	enaud58	41	dcpastore
17	31four14	42	jjonell
18	pscohen	43	gsosin
19	VGKnights	44	Barusu1
20	nvsru911	45	mountains
21	rattle15	46	Wyorwk
22	EVW	47	tassie08
23	pegmstr77	48	catpat
24	dkatz1877	49	Trucha1
25	greyday	50	Paludeja

The levels in Competitive Matchmaking are available in the FAQ.

Some Changes This New Spring 2022 Season

Although we had hoped to add several changes this season, we were unable to do so because of competing priorities leaving not enough time to get everything tested and ready to go. So this new season is keeping changes to just a little widening of the difference in CR allowed to make a match in the matchmaking system. Last season had it around 1000 CR, but we tweaked it up a bit to allow for some broader competition. This was needed due to how quickly the lower CR players were bumped out of being able to play (find a match) so early on in the season. We want to be able to welcome players into the season for a longer period of time, and not have people lose all hope early on as the time require to find a match grows beyond the time they have available to play. Again, more changes in the future, but for now that is the noteworthy change for this season aside from some bug fixes, etc.

As a reminder, if you have played a few seasons here and have some thoughts on what you would like to see around prizes, structure or anything else, please email us at support@FullerSystems.com with your suggestions.

Competitive Cribbage - Winter 2022 Season

Welcome to the Winter 2022 Season of Competitive Matchmaking for Cribbage Pro! Yes, it is still 2021 when we start this season, but I think we have had enough of 2021. The Autumn 2021 season has ended, and in a way that I honestly did not expect. So many new faces on the Top 50 leaderboard this last season, several of which came in at the "last minute" to make their way into the top rankings, and of course a new 1st place player as well! Please continue to tell your friends about competitive cribbage, and of course the chance to win the prizes! Thank you to all who were once again able to participate in this great game of cribbage!

As many will attest, it takes some significant commitment to achieve this, and so I want to very sincerely recognize that hard work here. I'm humbled by the individual effort put in by so many. That said, I also hear that it would be nice to lower that level of work a bit to allow more people a chance to participate. This season we are making some smaller changes, but won't be making the bigger changes until next season when I do plan to include more of your suggestions. Before I get into the more minor changes this season later in this post, let me take a moment to recognize the top players last season.

In 1st place, we have "ThreeG". Great job on achieving this rank and beating out some great competition! 2nd place is "iPeg", and I am sure you are all deeply saddened to see them fall from 1st place, after sitting there multiple seasons. In 3rd we have "Dhrun", which again I know took a lot of work to get there! There were several big improvements again this season, but we really saw a lot of new players in the Top 50, so congratulations to you all as well.

As with past seasons, everyone who finished the season in the Top 50 ("Recent" list), have been awarded both a special in-game "board peg" as well as Cribbage Pro Gold that can be used in the Cribbage Pro Contests system and then redeemed for cash (awards must be used at least once in a Contest to be cashed out to USDC, see the full terms and conditions for details). The top finisher is awarded the "crown" board peg, and all others in the Top 50 are awarded a "star" board peg. These pegs are shown to everyone when playing in online multiplayer games, and they are permanent, so if you see your opponent has one of them you can know that they have earned it by finishing in the Top 50 in competitive play. The Cribbage Pro Gold awards are as follows (not cumulative):

• 4 Gold for Top 50
• 7 Gold for Top 25
• 10 Gold for Top 10
• 20 Gold for 3rd Place
• 30 Gold for 2nd Place
• 50 Gold for 1st Place

Remember to complete your 10 matches per week. See the FAQ for details. Play early, and play often!

Here was the final Top 50 for Autumn 2021:

1	ThreeG	26	4MrHand
2	iPeg	27	glaicer29
3	Dhrun	28	jkruger
4	card55	29	ernie313
5	flashmatt	30	gstorm77
6	kcguy	31	Paxter
7	Saskie	32	RatKing
8	lbolt58	33	VGKnights
9	WhyADuck	34	dkatz1877
10	XLNC21	35	Linkup
11	UberPooch	36	0wl
12	Domerzag	37	Br1Guy
13	nob4one	38	cribberoo
14	jwick60	39	jwr13
15	hillchem	40	dph
16	xdb1135	41	Yompopo
17	rattle15	42	DdsG
18	nvsru911	43	shudbgolf
19	chiyo1	44	stephzzz
20	beth0223	45	gmax
21	Cmoney421	46	airmark7
22	jjonell	47	Trucha1
23	mountains	48	Rhuby
24	better69	49	Birddoggy
25	Swodis	50	lovJesus

The levels in Competitive Matchmaking are available in the FAQ.

Important Changes This Season

Now to briefly go over some important changes this new season. First, we have changed the rule about how late you can come into the season and start playing. You now must have completed your placement matches 3 weeks prior to the end of the season. This should give enough time to let the ranking settle out the top players without the potential for a few lucky matches to drive rankings sideways at the end of a season.

Second, multiple pieces of the matchmaking system have changed. The biggest change is that we now will enforce a maximum CR difference between players once you get to the Diamond level. That means you shouldn't see someone who is 1000 CR lower/higher than you being matched at that point (and it is fairly unlikely at the lower levels too). The second change is a bit more complex to describe, but put simply it tweaks how the system determines if it thinks the matchup will produce a "good game" and let it through as a positive potential match. I think both of these changes will allow some more movement in the leaderboard in a good way, while also reducing that "risk" of waiting too long and being matched against someone too much lower than you. One of the real life "daily" impacts is that you may wait a little longer for a match, but also that you should not exit out of the matchmaking while waiting like before if you were trying to avoid that lower CR match. It will be fun to see how this all plays out, and note that we may make some tweaks throughout the season if it looks like it any of this isn't achieving the desired outcomes.

One last minor change is a tweak to how wait times are calculated. It is definitely far from perfect, but just remember it is based on what players of your similar level are seeing as wait times on average recently. As such, it will lose accuracy during slower times when fewer players are playing. I am honestly debating if this feature is very helpful, and so please let me know your feedback if you would rather that space on the screen be used for something else or just gone.

Finally, know that we are looking into some potentially bigger changes for the next season. If you have played a few seasons here and have some thoughts on what you would like to see done, please email us at support@FullerSystems.com with your suggestions. Similarly, if you have never played and something is holding you back, let us know. It is primarily what you all suggest that drives what I work on next, so let your voice be heard.

Older iOS or Android Device Not Connecting to Multiplayer?

Is your older iOS or Android device no longer able to connect to play online multiplayer games, but instead you get a general error about a potential account problem or other connection problem? If you have tried resetting your password and making sure your internet connection is working correctly, but still have problems, you may be experiencing a problem with not having recent security updates (or probably any updates at all recently) on your older device. If you are using an older iOS version older than iOS 10 or Android less than version 7.1.1 (with some exceptions), that older device does not have the latest security updates required to connect securely to the game servers. Without going into a lot of technical details as to why/how this has happened, know that there is this concept of a "root certificate" that your device is missing, but needs to be installed and trusted in order to be able to continue to connect to the game (and many other websites/apps in the future as well most likely). That root certificate is the one used by our website to secure it over HTTPS/SSL (again, skipping over most of the technical parts), and is provided by a company called "LetsEncrypt" (they provide our SSL Certificate). The solution is to add this root certificate to your older device manually. You need to use your device that is having problems to follow these high level steps:

1. On your device having the problem, go to https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/
2. Scroll down to the section below the image titled "Root Certificates", and under the "Active" listing the first item is "ISRG Root X1".
3. Under "ISRG Root X1", to the right of that is the "Self Signed" item linked as "der".  Select and download that "der" certificate file.
4. Open that file on your device and follow any prompts to install it as a root certificate. How you do this exactly will depend on your device. For example, here is how to install a certificate on an Android Pixel device. Other Android devices will require you to go to the Settings app and under a Security section to install the certificate, while most older iOS devices will guide you directly after trying to open the file.

Once installed, you may have to restart your device and then try again to use the game. If simply opening the certificate file you downloaded does not get you started on installing the root certificate, you may have to do a Google search for specific instructions for how to install it on your specific device. It is usually just a few short steps.

Finally, if you try this and still have problems, then this may not be what is causing your issue and you should email us at support@FullerSystems.com for further assistance.