This snippet from the BBC News website somehow interested me enough to want to share it here ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43203095
Played a game nearly exactly the same in college, without the "pigs". There was always a game going in the student center. Game started every morning by 7:00 even though the first classes didn't start until 7:30 or 8:00. Take off to go to class, and someone was waiting to take your seat. There's another game much like it called "Pitch", except the only scoring cards are "Hi, Low, Jack, Jick, Joker, and Game". (Only the trump cards count... "Jick" is the off-jack, and "Game" is the "10 of trump". Used to play with my grandfather. I was a good card player, but it seems Grandpa beat me at nearly every game of Cribbage. He seemed to always have the cards to make 15 and 31... still can't imagine how he managed that.) Ah.... things we used to do. Now days, people don't have time for such. (Can't seem to get their beak out of their damned iPhones... pity, that.)
Cribbage is like that: there must be more skill in it than meets the eye ... "old timers" seem to be fairly consistent winners at the game. Must have been quite some game, to get students up for 7.00am (unless they were still "up late" from the night before?).
Doesn't seem like there would be much skill in Cribbage. You can only play the cards you have. When you play 1st, it's just a guess which of your cards to play. But I can still remember being frustrated that Grandpa almost always seemed to have the card for "15-2" and "31" no matter what card I played. (And the meld... how does one player always seem to have more than the other?) That's illogical. Seems the split of games should be somewhere around 50-50, but was nowhere near that ratio. As for the college game... I had to drive 20 miles every day through morning rush hour traffic. I'd often make it a point to get to school early enough to get a seat at the table. Truth be known, between card games and the pool halls (I won the school's "8-Ball" pool tournament)... that's probably the reason I dropped out of school. Misspent youth, I had.
Yep. The iphones/chat rooms/ email were all supposed to keep us connected, and indeed it does that when it does, but is also a major contributor to the epidemic of loneliness in modern civilization. A guy meets a girl sitting on a park bench next to him, and his first instinct is to hope that she will send him a pic so he can download it and see what she looks like. Hellooooooo!. I am sitting right here. Or maybe he will go out with her and they can sit there in the coffee shop and watch their iphones together. Doesn't get any better than that. Obviously that card game remains popular because it is an antidote to the epidemic for many. But someone will develop an app for the game- already have most likely- and then the bright idea that you can play online- and voila- who needs to go down to the store and talk to all those hillbillies. And so it goes. Progress. Anyway. Nice to see the rural folks get some good press and treated like humans rather deplorables just because they are not hip and progressive. They are not. I am a deplorable myself.
There is a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj and Lucy have a "texting date"... sitting across a table from one another in the library. Humorous notion on one hand, sad on another. Years ago our family used to have Saturday dinner at my aunt Ida's house. She was a world-class cook! We'd eat early, like 2:00, then the "penny-nickel-dime" poker game would break out and run until midnight. 3-generations... talking, joking, eating, drinking, playing cards. (Grandpa always dealt, "2 cents ante, Jacks or better".) Too bad we don't have time for such these days.