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Dan Barlow:

If I keep the K, a 9 will come up. If I keep the 8 a Q will come up. You just can't win. So I toss myself 2-K. Opponent might throw me a 3 to go with that. He's unlikely to throw me a 5 to go with 2-8.

DeLynn Colvert:

I toss the 2-8, keeping both ends open with the 10-J-J. With such weak cards I'll keep for maximum count and peg for maximum as well.

George Rasmussen:

Interesting hand for sure. One could argue that holding 10-J-J intact is the essence of the hand, with run possibilities in either direction. Little exists in the way of pegging opportunity on this two point hand. Not much pegging potential exists with tossing J-J to the crib and retaining 2-8-10-K either. That being the case, I'm going to play 8-10-J-J and discard 2-K to my crib. By the way, a small difference in this hand would prompt me to toss the J-J to crib. If the remaining cards were 3-8-10-K, that 11 combination of 3-8 would sway me to discard J-J.

Michael Schell:

Pone starts the deal -2, while I'm +16. This trumps everything, despite the lousy cards I dealt myself. I'm going to eschew the normal alternatives of 2-10-J-J, 8-10-J-J and 10-J-J-K in favor of the defensive 2-8-10-K. Even if I only score four or five points total this hand, I'll still be in decent position to get to 96* or better with my first count as pone. I can't afford to let my opponent get into position by scoring anything above average here.

Phyllis Schmidt:

There's not much here to hold, but if I keep 8-10-J-J, then both ends are open. I have to catch a break with the up card.

Peter Setian:

Normally I would throw 8-10. But being in such a conservative position, and needing to hold back the opponent, I would toss J-J and hold the variety of cards to defend against pegging.

HALSCRIB:

Seems like a simple question. But in this position my first goal is to minimize pone's scoring, and if I make the natural toss of 2-9, then pone will peg one point more on average than if I keep 2-8-10-K. With average scoring, I'll still get to 121 "on time", so I'm going to sacrifice some combined hand/crib scoring and toss the Js to keep the four well-spaced cards.

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Panelists

Dan Barlow won the 1980 National Open Cribbage Tournament, and made the 1985 All American Cribbage Team. His cribbage strategy articles appeared in Cribbage World for many years, and can be seen on the ACC Web site. He also provides strategy tips at MSN Gaming Zone. He has written six books on cribbage, two of which have been glowingly reviewed in Games Magazine. All, including his latest book Winning Cribbage Tips, are available at The Cribbage Bookstore.