Garrett Pegg — Cribbage Player & Writer
Garrett Pegg is a competitive cribbage player with 20+ years of tournament experience and the lead writer at CribbageBox. His articles draw directly on ACC tournament play, club mentoring, and the mathematics behind optimal cribbage decisions.
Garrett Pegg
Lead Writer, CribbageBox
Garrett Pegg has been playing competitive cribbage for more than two decades and writes about the game from the perspective of someone who has sat across the board from serious tournament players for most of his adult life. His articles at CribbageBox are grounded in that experience — not in theory alone, but in the real decisions that determine whether you win or lose a rated game.
Playing Background
Garrett learned cribbage at fourteen from his grandfather — a retired postal worker who kept a worn pegboard on the kitchen table year-round. What started as a way to pass winter evenings in Burlington, Vermont became a lifelong pursuit of the game.
He joined his first American Cribbage Congress (ACC) club in 2003 and has competed in sanctioned tournaments across New England and the northeastern United States since. Over that time he has accumulated more than 500 rated tournament games, been a consistent finisher in New England regional events, and is a two-time Vermont State cribbage champion (2009, 2014). He remains a regular participant in the ACC Grand National tournament.
Beyond tournaments, Garrett has spent years mentoring beginners through local club play — explaining the same concepts (why you never give a 5 to the opponent’s crib; why a 4 is the safest lead; how to count a double run without losing track) dozens of times to dozens of players. That experience of teaching is what shaped the way he writes: he knows exactly where new players get stuck, because he has watched it happen repeatedly at the table.
Writing at CribbageBox
Garrett is the primary author of CribbageBox’s strategy library and the lead writer and reviewer for the learn section. His writing covers the full depth of the game — from absolute beginner tutorials through mathematically rigorous discard analysis — with the consistent aim of being accurate, clear, and directly useful at the table.
What He Covers
Rules and scoring — The rules articles are written against ACC official standards and reviewed for edge-case accuracy. Garrett focuses particularly on the questions that come up during real games: what happens when both players reach 121 in the same round, how flush scoring differs between hand and crib, when and how muggins applies.
Discard strategy — The discard articles are informed by expected value calculations across all 15 possible keeps from a six-card hand. Garrett builds on this math with the practical judgement that comes from tournament play — when to deviate from the EV-optimal keep based on board position, and which theoretical considerations actually matter at the table versus which are textbook noise.
Pegging — Pegging articles draw directly from match experience. The specific traps described in Pegging Traps to Avoid and the sequences covered in Opening Leads are the patterns Garrett has seen (and been caught by) repeatedly across hundreds of competitive games.
Beginner content — The beginner guides are written with the teaching instinct developed through club mentoring: short sentences, worked examples, and a consistent focus on the one thing a beginner should take away from each section rather than everything that could possibly be said.
How Articles Are Produced
Every strategy article at CribbageBox goes through the following before publication:
- Playing-informed drafting — claims about strategy reflect what works at rated tournament level, not just mathematical optimums in isolation
- Rules cross-reference — any rule interpretation is checked against current ACC regulations
- Numerical verification — expected value figures, probability tables, and scoring breakdowns are calculated independently before inclusion
- Plain-language review — technical content is tested for clarity against the standard of “would a club beginner understand this in context?”
Selected Articles
- Cribbage Rules: The Complete Official Reference
- Cribbage Scoring: Every Combination Explained
- How to Count a Cribbage Hand
- Discard Strategy: What to Keep and What to Throw
- When to Keep vs. Discard 5s
- Pegging Traps to Avoid
- The Mathematics of Cribbage
- Cribbage Probability
Editorial Standards
CribbageBox publishes corrections. If an article contains an error — a miscounted hand, a misquoted rule, a strategy claim that doesn’t hold up — the article is updated and the correction is noted. The goal is that every article is something Garrett would be comfortable defending at an ACC tournament director’s table.
Opinions about strategy are clearly labelled as such (e.g., “in most positions, X is the better play”) rather than presented as settled fact. Where the community has genuine disagreement about optimal play, that disagreement is acknowledged.
Spotted an error or want to suggest a topic? Contact us — feedback on specific articles is always welcome.