There’s no crying in cribbage. There’s no politics, either

I’m out of town today. This busy brain — and this column — are taking a break this weekend from the politics that normally consume the thoughts and works of an opinion writer. Instead, I’m spending this fine summer Sunday in Des Moines, at the final day of the Iowa State Fair.

The final day of the fair is the best day of the fair for one simple reason: it’s the day of the cribbage tournament.

That’s right, folks — I’m so Iowan that I drove two hours from Cedar Rapids just to sit down in a big hall with two hundred other Iowans and play cards with eight of them. God bless our great state.

For the uncultured heathens of our great state, cribbage is a card game in which players score points primarily based on combinations they can make from the cards in their hand and the sequence in which they are played, tracking those points by moving pegs on a game board.

Players score 2 points for each combination of cards that add up to 15, as well as points for a pair, three or four of a kind and other combinations similar to what would be called a “straight” or a “flush” in poker — although a straight in cribbage is called a “run” and may have as few as three cards in sequential order. The first player to reach the end of the 120-hole board wins.

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Cribbage is the game of my people. It is a revered Cole family pastime, purposely mentioned in the obituary of my late grandfather, Bob Cole of Story City.

“He taught his grandchildren to play cribbage when they were young,” the obituary reads, “and continued to enjoy playing cribbage until his death.”

Indeed. Grandpa played his last cribbage game with my mom and brother when we drove out to Story City to celebrate his 101st birthday in 2015, about five months before he died peacefully that September. He won that very last game and boasted shamelessly about his victory for the rest of his life. (Literally.)

Bob Cole was the best. But now’s not the time to tear up at the memories. There’s no crying in cribbage.

Cribbage does involve some arithmetic skill — which is why, just like my grandfather, his progeny tend to be indecorous braggarts following a win. But is largely a game of chance based on how the cards are dealt, and the odds of scoring vary. Even the most skilled players are prone to being dealt a hand that scores zero points, and even a fourth-grader can achieve the maximum score for a single hand.

The cribbage tournament has been a fair time contest at the Iowa State Fair for decades. Participants are expected to pay a fee to enter the tournament.

“I gotta bring a dollar with me to get into the tournament,” I explained to a friend last week.

“A whole dollar?” my friend said with a smirk.

“Yep,” I replied. “They split the entry fees up into prizes for the winners of the tournament.”

The number of winners who receive a cash prize varies from year to year, said Larry Kacer of Altoona. With the help of his family, Kacer has run the tournament for just shy of 40 years.

In Kacer’s tournament, players who place in the top 10, 12 or even 15 can take home a modest monetary prize. The winner gets around $35-40 dollars as the top prize, but the amount varies just as the size of the kitty does, which is based on the number of players.

The attendance record from Kacer’s tenure is 212 players, set in 2004. Twenty years later, the tournament still enjoys healthy numbers that make it a satisfying event.

Like my friend, I get a kick out of the idea of such a low entry fee. I’m certainly not complaining that I can enjoy several hours in air-conditioned paradise playing the Lord’s card game for a dollar. But I couldn’t help but wonder recently: why keep the admission so low, especially if the money it is doled out to the winners as prizes?

I had already formed a hypothesis when I reached out to Kacer last week: The prize money probably has a regulatory ceiling, one that could be exceeded if a higher entry fee resulted in a larger pot of cash for the winners.

One dollar per person for a tournament that receives 100-200 participants makes for a nice little cash treat for the top five or 10 percent of scorers. Bump that admission fee to $10 — the same as the base fee to enter an item such as a pie or a flower arrangement in the Iowa Family Living competition — and I’d gladly still pay it. But if the pot that is split on a prorated basis among winners is also 10 times larger, some winners could walk away with a not-insignificant sum, and our good-natured card game could get a lot more serious.

It’s not an absurd thing to consider, I contend. We live in a society where government regulates just about anything, almost always for reasons rooted in the intent to protect people.

That’s usually a good thing. I can reasonably expect that everything I eat at the fair today won’t make me violently ill because of rules government proactively imposes on food vendors to ensure food safety. If I get sick from the four quarter-pound strips of pork belly on a stick I eat today, those regulations make it less likely that I will have fallen ill from tainted product and more likely because I was dumb enough to eat a whole pound of greasy bacon. (But it will have been delicious, and I will regret nothing.)

Sometimes, however, the laws designed to protect us can go too far. Until 2020, it was illegal for a kid to operate a lemonade stand in Iowa based on how state law defined “food” and food establishments, which require a license from the state.

In 2011, police in Coralville shut down at least three lemonade stands run by kids during RAGBRAI, including one operated by a four-year-old. It took legislation, passed unanimously in 2020, to legalize lemonade stands in Iowa.

Those laws that are designed to protect us from careless and bad actors affect our gaming, too — including bingo games. Before this year, a qualified organization offering a bingo game could not legally provide a merchandise prize exceeding $250 in value. In February, Gov. Reynolds signed a bill passed with wide bipartisan support raising that ceiling to $950 — unless the prize is a firearm, in which case the retail value can be as high as $5,000. (Again, God bless our great state.)

So, is our happy little cribbage tournament’s entry fee based on a legally imposed ceiling? Kacer’s answer humbled this opinion writer in need of a break from politics with a much-needed reminder that not quite everything yet is done under the thumb of government.

“We’ve never changed it,” said Kacer. Admission has been $1 since 1985, when Kacer took over leadership of the tournament. Since that dollar is paid on top of fair admission and any items purchased throughout the day, Kacer and his fellow organizers have no plans to raise it in the future.

Kacer will be joining me and a hundred or two other Iowans on the game floor today. The right to continue playing was a stipulation of his when he agreed to take charge of organizing the event. And for the last four decades, “I’ve been looking for the perfect hand,” he said.

We cribbage enthusiasts know what Kacer means by “the perfect hand.” It’s the elusive maximum score of 29 that most of us will only ever dream of scoring. According to the American Cribbage Congress, the odds of being dealt the perfect hand are 1 in 216,580, or less than five ten-thousandths of a percent.

By comparison, the odds that a person will get struck by lightning at some point during their lifetime is the far more likely 1 in 15,300, according to the National Weather Service.

And yet, the perfect hand has been dealt at our humble tournament — twice, according to Kacer.

Tournament rules require that players bring their own boards, their own deck of cards and their own pen to keep score. I brought my lucky deck of cards and my prized cribbage board, which previously belonged to Bob Cole. He’s probably looking down from Heaven on his only granddaughter and beaming with pride.

I also brought a dollar to cover my entry fee. Along with what I recently paid an enterprising eight-year-old for a cup of pink lemonade, this dollar will be one of the best I ever spent.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com