A 19 hand is a hand worth zero. No four cards plus a starter can score exactly 19 — or 25, 26 or 27 — so players say “19” as a joke for a hand with no points.
Cribbage hand scores run from 0 to 29, but a few totals in that range are impossible: 19, 25, 26 and 27. Because nobody can actually score 19, “I’ve got a 19 hand” became the traditional way to say your hand scored nothing.
A zero hand has no fifteens, no pairs, no runs of three or more, no flush and no nobs — for example 2♣ 4♦ 6♠ K♥ with an 8♣ starter. Fifteens hide in combinations of three or four cards (an ace, a 4 and a queen already make one).
How often each score turns up
We counted every possible four-card hand with every possible starter, 12,994,800 combinations, using the Trindo scoring engine. Hands are dealt as six cards and you keep four, so real hands score a little better than these figures, which treat the four cards as random.
- 0 points: 7.8% of combinations, about 1 in 13.
- 2 and 4 points: the most common scores, each about 22%.
- 1 point: under 1%. A single point needs a lone nobs and nothing else.
- Never: 19, 25, 26 and 27. A 24 is possible and the next score up is 28.
If you ever total 19, 25, 26 or 27 when counting a hand or crib, recount. The good end of the scale is covered in the highest possible hand, 29 points, and the rest of the scoring is in the cribbage scoring and strategy guide.