JQT says: I guess I'm doing okay, almost adequate even, in the aggregate, thanks. These seasonal change storms now occurring across the South do tend to wreak havoc with my atypical trigeminal neuralgia and severe migraines, but you know: enough about me! (What do *you* think about me? ; - ) Okay, back to your interesting, if not altogether reasonable, Cribbage Question: Yes and No. Yes, the "inherent" value of a PAIR does certainly make up a significant amount of its Crib Value, but as you rightly pointed out, we also derive a similar inherent value and thus benefit from any 5 Card sent to Our Crib, or from any combination of cards that either adds up to five, or adds up to fifteen. And so that's not sufficient to explain the entirety of my purported logic. No, there's something else about PAIRS that I think makes them less powerful than say "touching" cards in our Crib: if we are dealt two or more of any card, those cards are now less likely to show up from either the Cut Card or from Pone's Discard! It's merely a matter of statistics in that when we send a PAIR into our Own Crib, these are now 'de-facto' cards that are less likely to receive additional help from a card of a similar rank. This is of course less worrisome if we are considering discarding a PAIR of prime connector cards such as Toss (3 3) or even Toss (7 7) I believe, because these often receive likely help from *other* cards. Notice also that I am mostly talking about 'relative improvement' here as opposed to 'static' value: naturally if we stow a PAIR, we already begin with Two Points in Our Crib. But my concept here (and I do believe it's a more vital criteria when it comes to overall 'synergy' in Our Crib) is that other constructs such as "touching" cards and cards that add up to either five or fifteen offer us someting better on which to BUILD additional points, points that usually originate from where none existed prior.

JQT says: Denewton: I believe that Gougie was just embellishing a wonderful display of irony. The 7 Card Cut pushes the 8-8-9 from Two Points all the way up to a Dozen Points, and by attempting to achieve this, with a clever twist of words, he implies that he has thus doomed his own good fortune.