JQT says: I am loath to disrupt a good phrase, but if 30% of all games are indeed lost on the first hand or deal, then, since I do save my played games against the computer, I should be able to "shuffle" or randomize the order of say some number of deals (let's say Deals One through Six) of perhaps 20,000 of my archived games, and then three out of ten times, you should be able to tell me which one of those Six Deals was actually FIRST in the game. It would mean that there is something players do that is discernably different during the very first deal of a game. At the end of a game, I don't think the losing (or winning) side or player gets to pick which one of the deals "lost" (or "won") a particular game, just like an investment in which you "double your money" you cannot "point to" the particular dollar that was responsible for that growth. Investors who understand math are fond of saying, especially to gamblers: "Money has no memory." And similarly, in a game like Cribbage, the pegs probably have no idea of which deal "won" or "lost" a particular game; and even if they did, they probably wouldn't tell us! In the same line of reasoning, you cannot say that a specific hand score during a specific deal "predicted" the score of the deal that follows or precedes it. Humans are nostalgic and superstitious: we like to say that the touchdown before halftime "won" the game, when that can ONLY be the case if no other touchdowns were scored! In a basketball game that is won 78-to-77, the first free throw of the game helped win just as much as the last, but we don't call that first bucket a "buzzer beater"! Now, psychologically, we might say that a Cribbage player who does poorly during the first deal, for any number of many various reasons, might be affected throughout the remainder of that game, and even the games that follow it for the rest of the night. A player who gets a Twenty-Four-Point Hand on the first deal might play better (or worse) for the remainder of the evening! Also, a player who gets a Zero-Point Hand and Zero-Point Crib in Deal One might be upset and play poorly for a while, but it might also cause some players to increase the quality of their subsequent play. But to say which particular deal in a sequence has any more effect than any other deal is tantamount looking at an archery target, and inferring that the shots that are closer to the bullseye were sequentially last (or first). You cannot say, "Look, she started out missing by ten inches, and then each shot got closer!" What you might do is see a target with awful results, and three out of ten arrows missing, and infer that, "It appears that she shot so poorly, that it maybe has caused her to later miss the target!" or, "She missed a few, so her later results, while better, were still poor." But you really don't know the sequence of which arrow was shot when, not unless you watched her shoot; and I would contend that other than possibly having the outcome of a poor deal affect a player later in a psychological way, that there's probably no way you could look at all the deals of a game if they were not in their original order, and then pick which one was the first deal, and do so any more reliably than someone choosing from amongst them randomly.