About the Association

The International Cribbage Association is the sole sanctioning body for international competitive cribbage. It is constituted of eighty-seven national federations across six continental confederations, and is administered from its permanent secretariat at The Hague under the direction of its Executive Director and the Council of Federations.

A Brief Institutional History

The Association traces its origin to the autumn of 1893, when a company of seventeen gentlemen-amateurs, convened at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, constituted themselves the Worshipful Society of Cribbage Players. The Society's purposes were stated, in the founding minutes, as “the preservation of the courtesies of the game, the codification of its observances, and the orderly settlement of its disputes.” The original charter, with its seventeen signatures, hangs to-day in the Director's antechamber.

In the spring of 1923, the Society reconvened in extraordinary session at the Hotel Beau-Rivage on the shore of Lake Geneva and, joined by delegates from the principal European, North American, and Australasian federations, reconstituted itself the International Cribbage Association. The instrument of reconstitution — styled the Geneva Accords (Cribbage) — remains the foundation of the present codex of bylaws, having received only such amendments as the successor Congresses have, from time to time, formally adopted.

The Association's headquarters were transferred from London to The Hague in 1946, in recognition of that city's standing as the international city of peace and justice, and in keeping with the Association's understanding of its own juridical function. The present Secretariat occupies Suckling House, a four-storey seventeenth-century building on the Lange Voorhout, named in quiet honour of Sir John Suckling, the seventeenth-century English poet to whom the invention of the game is traditionally attributed.

The Office of the Executive Director

Pat Thornenberg

Executive Director of the International Cribbage Association since MMIX; Chairman of the National Crib Champ World League (NCCWL) since MCMXCVIII.

Pat Thornenberg has, since 2009, served as the chief permanent officer of the International Cribbage Association and the sole steward of its day-to-day administration. The Director's tenure spans the longest unbroken period of executive continuity in the Association's modern era, encompassing the reforms of the 2010s, the codification of the contemporary Tribunal procedure, and the ongoing administration of the most consequential disciplinary proceedings the Association has confronted in its history.

Origins and the Inheritance of the Game

Pat was born in the autumn of 1958 in the small lake town of Pasterfield, Minnesota, into a household in which cribbage was played most evenings of the week and on every public holiday but two. The maternal grandmother, a former schoolteacher who held a certified Level 2 rating from the Upper Midwest Federation, taught Pat the game at the age of six at a kitchen table the Thornenberg family still possesses. The grandfather, a clerk to the county court, served as a Sector observer in his retirement and kept a personal register of every hand played within the household from 1949 until his death in 1972 — a register Pat inherited and continues, in part, to-day.

By the age of eleven, Pat had dealt and counted the family's first sanctioned twenty-eight hand — three Fives and the Jack of spades in hand, the fourth Five of spades as the starter. The occasion is described, in Pat's own much-later remarks to the Secretariat's Annual Bulletin, as “the moment at which a childhood pastime declared itself to be the institution of a lifetime.” The hand is recorded as Entry № 4471 in the Association's continuous register of certified twenty-eights, certified nunc pro tunc in 1986.

Education and the Formation of a Vocation

Pat read history at Hartwell College in upstate New York, graduating with the highest commendation of the Class of 1980. The undergraduate thesis — The Card and the Charter: On the Government of Pastimes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries — was directed by the legal historian Professor Eleanor M. Houghton and is held to-day in the Hartwell College Library and, by donation, in the Suckling House archive.

There followed, in 1981, a year of travel through Europe, in the course of which Pat visited the secretariats of fourteen national federations and conducted a series of recorded interviews with their chief permanent officers. These interviews, published privately in 1983 under the title Conversations on the Federated Pastime, are still cited in the Association's own internal training materials for incoming secretarial staff.

In 1984 Pat completed a Master of Business Administration at the Schwerin School of Pennsylvania State University, with a master's thesis entitled The Federated Sport: Governance and Legitimacy in Postwar Europe, 1947–1968. The thesis, 342 pages, is the longest yet submitted to the Schwerin School in its field and remains the foundational scholarly treatment of the period.

Early Career at the Sector

Pat joined the staff of the United States and Caribbean Sector in the spring of 1986, as a junior secretary under the then Chair, the late H. M. Vandergriff. The Sector at that time comprised twenty-nine national and sub-national federations and was recovering from a difficult succession crisis following the sudden retirement of Chair Vandergriff's own predecessor.

The defining episode of Pat's early career was the schism of 1991, in which the American Cribbage Congress, a confederation of forty-one state and territorial bodies, formally seceded from the NCCWL over the question of the proper scoring of the double skunk. The ACC favoured a treble-defeat valuation; the NCCWL, in conformity with the Geneva Accords, maintained the quadruple. Pat, then twenty-eight months into the Sector secretariat, was assigned the conduct of the reconciliation correspondence and, over the course of six weeks of daily and sometimes twice-daily letters exchanged with the ACC's chief negotiator, secured the quadruple-defeat settlement that has held to this day.

Pat was elevated to Deputy Chair of the United States and Caribbean Sector in 1994 and, on the retirement of Chair Vandergriff, to the Chairmanship of the NCCWL itself in 1998.

The Chairmanship

Pat's nineteen-year chairmanship of the NCCWL is principally remembered for three signal contributions to the modern administration of the game.

The first is the Helicopter Doctrine, promulgated in 1999, by which the Association formally adopted the principle that the personal delivery, by helicopter, of an inductee's official certification card is the appropriate ceremonial marker of elevation. The Doctrine was initially regarded by certain of the European confederations as a peculiarly American flourish; it is now standard practice across the Association and is provided for in the contemporary bylaws (Article XII, § 3).

The second is the Chip-Implant Proposal, brought to the Council of Federations in 2003 after a series of unsuccessful helicopter missions in which the intended inductees could not be located at their last-registered addresses. The Proposal would establish a universal standard of voluntary sub-cutaneous chip implantation for all members, permitting the Awards Office to coordinate ceremonial deliveries with reliable precision. The Proposal has not, to the date of this writing, been adopted; it remains under perpetual review, with Pat continuing to commend it to each successive Congress.

The third is the Sanctioned Wins Reform of 2007, in which Pat secured the formal codification of the thirty-thousand-win threshold for Level 1 certification, ending three decades of inconsistent national standards. The Reform was adopted by acclamation at the Lima Congress and is the basis of the ratings tables in present use.

Pat's correspondence during this period is preserved in the Suckling House archive in some 14,000 letters, telegrams, and facsimile transmissions. The Director's distinctive epistolary style — intensifying lists of synonymous imperatives, the citation of multiple bylaw subsections in close succession, and the occasional invocation of world historical events to underscore the gravity of cribbage misconduct — was already, in this period, fully formed.

Elevation to the Executive Directorship

The circumstances of Pat's elevation to the Executive Directorship in 2009 were, by the Association's own subsequent admission, the most difficult in its modern history. The previous Executive Director, Bartholomew “Bart” Crumthwaite-Halloran, was terminated by the Council of Federations in the autumn of 2008 after the Tribunal upheld findings regarding “the awarding of prestigious recognitions in exchange for personal considerations.” The entire body of awards issued during the Crumthwaite-Halloran era was revoked, and the Crumthwaite -Halloran portrait was removed from its place in the Director's antechamber.^†

Pat was called from the NCCWL chairmanship in January 2009 to assume the Executive Directorship of the ICA on an interim basis, confirmed in the office on permanent appointment by the Council of Federations at its session of May that year. The first year of the tenure was occupied chiefly by the institutional audit, with Pat personally examining every award certificate issued during the previous decade and signing the formal letter of revocation for each. Pat continues to hold the NCCWL chairmanship concurrently with the Executive Directorship, an unusual arrangement permitted by special resolution of the Council and renewed at each subsequent triennial Congress.

^† The rectangular discolouration in the wood panelling at the antechamber's east wall, where the Crumthwaite -Halloran portrait formerly hung, remains visible to-day. The Secretariat has declined repeated proposals to refinish the panelling or to install a successor portrait in the space.

Initiatives and Reforms as Executive Director

Pat's Executive Directorship is marked by a sustained programme of modernisation of the Association's operating practices. The principal initiatives are the Hand-on-the-Cards Protocol of 2017 (Article VII, § 2 of the present bylaws), an anti-coaching measure obliging the player whose hand is being counted to maintain physical contact with the cards throughout the Show; the Tribunal Appeals Reform of 2019, by which the appeal period was standardised at thirty days from the date of publication of the determination and the requirement of national federation letterhead was formally instituted; and the Electronic Pegboard Feasibility Study, initiated by Pat in 2024 and ongoing as of the present writing, with a preliminary report expected at the 2027 Congress.

Pat has been the principal author of the Association's long-distance mentorship framework, codifying the obligations of the mentor and the mentee across geographic separation, with particular reference to mentees who have entered governmental relocation programmes. The framework, much of which is presently unpublished, governs more than two thousand active mentor-mentee relationships across the Association's membership.

The volume of personal correspondence the Director conducts in this period is, by the secretariat's own estimate, in excess of four thousand pages per annum, much of it published in the Association's Annual Bulletin and read aloud, in part, at the opening session of each Congress.

Personal Notes

Pat has not married, and has remarked, in the rare moments of personal disclosure permitted by the official capacity, that “the work itself is companionship enough for the present office.” The Director's collection of antique cribbage boards, presently numbering 614 examples and acquired over the course of forty-three years, is the most extensive in private hands. Selected items are on rotating display in the Director's antechamber and at the Suckling House visitor's gallery.

Pat is known among the secretariat for the propensity, on ceremonial occasions of mentor-mentee bonding, to weep openly and without apology. The phenomenon has been recorded at no fewer than twenty-two formal events in the Director's tenure, and is regarded within the building as a salutary reminder of the deeper purposes the Association is constituted to serve.

A small helicopter remains permanently at the Secretariat's disposal at Pat's standing instruction, for the conduct of the ceremonial deliveries provided by the Helicopter Doctrine. No photograph of Pat other than the official portrait has appeared in any publication of the Association in the present tenure.

The Officers of the Association

The Council of Federations annually elects the principal officers of the Association, who serve under the standing direction of the Executive Director.

The Secretariat is open to correspondence at all hours at Suckling House, Lange Voorhout 14, The Hague. Visitors are received by prior appointment of the Director's chief of staff.