The American Cribbage Congress was founded in 1980, but it took more than two decades for the rest of the world to catch up - it wasn't until high-speed internet made it practical to deal real hands to real opponents scattered across the country that the ACC built its Internet Cribbage Program to bring sanctioned competition online. Twenty-three seasons later, what began as a handful of players testing whether tournament cribbage could work over a home internet connection has grown into a year-round program spanning multiple platforms, with its own rating system, its own champions, and its own quirks of history.
On February 12, 2004, the ACC ran its first-ever Internet tournament. Every other ACC division ran its season from August 1 through July 31, so that first Internet season was deliberately a short one - just over five months - allowing the new division to fall into step with the rest of the organization the following August. Mike Fetchel won that inaugural partial season, the first of what would eventually be five Internet Championships for him.
Those early tournaments were played on MSN Zone's cribbage room using a Double Elimination Bracket format, with players capped at 50 rated tournaments for the season - a limit that would be revisited several times as the program grew.
The MSN Zone era didn't last. On June 19, 2006, MSN Zone shut down its cribbage room entirely, abruptly ending the 2005/2006 season - the program's third - before it could run its full course. Two months later, on August 14, 2006, the ACC ran its first tournament on GameColony, the platform that remains one of the program's two active sites today.
As play on GameColony settled in, the tournament limit climbed alongside participation: from the original 50 tournaments a season, to 100 starting in 2004/2005, to 125 in 2008/2009, and finally to 150 starting in 2013/2014 - a cap that's held steady ever since.
The format itself evolved too. For years, a Cribbage Cup structure - a five-game round robin followed by a single-elimination bracket for anyone who'd won three or more of those games - ran across multiple platforms, from the MSN Zone era through GameColony and into eCribbage, before eventually being retired. Double-elimination brackets, capped at 32 players each and sometimes run three at a time when the field demanded it, faded out along with MSN Zone itself.
Eventually, eCribbage joined GameColony as the program's second home, hosting a best-of-three single-elimination format from August 2016 through October 2022, and later becoming home to the 9-Game Grass Roots format still played there today.
A handful of special tournaments stand out from the regular schedule. In the middle of the pandemic, on April 18, 2020, the ACC tried something new: two back-to-back 9-Game Grass Roots tournaments, 18 games combined, with the cumulative results determining who advanced into a single-elimination playoff bracket - an attempt to recreate the feel of an in-person weekend tournament when in-person play wasn't an option. On February 11, 2022, the program marked International Cribbage Day with a special single-elimination tournament awarding double the usual IRPs. And on December 16, 2023, a special best-of-five single-elimination event on eCribbage awarded roughly 50% more points than a standard bracket tournament of the same size.
The points awarded for Single Elimination Bracket tournaments - 3 IRPs for reaching the third round, climbing to 84 for an unbeaten run through nine rounds - have stayed exactly the same since the very first season in 2004. Scoring for 9-Game Grass Roots tournaments has had a longer journey: the formula has been revised more than once as the format evolved, most recently in February 2021, with the current points-per-game-point scale now in its fifth full season of use.
Twenty-two seasons have crowned an Internet Champion - the player who finishes the season with the most IRPs - with the 23rd currently underway. A handful of names appear again and again on that list: Mike Fetchel and Daniel Crete have each won it five times, Mark Van Dyke three times, and Tom Langford twice, alongside a number of one-time champions across the years. The complete, season-by-season list - automatically kept current as each new season concludes - lives on the Past Champions page.
Heading into its 23rd season, the Internet Program runs two active tournament formats: Single Elimination Bracket on GameColony, and 9-Game Grass Roots on eCribbage. The tournament limit remains at 150 a season, and the program continues to grow and evolve the way it always has - one tournament, one season, at a time.