The inclusion of a cribbage event in the Mind Sports Olympiad will be welcomed by all serious card-players as recognising the worth of a game too often looked down on as a trivial pub pastime.

The jaundiced view of crib may be because it's the only game legally playable in public places without dispensation from a local licensing authority. But the pub is not its sole arena. It is played in working-men's clubs throughout the UK, with an annual national championship held under the aegis of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union (CIU).

The popularity of the game is beyond doubt, but it is hard to put a figure on the number of players. Twenty years ago Waddingtons Playing-Card Company placed it higher than bridge and poker. After making contact with the people who run web pages based on local pub cribbage, researchers estimate that 3,000-odd teams playing in UK leagues embrace about one and two million players - and this doesn't include players outside the club and pub circuit.

Unlike the other MSO card games - bridge (French) and poker (American) - crib is of English origin and played only by the English-speaking nations. It has been played almost unchanged for 400 years. It is also a game unlike any other, with its card combinations and arithmetical processing, and its unique scoreboard so necessary for recording points in dribs and drabs throughout play as opposed to huge totals at the end. From its scoring, such phrases as "pegging out" and "in the lurch" are derived, and terminology such as "two for his heels" and "one for his nob" - a hangover from the days when the knave was depicted at full length, with his single nob (head) at one end and his two heels at the other.

The pub attributes of crib today belie its high-class past. The 17th-century biographer John Aubrey ascribes its invention to Sir John Suckling, who died in Paris in 1641 after being involved in a plot on the life of Charles I. He describes Suckling as "the greatest gallant and the greatest Gamester", but adds that "he sent his cards to all gameing places in the country, with private marks; he got £20,000 by this way".

A similar game was played a century earlier in a primitive version called noddy, which means fool, denoting the knave of the turned-up suit. A possible theory is that Suckling added to this simpler game the distinctive feature of the box or crib, together with its eponymous title.

Crib's slip down the social scale began with the rise of whist in the 18th century, itself to suffer likewise at the hands of primitive (pre-auction) bridge in the 1890s. What may have brought it into greater prominence now has been the expansion of computer software based on traditional games. One can only hope that this will bring it back into fashion, as backgammon was revived but a few decades ago. One can never have enough of it.

David Parlett is the author of the Oxford History of Card Games, and The Penguin Book of Card Games.