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Best
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Your own cards are face down. Look at two, remember what you can, and call Cabo when you think your total is lowest.
Everyone's cards lie face down, your own included, and at the start you may look at just two of yours. Lower total wins. On your turn take the top card of the deck or of the discard pile: a deck card can be swapped into any of your positions or thrown away, and a thrown-away 7 or 8 lets you look at one of your own cards, a 9 or 10 at one of your rival's, and a jack or queen swaps one of yours with one of theirs without either of you seeing. A pile card must be swapped in. Call Cabo to close the round — your rival takes one last turn, then everything is revealed. The lowest total wins the round, but calling without being lowest costs ten penalty points. Three rounds make a match, lower total wins it, and every match you win the next rival deals one more card to each of you.
Treat the two opening looks as an investment in decisions, not in cards. Knowing that the second slot holds a king is worth far more than knowing it holds a four, because the king is the one you will spend the round trying to replace. So when you look and find two low cards, accept that this round you are mostly flying blind and lean on the discard pile instead; when you find a high one, you have a target and every draw has an obvious home.
Anchor what you learn to a position, not to a picture. "Third from the left is a queen" survives a dozen turns; a vague sense of "I have something big somewhere" does not, and it is exactly the kind of half-memory that makes people call Cabo and eat the penalty. If you can only hold a few facts at a time — and nobody can hold many — hold the ones about your highest cards and let the low ones go, because you will never need to act on a three.
The pile is safer than the deck and beginners underuse it. A visible two or ace is a guaranteed improvement over any card you know to be worse and, unlike a deck draw, it cannot force you into a decision you did not want. The one cost is that your rival sees exactly what you took and where it went, so late in a round, when they are deciding whether to call, taking a low card from the pile tells them their estimate of you is too high.
Call when your known cards average about two apiece and you have no unknowns you are worried about; that is roughly the break-even point, and both calling much earlier and much later measurably lose. Above all, do not call to stop a round you are losing — the ten-point penalty is bigger than almost any deficit you are trying to escape, so if you are behind, keep drawing and make the rival prove it.