Balatro Tips and Strategies (Add Your Own)

[Zed Clampet]

Ive been looking around and it seems like we've stumbled onto a well trodden debate in the Balatro community over whether Straights or Full House is better. I'm not any kind of statistician or mathematician to get into working out all the actual probabilities, so I'll just keep playing by my feelies

If the only decent Jokers available early on focus on Straights or Flushes then I do try to go that way, the problem is that I just havent had as consistant success with that. Thats obviously at least partly a me problem due to some choices that Im making somewhere, so I'll try some of your tips next time I'm into a Straight build.

Anyway I didnt mean I would always try and level all of the hands I mentioned, I would usually focus on one whichever one of them is most viable based on Jokers and other stuff that appears, and then later on Full House once theres a lot of duplicate cards. If I pull a planet card pack that doesnt have one of my main hands Ill just get whatever is most useful there. I play a bit differently to you in that I hardly ever focus hard on Pair or High Card out of those options, its usually 2 Pair or 3 of a Kind, because the Pair Jokers also work for both of those and they score higher due to having more cards in them.

I almost always have Splash, the joker that lets you count every card you put out, so having more cards in them really kind of works against me because I can play the pair and then put 3 enhanced cards with it and get bigger scores.

I have decided that the only way to play endless is to have Splash (see above) Mime, which retriggers the abilities of played cards, and to also have Blueprint, which will copy Mime and do it all over again. Then as many positive and negative Xmulti jokers as you can get.

As usual, I haven't read anything about making builds, so there are probably other ways.

I just played endless with a great set of xMulti jokers and Splash, and it wasn't enough. I had 2 x2's and an x4, I also had a joker that gave something like 52 multi for pairs. It did fine but wasn't enough when the blinds hit 10plus million. I also didn't have a good coin joker, which is pretty important.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I almost always have Splash, the joker that lets you count every card you put out, so having more cards in them really kind of works against me because I can play the pair and then put 3 enhanced cards with it and get bigger scores.

I have decided that the only way to play endless is to have Splash (see above) Mime, which retriggers the abilities of played cards, and to also have Blueprint, which will copy Mime and do it all over again. Then as many positive and negative Xmulti jokers as you can get.

As usual, I haven't read anything about making builds, so there are probably other ways.

I just played endless with a great set of xMulti jokers and Splash, and it wasn't enough. I had 2 x2's and an x4, I also had a joker that gave something like 52 multi for pairs. It did fine but wasn't enough when the blinds hit 10plus million. I also didn't have a good coin joker, which is pretty important.

Yea I never looked up anything before this, then out of interest trying to find out how to make Straights work better I found some threads debating the pros and cons of Full House vs Straight.

Have you got to the Eternal Jokers yet?

 

[Zed Clampet]

Yea I never looked up anything before this, then out of interest trying to find out how to make Straights work better I found some threads debating the pros and cons of Full House vs Straight.

Have you got to the Eternal Jokers yet?

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(sorry, I meant to do strike-through on what I wrote, but it got deleted instead)
EDIT: I didn't understand what Eternal Jokers are. They are only eternal during your current run. I thought you carried them with you from run to run. They aren't nearly as interesting as I thought.

I'm not sure why there's a debate of Full House vs Straights. You can't play the game trying to get either one (except for the occasional stroke of good luck)unless you have the two straight jokers. Then you can get straights very nearly every single time (I'm not exaggerating. I've done this several times, and I may have failed to get a Straight once or twice the whole game). There's nothing similar for Full House, so you are going to have to fall back on Pair almost every single round. Or you can sometimes fall back on Two Pair, which dilutes your leveling efforts and makes everything worse.

But here's the thing, if you are only trying to win Green or White Stake decks (which is how the game is most fun), it doesn't really matter. As long as you have a rational, coherent plan that works with the jokers you've picked up, you should win pretty much every game. If you aren't, then there's something wrong with your plan.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Have you got to the Eternal Jokers yet?

Okay, I played the Black Deck with the Eternal Jokers, but while it offered me a bunch of them, there weren't any that I wanted. That's kind of a shame because when you complete the game, it creates a new file called "unlock_notify" which I'm guessing gets rid of your permanent jokers when you start a new game. I'm also guessing that if you delete this file you get to keep them. Now you know I have to try it.

The game went well. Other than the Eternal Jokers, it had the changes from the previous decks included--no money on small blinds and higher antes. At least I assume that's what it was doing. I know the antes were higher, but I didn't pay attention to see if the small blinds were paying out. Anyway, there's no point in continuing this in endless mode, so I'll just go start a new game somewhere I haven't unlocked.

 

[Zed Clampet]

OKAY! This is really happening. I am not anti-RNG. I'm not one of those persons who plays XCOM and complains bitterly about the game being broken because they missed a couple of high percentage shots. But this is what has happened to me in Balatro.

There are cards you get that say you have a 1 in 4 chance of improving a joker. During 56 hours of play, I have used countless of these. I haven't kept track of the number, so I'm just going to say it was about two per hour (mostly because it was making me angry). When it doesn't work, the word "nope" briefly appears on the screen. So out of 100 times I've used this card, I've seen "nope" 98 times.

The odds of this happening are 0.000000176% (maybe, I'm struggling to remember how to do this, but I'm confident this is in the ballpark).

Meanwhile, my glass cards have a 1 in 4 chance to break after usage, and the last 50 are breaking at a 68% rate. I kept track of them in a spreadsheet.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

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(sorry, I meant to do strike-through on what I wrote, but it got deleted instead)
EDIT: I didn't understand what Eternal Jokers are. They are only eternal during your current run. I thought you carried them with you from run to run. They aren't nearly as interesting as I thought.

They definitely make the game harder at later levels.

I'm not sure why there's a debate of Full House vs Straights. You can't play the game trying to get either one (except for the occasional stroke of good luck)unless you have the two straight jokers. Then you can get straights very nearly every single time (I'm not exaggerating. I've done this several times, and I may have failed to get a Straight once or twice the whole game). There's nothing similar for Full House, so you are going to have to fall back on Pair almost every single round. Or you can sometimes fall back on Two Pair, which dilutes your leveling efforts and makes everything worse.

Early on you get offered Shortcut or Spare Trousers, what are you taking? I have mostly avoided playing straights as much as possible because I dont feel theyre as consistent as Full House at beating Ante 8 at whatever difficulty I'm playing at. Not saying thats correct but thats how its seemed to me.

But here's the thing, if you are only trying to win Green or White Stake decks (which is how the game is most fun), it doesn't really matter. As long as you have a rational, coherent plan that works with the jokers you've picked up, you should win pretty much every game. If you aren't, then there's something wrong with your plan.

The dev said he believes every game on White Stake is winnable, I assume he means on every deck. I dont know, the Black deck is tough at any difficulty at least for me.

OKAY! This is really happening. I am not anti-RNG. I'm not one of those persons who plays XCOM and complains bitterly about the game being broken because they missed a couple of high percentage shots. But this is what has happened to me in Balatro.

There are cards you get that say you have a 1 in 4 chance of improving a joker. During 56 hours of play, I have used countless of these. I haven't kept track of the number, so I'm just going to say it was about two per hour (mostly because it was making me angry). When it doesn't work, the word "nope" briefly appears on the screen. So out of 100 times I've used this card, I've seen "nope" 98 times.

The odds of this happening are 0.000000176% (maybe, I'm struggling to remember how to do this, but I'm confident this is in the ballpark).

Meanwhile, my glass cards have a 1 in 4 chance to break after usage, and the last 50 are breaking at a 68% rate. I kept track of them in a spreadsheet.

Lol. Thats one of the reasons I dont like using Glass cards, especially if your repeating them theyre almost guaranteed to break. I'd rather make them Lucky or + multi or chips.

 

[Zed Clampet]

They definitely make the game harder at later levels.

I don't know anything about the later levels, but they make the game more difficult as soon as they are introduced. I love switching out jokers.

Early on you get offered Shortcut or Spare Trousers, what are you taking? I have mostly avoided playing straights as much as possible because I dont feel theyre as consistent as Full House at beating Ante 8 at whatever difficulty I'm playing at. Not saying thats correct but thats how its seemed to me.

No question, I'd take Spare Trousers. But if I had a choice between Spare Trousers and Supernova, I'd take Supernova and forget the Two Pairs unless I had one of the decks that helps you make pairs.

The dev said he believes every game on White Stake is winnable, I assume he means on every deck. I dont know, the Black deck is tough at any difficulty at least for me.

If you are playing Black deck and early on the game is giving you lemons for jokers, it could be tough. You are going to have to try to make Full House, Flush and Straights or better just to survive.

Lol. Thats one of the reasons I dont like using Glass cards, especially if your repeating them theyre almost guaranteed to break. I'd rather make them Lucky or + multi or chips.

They are annoying, but I usually pick them up when they are extra cards (as opposed to changing one of my cards into a glass card)

I got a special card during my last run. It was a five of hearts. I had the joker that gave me plus multi for hearts, and this five of hearts gave an addition plus 4 multi and it had a bonus action of being triggered 3 times. I can't remember which deck this is, but it isn't conducive to getting planet cards, and I didn't get anything else to help level them anyway, so having this 5 in play helped a lot. I was actually able to duplicate it thanks to a tarot card, and it was good enough to help me win the round.

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I've started skipping blinds when the prize seems good enough.