Do you have to understand Poker

[VinylMorpheus]

Just what the title says. I’ve never played poker and I have zero knowledge on it. The closest I’ve gotten was the spades, diamonds and hearts keys from Resident Evil 2. Will the game teach me everything I need to understand?

Edit: All helpful answers Lads. Thank you! I’m sold!

[Scrub]

Yes. Can you match 4 of a kind? You can play.

[Jehovah's Thickness]

Its quite simple compared to actual poker, but matching cards and a couple hours you will get the hang of it.

[sab0t]

the game uses the different types of poker hands for making plays, so knowing these helps, BUT there is a list of these hands readily available at any time by pressing "Run Info", so even if you don't know poker hands, you can use the list as an easy reference.

the other main thing is that it uses lots of poker terminology, however, these are basically all just replacements for typical rogue-like terms. Imagine a generic dungeon crawling rogue-like where each 'level' of the dungeon has 3 'encounters' you must clear. In Balatro, "Ante" is roughly equivalent to "Dungeon Level", "Blind" is one of the 'encounters'. So you complete 3 blinds to get to the next ante. This takes a little bit of getting used to, but you'll honestly get the hang of it after a run or two.

[Morthgarrow]

The game actually shows you all the poker hands, both what their base score is as well as an example with pictures of how they can be scored. Also, selecting cards from your hand will automatically list what type of hand you are about to play (ex: pick a pair of Aces, the game shows you have "Pair" selected and shows the base score for it)

There's plenty of strategy with what you play or discard and how you search for better hands to play, which you'll pick up quickly and is part of the fun since the game twists this concept with the Jokers among other things.

So overall the game will do a good job of showing you the ropes, and you'll be able to build up your knowledge of what works well from there.

[Catman]

"Will the game teach me everything I need to understand?"

Yes.

Prior knowledge of poker would surely help in some ways, in other ways it will hinder you because our mind is already set on rules and a certain way to play (in this game we have to throw all that away). Think about it like this, in poker you are playing opponents trying to make the best hand, fold, or bluff. There is no folding in this game. There is no bluffing in this game. There aren't really opponents in this game, just goals. Even though it dresses in the attire of poker, it plays far more like a rogue-like. You must focus on your hand, but the power of your hand comes from the Jokers (IE power-ups) that you collect in-between rounds with cash earned through out the run. Same as any any other rogue-like. I would guess that prior knowledge of rogue-lite deck-builders would help more, but who knows?

[Cosmic]

Poker is 90% bluff, 10% card rules
Balatro is 90% roguelike/deck building, 10% card rules

[HealingMind(Free Palestine!)]

Honestly, the things this game has in relation to Poker are:

1. Playing Cards
2. You play hands present in Poker.

Anything else is about as functionally distant from Poker as possible, with most of the Poker related stuff mostly being Aesthetic.

Hell, this game has unique Poker hands that are straight up Illegal to play normally due to it being impossible with a standard deck.

Also, Poker doesn't have Jokers that completely change which hands you want to play and make you potentially not want to play certain big hands even if they fall into your lap.

[Slain The Ulti-Maid]

i went into this without not having a single clue about poker and it only took 1 game to understand the rules, you can get into it dw