Is Balatro hard to learn because idk how to play poker

[Sega Saga]

title

[Alexx]

Roguelikes are, by nature, pretty hard to learn. However if you are looking to learn the seperate poker hands the game does a decent job of giving an introduction to the different hands, and has an in-game menu with all of the hands that you can refer to if you forget.

Remember though, learning is part of the fun.

[Mez]

Game in of itself has some intricacies that take some time to learn, but for the most part everything is explained to you as you find it. After a few runs you should get the hang of the main game loop.

[Santaros]

No it isn't, the intricacy of the game comes from the interactions & synergies between Jokers, and the various systems in the game, poker itself it quite simple, and as has been said, you should mostly have a handle on that after a handful of runs.

[Sentient_Toaster]

The main things to learn don't really relate to poker, beyond having a good grasp of what hands your deck can consistently make given whatever cards you have (which changes, because you can add, remove and alter cards; and not all decks start with the standard 52-card 4-suit 13-rank setup) and how to make the best use of your jokers.

For instance, some jokers have weak effects to begin with but can be improved by playing hands with specific properties (e.g. increasing in value whenever you play hands that contain exactly four cards). These sorts of jokers complicate things because winning each round as fast as possible, i.e. with the highest-scoring hands, isn't necessarily the best approach you can take. Likewise, you'll have to decide when it's worth skipping a round to take the skip reward but *not* have the opportunity to earn a bit of income and to see whatever was in the post-round shop.

[Razör]

Compared to Yugiohs convoluted problem solving card text, Balatro is a cake walk