tips for a mid-tier player?

[AlphaGodith]

not a beginner anymore, i've beaten most decks (and the rest i could beat easily i'm just working on stakes instead atm) and i've beaten green/black stakes multiple times, just beat blue as well. i can get up to a million chips per hand somewhat consistently. also beat a lot of challenges.

however, i'm having a real tough time getting BETTER, i feel i've stagnated. can't get past ante 11 for the life of me. can't even really imagine getting an 'E' score. what am i missing, other than luck? or is that all there is to it from here?



i know that you need a good combo of jokers that build/improve/strengthen over time (runner and hiker are big faves) and give chips, +mult, AND xmult, with xmult being the most important and powerful.

i know that getting your jokers and deck to synergize for specific hand types is important, as is thinning the heck out of your deck so you can consistently draw the hand types you've strengthened.

i know skipping blinds is almost always a bad idea since you need the rounds to build up your jokers and the shop visits after each round to modify your deck.

what other tips would folks who get multi-million chip hands give me?

[revlayle]

One thing I had to learn was to be able to let go of jokers, especially ones I had invested into early (via money or time), and take a better joker when it comes up. Slowly but surely I had to start being able to take chances on Madness runs, Stencil runs (esp if I can duplicate), and (elusive for me currently) a good Obelisk run. Heck an Acient Joker run has won me several runs now.

I also had to learn to let go of a hand type I was working with. Maybe after 3 or 4 antes of two-pair being strong, I am presented with a shop with x2 Tribe and an Ancient Joker - "I guess we doin' flushes now".

I almost **always** give up something for a Blueprint/Brainstorm (almost, sometimes, your build is set and there is truly no room for one).

Of course this is not all inclusive. We all know a fixed deck + Idol is super strong. We know high card + crap ton of Ks + Baron is super strong. We know photochad is strong.

Actually, for me, only recently, did things click from mid-tier to getting more Ante 12+ runs. I scored my first E last week, before then I had several 1+ billions, but not an E.

[zirune]

Endless is a completely different game from simply beating ante 8 for a win. Very few strategies work for long in endless. You have to be getting tons of xMult from something like abusing Perkeo or retriggering steel kings with Baron. Anything other than a couple specific strategies will sputter out around ante 12.

So don't worry about it, you're fine.

[malogoss]

Plasma deck, high card, Baron, Mime, all the Red seal steel kings in the world.
Profit.

[AlphaGodith]

Początkowo opublikowane przez malogoss:

Plasma deck, high card, Baron, Mime, all the Red seal steel kings in the world.
Profit.

the rtgame strat? XD

[malogoss]

What is rtgame?

[AlphaGodith]

Początkowo opublikowane przez malogoss:

What is rtgame?

twitch streamer/youtuber. my introduction to balatro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICrA_os9enY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMqoS9gj-Rg&t=84s

[RazzberryMocha]

I guess at the point you're at you'd mainly need to understand how good specific jokers are and their best use cases. If you want to start scoring absurdly high scores and get a good baseline for getting to the e's then photograph + hanging chad is my recommendation. Both jokers are common, can cut out the need for a flat mult joker, and is made even better with glass. Just make sure to level up a specific hand type as the base mult of the hand type is what it's going to use.

[Xaelon]

If you can beat Ante 8 consistently I'd say you're more than a mid-tier player. Being able to do that means you win most runs so give yourself more credit.

Going beyond ante 8 is another matter entirely. Most builds will fail before they even reach ante 11, and even fewer can beat ante 11, much less go beyond that. Like you need an INSANELY stacked build with very specific jokers and a deck that's very precisely thinned down to only what you need. Don't get me wrong, it takes skill to put that build together, but you also need A LOT of help from the game's RNG too.

In my 50 hours I think I've beaten ante 11 maybe twice and only one of those was able to beat 12.

You're not a bad player if you can't succeed in endless because most builds simply won't be able to.

[Romaki]

I'm in the same boat as you. One run I had three good XMult Jokers and I still never saw an e number. Btw I love watching RTGame and I'd really recommend his first time playing Balatro (not one of the videos linked here), he absolutely nails his first run. I watched that after playing a couple of runs myself and I feel like I need to rewatch it to actually learn from it now.

[HerbertWess]

Ante 11 and afterwards kinda gets silly with how steep the curve can suddenly get. I had synergies which seemed solid for the infinite mode, and suddenly you are struggling nonetheless around that point. It is interesting to get there anyways, as it helps you get a grasp of how to make stronger decks, or how weak the deck might be even if it can get you to ante 8.

Just for reference to anyone that is testing infinite, i been there with stuff like 100+ mult or more swashbuckler, jokers with x4.5 mult or more, sometimes a +24 planet enhanced full house hand that could be used consistently due to joker synergy etc.... and yet there may be situations where it isn't enough. So try to plan ahead.

[AlphaGodith]

finally got to ante 12 for the first time and lost instantly lol. i have over 80 hours at this point, but i guess xmult is even more important than i realized. traded in some chip and +mults jokers so i could have a set of 5 xmult jokers (well one was blueprint but) that totaled around 15x and managed to get a round score of 40 mill, my highest ever.

[revlayle]

80 hours and ante 12?? To be honest you are doing amazing, imo.

[AlphaGodith]

Początkowo opublikowane przez revlayle:

80 hours and ante 12?? To be honest you are doing amazing, imo.

apparently @xaelon up there managed to BEAT ante 12 in just 50 hours, so i don't feel like i'm doing great only getting TO ante 12 in 80, but, thankyou nonetheless XD

[crate]

It helps to recognize that endless scales so quickly that even most xmult jokers don't really do anything (and +mult and +chips are completely useless).

Antes scale by factors of several thousand once you get to endless, so multiplying your score by even a factor of like 30 is really not large; that's only 1.5 digits added to your score when you need to add 3+ digits every ante.

Because of this, the only way to keep up with the scaling is repeatedly multiplying--so, glass + Idol/Triboulet etc. if you're going to play cards; or Baron/Mime + steel etc. if you're going to go for a held-in-hand strategy.

[malogoss]

Początkowo opublikowane przez AlphaGodith:

finally got to ante 12 for the first time and lost instantly lol. i have over 80 hours at this point, but i guess xmult is even more important than i realized. traded in some chip and +mults jokers so i could have a set of 5 xmult jokers (well one was blueprint but) that totaled around 15x and managed to get a round score of 40 mill, my highest ever.

Usually when you go endless, your main hand level should be pretty high. It could be any hand, from HC to Flush Five. But the impact of a high level hand is huge on scoring, and maybe not in the first expected way.

Say you're at ante 12 and you High Card is level 34 or 35.

That's roughly 350 chips and 35 mult, just from the hand level.

Then you start doing math. What's your Stuntman really worth now? Maybe you have a foil joker, so we could say you have 400 chips before counting Stuntman. Stuntman adding 250 chips to 400 is a +63% to score. That means, if you sold Stuntman and replaced it with a 1.75 Ramen, you'd get higher scores!

Same goes for mult. You get 35 mult just from your HC hand level. Compare that to a holo Raised fist, that gives at most +30 mult. That's less than +100%. So a x2 Ramen would be better! Or do the math for a better +mult joker. Say a +60mult Fortune Teller. That's like a x2.71mult. That's not bad at all. But you'll need to use almost 2 tarot cards for every level your HC gains for the FT to keep its relative power. If you have some blue seals, FT can only lose ground.

All that is with HC. The hand that gains the less from levelling. So imagine with 4oaK or Flush Five.

So yeah, it does not take all that much. A hand gets to a high level and what that does is it frees slots for more xmult jokers, that are more beneficial than chips and xmult.

And then you realise you'll never beat ante 13 or 14 and you're done with endless. Unless you go for totally different builds.

Good luck hunting big scores.