two pair is the best hand type

[pack]

argue with the wall

[Birck]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Originally posted by kone:

If you got Spare Trousers, for sure. But it's the most average hand otherwise.
High Card, Pair, Flush and Straight are stronger, scale better and easier to build around.

Uh. High card and pair are technically weaker and scale worse, on their own. But the difference is quite small, and the greater ease of play quite useful. (Though being able to score fewer cards without Splash can limit certain approaches.)

They should scale worse because they are so easy to make, for instance if you need three full houses to win with that hand you will be hard pressed to find them.

Meanwhile if you need three high card or pairs that can be easily accomplished.

[noisyturtle]

I had the 2-pair Joker and celestial boosted 2-pair to x8
Won me my first game last night, easily clearing 40-60K per hand

[Thorstorm]

Originally posted by Scrub:

Why is this phrased like you're trying to start a fight?

edit: oh op has played less than 2 hours, yeah I remember having the same thought back then. Have fun learning!

I have 40 hours and he's right lol
Many of my many wins were because of a two-pair build.

[Moray Eel]

Imagine not going for 4 of a kind every run smh

[SihAlex]

Flush is all I know, bonus points if you build flush + pairs (or damn you with 2 pairs...)

[CJones]

2-Pair is great in the early to mid game, and you certainly can clear Ante 8 without too much trouble, with the right Jokers. But you won't get far beyond that. 2-Pair doesn't scale well.

People better at this game than I am swear that the best hand is actually High Card. The reason being that you can always play it, and it leaves 7 cards to activate "held in hand" effects. Like Steel Cards.

I haven't been able to make this work though.

[RazzberryMocha]

Originally posted by CJones:

2-Pair is great in the early to mid game, and you certainly can clear Ante 8 without too much trouble, with the right Jokers. But you won't get far beyond that. 2-Pair doesn't scale well.

People better at this game than I am swear that the best hand is actually High Card. The reason being that you can always play it, and it leaves 7 cards to activate "held in hand" effects. Like Steel Cards.

I haven't been able to make this work though.

The best way to make high card/pair work is to have jokers providing enough chips and mult to where it doesn't really matter what hand you play. After that you can replace some of the chip and weaker flat mult jokers over time with planets (it doesn't take many). These hands are also the best with jokers like green joker and ride the bus, both being some of the best jokers in the game.

[DMAN222]

Flush five would have to be the best, no? That is why it is worth the highest base chips/mult

[(Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr]

Originally posted by DMAN222:

Flush five would have to be the best, no? That is why it is worth the highest base chips/mult

In this game you tend to want to gravitate towards hands that can be played repeatedly without discarding, especially in later antes. You could build around flushes but it would require a good bit of luck with spectral and/or tarot cards. By the time you set it up to make it viable you've probably inadvertently made easier hands more score viable.

[noisyturtle]

I hate how flush beats 3 of a kind and a straight, both of which are much more difficult to achieve than a flush.
Whoever wrote the rules to poker had a hole in their head when they wrote that rule

[Eizo]

Originally posted by noisyturtle:

I hate how flush beats 3 of a kind and a straight, both of which are much more difficult to achieve than a flush.
Whoever wrote the rules to poker had a hole in their head when they wrote that rule

What are you on about? Flush is worth more because it has a lower probability, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability

You can even figure this out yourself, without any [advanced] calculations. Flush needs 5 cards out of 13 available, where every card you have of a certain suit lessens the chance that the next card will be of the same suit. For a straight you can begin in any suit and both go up and down in any suit, your chance for getting a card you need for a straight is not lessened by already having any other card you already have in that straight (in fact it’s increased, the opposite for a flush).

[noisyturtle]

There is no way a flush has a lower probability than a straight.
It is objectively much more difficult getting numbers/faces consecutively than any old cards of the same suit.

The guy who came up with Poker hands did his math wrong, I do not accept it.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by noisyturtle:

There is no way a flush has a lower probability than a straight.
It is objectively much more difficult getting numbers/faces consecutively than any old cards of the same suit.

The guy who came up with Poker hands did his math wrong, I do not accept it.

Well you can deny reality all you want, but for normal (Texas Hold 'Em) poker it's true. It's just that the same can't be said in Balatro - instead of having two cards and getting 5 cards on the table, you have a way larger hand and can cycle through the deck with discards and even by playing hands if needed.

And of course it's easier to change your deck into a flush-centric one than to make it better for straights. But all of this is counteracted by the fact that flushes scale worse than both 3oaK and straight, as well as the flush-centric jokers being weaker. The Trio and The Order give x3, The Tribe only x2. The +mult and +chips jokers for the specific hands are +12/+100 vs +10/+80 for flush. Only the suit-specific sin jokers get to +12 mult, but only for one specific suit. Then again Bloodstone is really strong, as long as you're relying on hand level and not a scaling +mult joker. Point is, flushes do have intentional demerits to make up for how easy they are to make in Balatro.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Goblin:

Originally posted by noisyturtle:

There is no way a flush has a lower probability than a straight.
It is objectively much more difficult getting numbers/faces consecutively than any old cards of the same suit.

The guy who came up with Poker hands did his math wrong, I do not accept it.

Well you can deny reality all you want, but for normal (Texas Hold 'Em) poker it's true. It's just that the same can't be said in Balatro - instead of having two cards and getting 5 cards on the table, you have a way larger hand and can cycle through the deck with discards and even by playing hands if needed.

And of course it's easier to change your deck into a flush-centric one than to make it better for straights. But all of this is counteracted by the fact that flushes scale worse than both 3oaK and straight, as well as the flush-centric jokers being weaker. The Trio and The Order give x3, The Tribe only x2. The +mult and +chips jokers for the specific hands are +12/+100 vs +10/+80 for flush. Only the suit-specific sin jokers get to +12 mult, but only for one specific suit. Then again Bloodstone is really strong, as long as you're relying on hand level and not a scaling +mult joker. Point is, flushes do have intentional demerits to make up for how easy they are to make in Balatro.

Of course, Balatro is based on draw poker, not community card poker like Texas hold 'em...

[DMAN222]

Originally posted by (Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr:

Originally posted by DMAN222:

Flush five would have to be the best, no? That is why it is worth the highest base chips/mult

In this game you tend to want to gravitate towards hands that can be played repeatedly without discarding, especially in later antes. You could build around flushes but it would require a good bit of luck with spectral and/or tarot cards. By the time you set it up to make it viable you've probably inadvertently made easier hands more score viable.

My apologies, I was just trying to be silly. Thank you for the tips but I do understand it is more effective to build around easily repeatable hands (until you run into the eye)