Balatro Beginner Bguide

Beginner guide, with intermediate tips, through Gold Stake tips.

What is Balatro? Why this guide?

Balatro is a deck-building game in the poker family. Most people today are more familiar with variants such as Texas Hold 'Em, but Balatro is a little closer to a rare variant known as Two More Inches. What does that mean?

Basically. You get an oversized hand of cards, and earn points for playing the best poker hand you can. You get a number of tries to surpass a required score. Winning a round grants money to be used in a between-level store. As a roguelite, you also unlock powerful cards and decks as you play.

The twist is that Joker cards and booster packs allow you to "cheat", stack the deck, and make outrageous hands.

The art and music are also rad. Anyone remember Dropsy? Trippy pixel art.

The purpose of this guide is to provide text-only beginner tips to help you go from zero to hero. For instance, do you know what right-clicking does? It's in the tips section. I find that some guides rely too much on images. And yes, this guide is text-only. I personally find picture-heavy guides to be pretty annoying to reference on mobile.

What if I don't know poker?

You only need to know the very basics about poker to win at Balatro. We'll start with some general poker terms, and I'll specify where Balatro differs.

Ante - The first mandatory bet in a game, or the minimum amount of money you need to play. In Balatro, the ante is basically the "level". Each ante has 3 blinds of increasing difficulty. A small blind, a big blind, and a boss blind.

Blind - Part of a poker game allowing players to place a bet before more cards are dealt. In Balatro, "blind" is the current challenge. There are 3 blinds per ante. (It's called a blind because you have to place your bets before seeing the next cards.)

Hand - To show up to 5 cards (left click, card is raised). Try to make the best (and rarest) combination of suits and ranks. The blind ends when you score over the required amount, or play your last hand.

Played/Held/Scored - Some cards in Balatro have effect which happen when you play or hold cards. Just in case, know that "held" cards are ones you didn't play. "Played" cards include all the ones you selected when you hit play. "Scored" cards are only those in the played hand which scored. (Example: Some bosses disable your cards, so they don't score.)

Discard - To remove up to 5 cards from your hand. You always draw back up to your maximum hand size (assuming your deck has cards left in it). Use discards to draw better cards. You only get so many discards per blind.

Suit - Poker cards have 4 suits. Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs (clover), and Spades.

Rank - Each suit has 13 cards. From high to low they are (A)ce, (K)ing, (Q)ueen, (J)ack, 10, 9... 2. So I will use shorthand AKQJ1098.... (there is no 1 or 0, so 10 always means 10). Ace can count as either "11" or "1" and scores as "11". So AKQJ10 and 5432A are both valid Straights.

Face Cards - The King, Queen, and Jack have faces printed on them.

Joker - A special card invented for some versions of the game Euchre, where Jacks were used as trump cards. Jokers have become widely adopted in some games as shorthand for "wild", which can substitute for other cards, or like a blank tile in a word game. In Balatro, you can purchase up to 5 jokers at a time, and they modify the rules of the game, often giving you a higher score.

Pair or Two Pair. To play 2 cards of the same rank. And since you can play up to 5 cards in a hand, you can play 2 pairs in one hand, such as AAKK.

2 of a Kind, 3 of a Kind... To play 2 or more cards of the same rank. AA, AAA... Yes, paid and 2 of a Kind are synonymous.

Straight - To play 5 ranks in order. For example, 65432 is a straight. As is AKQJ10. Cards must be sequential, so A8642 is not a straight. Cards can be any suit.

Flush - To play 5 cards of the same suit. For example, all Hearts, as in HHHHH. Can be any rank.

Full House - Since you can play 5 cards, you can play 2 of a kind and 3 of a kind in the same hand. AAKKK.

Straight Flush - You may combine straight and flush. So if your 98765 are all hearts, that's better than either condition alone.

Poker Hands Reference

Poker hands with examples. The top hands are far more rare and difficult to make, but also score a lot more to make up for it.

Straight flush - 5432A, all the same suit.
Four of a kind - AAAA.
Full house - AAAKK or AAKKK.
Flush - Any four cards of the same suit (HHHHH for hearts).
Straight - 5432A, of any suit. Must be sequential. (A8642 is not a straight)
Three of a kind - AAA.
Two pair - AAKK or KKAA.
One pair - AA.
High card - A. (will always score, unless boss conditions debuff all cards, and so forth)

Balatro has hidden hands with special unlocks. I won't spoil them but they should be fairly obvious. One example worth calling out is the Royal Flush. AKQJ10, all the same suit, scores more than a normal straight flush.

The way the scoring works in Balatro, a beginning player will want to aim somewhere in the "sweet spot" of Straight, Flush, or Full house. You will want to look at the opening shops to see if one hand can be powered up early, and try to carry that advantage through the run.

Full House scales the best, and has the option of playing 3 of a kind or even 2 pair depending on drops. I'm going to recommend Full house as a start for most people. Just because I think it teaches you the best lessons which pay off later on.

Due to the cards you can unlock in Balatro, Flushes are the "easiest" way to play in most circumstances. For example, you can eventually manipulate your deck so that your only cards are one suit, such as Hearts. Then you will never lose the game from a bad draw. Flushes are fun, relatively easy, and totally valid through Ante 8 to win the game. But in my opinion, they're also so easy, you don't learn as much as you could about deeper strategies. My recommendation would be to at least experiment with starting a run with Full House or Straights, and compare that to how the game changes versus playing All Flush All The Time. This will be super valuable going into higher stakes.

Note that Balatro allows you to stack 5 or more copies of a single card. There are some things you can do with flushes, straights, and full houses you can't do in Poker. You unlock some buffs for these hands after playing them once. For example, a normal poker game doesn't care if a full house is also a flush (hint).

Scoring

Chips * Multiplier = Score.

The "base score" of a hand is based on how rare the played hand is (listed on the Run Info screen).

Chips. Each card adds its rank in chips to the base score. Ace scores 11, face cards through 10 all score 10, and so on.

+Mult. Adds to the multiplier. If a joker gives +2 mult and a card gives +4 mult, that's a total multiplier of +6.

The first blind always requires 300 score (on the base red deck). So you just need to amass some combination of cards that will give you (at least) something like 50 Chips * 6Mult. This could be a Full house such as AAAQQ, or a Straight or Flush that hopefully starts with a higher card.

XMult. Also known as exponential, or multiples of multiplier. If you have +4Mult, and X2Mult, that makes +8Mult. Note that XMult is multiplied, not added together. So +4Mult and +4Mult makes +8Mult. But X4Mult and X4Mult makes X16Mult.

Chips * (Mult * XMult).

As you progress, remember the left-to-right order cards are arranged on screen affects how they're applied. So you should usually stack your Jokers in the order Chips, +Mult, XMult.

100 Chips * +14Mult * X2Mult = 2800 score.

Note that there are much more detailed score breakdowns elsewhere. This is only a very high-level guide to help you choose between what hands to play.

Balatro Terms

Balatro has some terms not found in poker at all.

Skip - You have the option to skip blinds or booster packs. Skipping blinds comes with a bonus tag, which you can examine by hovering over the tag at the bottom of the blind.

Tag - The bonus you get for skipping a blind. Many players are confused by "double tag". Double Tag means next time you skip, you get that Tag twice.

Modifier - Each card in your deck may be modified. Cards may get one each of enhancements, seals, and editions. Jokers may only have an edition and a sticker.

Seal - A round sticker placed on a card. Gold earns $3 if the card is scored. Red will retrigger all of a card's relevant effects anytime it is triggered. Blue will create a planet card if this card is held at the end of a round. Purple creates a tarot card if discarded.

Enhancement - A visual change to the card. Bonus gives +30 chips. Mult gives +4 multiplier. Wild means the card counts as all suits. Glass is a x2 mult and also a 1 in 4 chance of breaking. Steel is X1.5Mult while card stays in hand. Stone means the card no longer has a rank or suit, but gives 50 chips. Gold gains $3 of held at end of round. Lucky gives a 1 in 5 chance for +20Mult, and also a 1 in 15 chance to get $20.

Edition - Base is the default form of a card. Foil gives +50 chips. Holographic gives +10 multiplier. Polychrome gives 1.5x multiplier. Negative is usually only applied to jokers, and means the card doesn't take up a slot.

Negative - Usually only seen on Jokers. A Negative card adds a slot, effectively meaning it doesn't use a slot. Example: You have 5/5 jokers and try to purchase a base joker. The game does not allow this. Instead, you purchase a negative joker. You now have 6/6 jokers. Negative jokers are almost universally positive, and should not be sold or discarded under any circumstance, unless you have some very specific strategy reason.

Stickers - Introduced in 1.0.1, higher stakes have a 30% chance of applying each kind of Sticker to a Joker. Perishable debuffs after 5 rounds. Eternal cannot be sold or destroyed. Rental charges you $3 per round. Stickers don't hurt as much on lower difficulty, but on higher stakes they can kill a lot of runs. Stickers can also stack. So imagine being on a late-game Gold Stake and the Joker you really need for your strategy is Perishable and Rental (after 5 rounds it does nothing, but still costs money). Rental and Perishable Jokers are initially cheaper, which can be temporarily helpful early on.

Voucher - A permanent upgrade. The store gets a new voucher anytime a boss is deafeated.

Consumable - You have 2 slots for consumables. For example, tarot cards are discarded when used.

Arcana packs, with Tarot cards - Cards which generally enhance your deck. For instance, Strength raises up to 2 cards by 1 rank. So you could turn KK into AA.

Celestial packs, with Planet cards - Ups the level of a hand, adding chips and multiplier. For example, Earth levels up full house.

Spectral packs, with Spectral cards - Similar to tarot but usually with a downside. For example, Grim destroys a random card in your hand, but it also creates 2 enhanced cards.

Deck - The game has multiple decks, and each deck has a special ability. The initial Red Deck has +1 Discard. Cards in each deck are reset between runs. You only retain access to unlockables. Once unlocked, cards join the pool of cards which can drop in the store.

Win - The game counts a "win" with a deck when you beat the boss of the 8th ante. You get some unlocks as you win. And you can go into Endless mode.

Endless - The "secret" mode when you win with a deck. You continue to play against exponentially more difficult blinds. Endless mode is great for unlocking new cards, as presumably you're making tons of money, so you can complete lots of different hidden challenges and roll lots of random jokers you haven't seen before.

Order - Card order is a little weird in Balatro. In poker, order technically doesn't matter. If you play 23456, it's a straight. If you played the same cards 24635 in a poker game with friends, you're kind of a jerk for making it harder to read your cards, but it scores the same. In Balatro though, most effects happen left-to-right. So order may matter. This can get really complicated so I'll reiterate the important bit a few times. Try to trigger +Mult before triggering XMult. Math people can figure this out quickly enough, but since education fails most people in maths, just trust me. The only time you really need to worry about ordering the cards you play, is when it triggers some ability such as XMult.

First Blind - Survive

Playing the first blind without trying to understand the opening screen is fine for a beginner. Just read Jimbo's tooltips and try not to skip any of the tutorial information. Most pros on lower stakes will check the tag to see if it's better to skip the round, or hit a new run entirely until they get a good set of tags and first boss. Your whole game grows exponentially off this first ante. So you will learn to maximize these first hands.

Since you're new. Just play the first blind and try to earn money. The first hand forces you to learn beginner tactics. Basically:

Scan your hand to see if you have any obvious big scores. Straight, flush, full house, or at least a pair of face cards or aces. Anything you can use to build a good hand. While a pair of 2s can help build a full house, 2s score so few chips this is not your first choice. (A pair of 2s will only add 4 chips, plus a little base score as a pair. You need a score of 300, so a pair of 2s isn't worth much.)

You get more money for winning with less hands played. You basically lose $1 for each hand you play. Try to use your discards to ensure you win with one hand, whenever possible.

If you have any good 4- or 5- card plays, probably play them, and be flexible about it. For example, a full house of QQ888 is a solid play. Just don't get so fixated trying to find your preferred strategy, that you throw away a perfectly good Four of a Kind AAAA! Be open to whatever best score you can make in the opening rounds.

If you don't see any obvious plays, probably discard your 5 lowest cards. You don't have a lot of options. Face cards score more chips. Balatro runs are addictive, and this game is a roguelike, so you will be back here. Don't overthink it.

I'm going to recommend aiming for a full house such as AAAKK, depending on what's in your hand. You may also aim for Flushes or Straights. Lots of new players love Flushes because they're easy to make. But Flushes do not scale well, so they may frustrate you by losing in the later Antes.

Always play 5 cards when possible, early on. If you draw AAAA you might be racing to mash that play hand button. But remember to take out the trash. If you play AAAA2, you get that discard for free, and it doesn't hurt your score. In fact, with some jokers, that extra card might give you points.

Early Strategy - Obtain Jokers

You won't unlock many good XMult options until you've failed, won, and otherwise experimented across a few runs of Balatro. It is a roguelike after all. So just plan on doing your best until you get the hang of it. Try to memorize successful combinations.

Newbie players should try to obtain +Mult jokers as soon as possible. An early strategy like trying to match Aces and Faces for Full House means you score some okay chips. A little mult goes a long way. Toward the late game, you will tend to want a single +Chips Joker in your lineup. Jokers which help you gain money are better early game. And pure utility jokers - like +1 discard - are generally reserved if you have lots of money and an open slot.

Celestial and Astral boosters. If you don't roll any good jokers that provide obvious means of scoring or earning money, try these next. Astral/Tarot usually boost your deck, from trashing low cards to making high cards wild. Celestial/planet cards boost score. Pick hands that suit your strategy, such as Earth for Full House.

Spectral boosters. Spectral cards usually have some negative, but early on you can deal with most negatives. For instance, Incinerate (destroy 5 cards, gain $20) is almost always worth it in the early game.

Standard boosters are the least valuable packs for most strategies. What you're really hoping for in a standard booster pack is an enhanced version of a card that synergizes with something else in your deck. For instance, if you have the Fibonacci Joker, it gives bonuses for certain ranks such as Ace. So you want to take Aces from Standard Packs, to increase your odds of drawing them.

Vouchers are expensive. Once you're making some decent score. Look for obvious quality of life improvements. When you can afford the Voucher +1 Hand. Not only does one more hand mean you can score more. But remember you also earn $1 at the end of the round per hand remaining. So +1 Hand can also mean +$1 per Blind!

Negative jokers are usually great, and are usually important when they drop, at least on lower stakes. On higher stakes, it's possible to get a total bummer like a Negative Rental Joker that costs $3 per round and doesn't help much. But on lower stakes, a negative joker at least adds sell value (synergizes with cards like Temperance). So negative jokers are almost always a good idea early on.

Late Game, Advanced Strats, Economy

To recap.

Beginner strat: Match Aces and Faces, stack +Mult, aim for XMult. +Chips is always valuable early on but doesn't scale like Mult, so you may want to re-buy later on.

If you opted for Flushes or Straights, you're more likely to play low ranks. You benefit more from +Chips, especially early on. But Mult and XMult still tend to scale better later on.

First off, a matter of accounting. On your first runs you might be too busy to notice the game economy. But most advanced strategies start with noticing that money gains interest between rounds. People will talk about this like some sort of godly strategy. But it's really just the beginning. Interest is capped between rounds, and this is shown in the tooltip, so read everything. You did know hovering the mouse over most parts of the game shows tooltips, right?. Tooltips are also default on for Steamdeck, etc.

By default, the maximum interest is $5 per round when you start a Blind with $25. Basically, try to carry $25 between Blinds, to earn maximum interest.

Some cards synergize to make money. For instance there's a joker that adds sell value to all your jokers every round. So even a lame joker that barely helps early on, could be worth a lot of money eventually. Aside from constantly buying boosters like Celestial/Planet packs to increase score, the big money sink is trying to reroll in the shop to unlock and acquire better jokers. This means in the early game, the more you boost the economy, the better the odds your late game will be good.

So you're flush with cash. You know a couple strategies to (eventually) beat the game. What's the problem? You're exposed to risk, and you will notice that over several antes, eventually you lose. By the time you discard enough cards to make a great hand, you might be low on discards with a lot of work left to do. There's got to be a better way!

Intermediate strat: Optimize strategies that don't rely on playing 5 cards, or which maximize your ability to make your hand every time. Here are a couple of tools available from the start to give you some ideas.

The hand type you optimize is always the best hand type. If you stack enough planets and stack your deck with boosters, you can build a deck to suit any strategy. It might take some luck, so you may want to keep an eye out in the early rounds and follow whatever seems to be landing. Sometimes the first tag of the game will be +4 levels to three of a kind... maybe that's a strategy worth trying this time?

Half Joker gives +20Mult if you play 3 or fewer cards. This can be a key card to turn 3 of a kind into a winning hand. If you really stack bonuses, you might even be able to win with Pair or High Card, but those are challenge runs as they do not scale well.

Splash scores with all played cards even if they're not part of the hand. If you're used to trashing a card by playing AAKK2, imagine now that 2 at least scores a few chips. Nice. Also synergizes hugely with enhanced cards. Imagine if you get a Standard Pack with a 2 that has a +4Mult and a Red seal so it counts twice, giving you +8Mult for the hand. Splash might make that a valuable card.

Four Fingers allows you to score straights and flushes (and straight flushes!) with only 4 cards instead of 5. Note that straights still have to be consecutive. Suddenly 5432 could be a valuable combination. And you can still play a 5th card. Pairs well with Splash, so even a junk card in the 5th slot can still score. Especially when the junk card is enhanced.

Tarot Cards stack the deck. Tarot cards can do things like trash your low cards, or turn all your cards into a single suit such as Hearts. Spectral Cards can help too, but generally involve some downside, which might be confusing to you as a new player. Using tarot cards to stack your deck, so that you get your preferred hand more often, is a key strategy for higher stakes.

Be careful not to ruin your hand if you play more cards than you need. If you've built a whole strategy so Three of a Kind is getting +Mult, and you accidentally play an extra pair to make a full house, the game will score a full house. If you have a ton of levels in Three of a Kind, playing a Full House can be worse!

Tips and Secrets

Remember this is a roguelike. You may fail a lot of runs before your first win. Try to get through as many rounds as you can as a beginner. You will unlock hidden cards with powerful abilities, learn new strategies, and memorize new mechanics.

Hold "R" to restart on Desktop. Only valid during a run. At the "lose" menu you have to click the "New Run" button. But sometimes you might end up in a hopeless situation. Let's say you're in a 1,000,000 blind and thanks to bad luck you know your deck can't make more than 20,000. Just hold R and save yourself some time. On Steam Deck, there is no default binding, but you can set one up.

You unlock a lot of collectibles in Balatro by winning with each deck. Winning means beating the boss of the 8th ante. So if nothing else, just focus on winning once with each deck. Eventually you might find a deck you really like, and then use that for higher stakes.

If you win without playing a certain type of hand, you unlock a joker that boosts that hand. If you initially find that you're only scoring with flushes even though it's not your favorite hand, don't worry, the game is smart enough to spread the love.

Right-click deselects all cards. I didn't know this until I checked other guides to see if there was any common stuff I missed. Steam Deck maps this to B by default.

Hovering the mouse over things shows tooltips. Tips include how many chips a card will score, or what an enhancement does. Also cool tips like hovering over the post-blind interest will show the cap on interest earned between rounds. The help system is, in general, really detailed. If you feel like you're missing some information, keep an eye out as you play. For example, I didn't realize that unlocked "reroll boss blind" powerups are shown on the left bar while selecting what blind to play. You get so focused on the cards, you miss all the helpful tips all over the screen. Steam Deck just shows tooltips on highlighted items all the time.

Some of the starter jokers promote winning with less than 5 cards. Also covered in my section on advanced strategies. Worth repeating. If you can build a strategy that works well playing less than 5 cards, you experience less risk due to bad draws. If you find you can beat Ante 8 playing Pairs, that's a lot less risk than Flushes or Straights.

Order sometimes matters. This is most important because you should place +Mult cards before XMult cards. Some card effects can also play into this, but that can get very complicated. I won't go into the math so just remember - add before multiply.

Some jokers are better temporarily. It's okay to buy now sell later. There are some obvious cases where some jokers lose their effects each round, and eventually have to be sold when they lose their effect. Some jokers with +Chips might absolutely destroy the early rounds only to disappear behind a wall of +Mult and XMult. As you grow in strategy, learn to separate early game survival from late game planning. Unless you want to be one of those people who re-rolls a run a dozen times to get a good start. I can't stop you.

Deck Tips

As you get into the game, you might find that some decks seem more difficult than others. As of patch 1.0.1, here is what I had problem with.

Black Deck. Affected by bad luck more than others. You might think that +1 Joker is easy mode. But the -1 Hand is a real punisher early on, as it limits how much you can score in a blind. You will have a ridiculous stack of good jokers and still come up short in scoring. This deck is great for Endless, but good luck getting there. I did the most retries with this deck before my first win.

Nebula Deck. Similar to black deck. The Telescope (celestial packs always have most played hand) bonus is incredibly powerful late game. But you have nothing else in the early game. The odds that you'll stack enough advantages to make this worthwhile are quite slim during the first 8 antes. But once I finally passed ante 8, I went further than I have with any other deck. (12/8 antes).

Anaglyph is just useless on higher stakes. You will rarely skip blinds on Gold Stake because you need all the money you can each round. So you'll never use those Double Tags. You can farm for something funny like a ton of Double Tags with the Negative Tag, and try to power through on a giant stack of Negative Jokers. But even that is up to randomness.

Most people online seem to agree these are the "worst" decks for new players. I can't tell you the exact count of games I required for these decks. But let's say I can usually win a game within 5 tries with the basic Red deck. It might take 20+ with the Black and Nebula decks. Note that as you memorize cards, and unlock some good stuff, those numbers do come down. But it can feel frustrating if you don't like grind.

The "good decks" list is long. Plasma Deck (balances Chips and Mult) means you can use +Chips jokers as +1/2Mult. Plasma breezes through early Antes so you can often shore up its weaknesses. (Late game there is no XChips, so you either pivot to XMult, or you need some card to constantly grow Chips like the Hiker). Checkered Deck makes Flushes even easier, so again it's easy to play early rounds, and you can save that brain power to dig for power combos.

Blue Deck, Yellow Deck, and Green Deck help your early game economy, which is by far the hardest part about higher Stakes. These decks are always good.

Erratic Deck and Abandoned Deck might not seem obvious as powerful decks. These decks tend to narrow down the list of viable hands. (Abandoned Deck has no face cards, Erratic has random cards - so you might start with a bunch of 7s and no Queens). Your only choices with these decks are maximizing the viable hands. You don't spend a lot of brain power or Discards trying to decide between different possibilities. By narrowing down your options, you also narrow down the random chance of a bad hand.

Higher Stakes, End Metagame

So you've unlocked a few decks. Won a few runs. Played a little Endless mode. What's next?

Higher Stakes. Higher stakes add to the difficulty, unlock cool stuff, and thus become a whole new metagame. The way you win your first game of Balatro probably won't get you too far in higher stakes. Any Joker you have when you win a stake gets a colored chip so you know what you've used to win stakes.

White Stake: Normal.

Red Stake: Small blind gives no cash reward. Note you can still earn for leftover Hands, Interest, etc. (Each stake also adds all previous stakes.)

Green Stake. Required score to win scales up faster each round.

Black Stake: 30% chance any Joker in the Shop is Eternal (can't be sold or destroyed).

Blue Stake: -1 Discard.

Purple Stake: Scales even faster. This is the biggest jump in difficulty. Most people get stuck here just as long as they get stuck on the final Gold Stake. You will have to learn new strategies, and really master XMult to pass this stake.

Orange Stake: 30% chance any Joker in the Shop is Perishable (debuffed after 5 rounds).

Gold Stake: 30% chance any Joker in the Shop is Rental ($1 to buy, $3 per round). Also if you get a Soul card from a Spectral pack you are guaranteed a rare joker if you have not yet used it to win a Gold Stake. This is to help with an Achievement.

High Stakes Strategies

You'll need to memorize at least a few winning strategies, and learn to dig for them. If you don't know any, there are a number of great streamers who have video guides. Balatro University and Rofl are some fun ones. Watch them win a Gold Stake, to learn how you can too.

As the stakes increase, early economy becomes even more important. Every dollar you earn, and every bit of interest you can get between rounds, can really add up. Especially since Small Blind has less rewards. Any Joker that gives money, from Rocket to Egg to Business Card can be crucial. Never be afraid to use a temporary Joker (Chips) to save your run in the immediate. You can sell cards and re-purchase later as necessary.

Don't be afraid to reroll the early game. If you get horrible luck so you can't score much in the first blind, it's okay to hold R to restart the run. Better to get a good base now than to waste a bunch of time struggling through the mid-game.

Commit to a strategy early on, pivot only if it's highly likely to lead to a win. When you're on Ante 7 and you're gambling that you just might be able to pivot from Straight to High Card if the next couple of rounds go your way, what are the odds really? 50%? Redoing a whole run because you threw away an Ante 7 strategy is a bad idea, versus if you could at least hobble along to win Ante 8 and unlock some stuff.

Remember you roughly need one +Chips Joker, one +Mult, and as much XMult as you can stack. Some Jokers do double duty. Maybe you luck out and your +Mult and XMult Jokers are both Foil so they give +100 Chips already. So you won't necessarily need a dedicated +Chips Joker. Economy and utility jokers should be taken early on if you have space. (Getting an economy joker like Golden Joken in the first shop, so you can start to build interest, can be huge.)

High Card isn't magic. The forums love high card as the joke option. Unless you get specific combos going, High Card is just showboating. Basically if you can win with High Card, you would have only scored more with a stronger hand like Pair, which adds basically zero risk. This is another way to say, if your early Shops favor a strategy like Flush, you can still beat Gold Stake. You don't have to play any strategy just because the forum says so.

Option A: Destroy cards

In higher stakes, you want your strategy to be super reliable. If you destroy cards to get your deck down to only one hand, but those 5 cards form a perfect Royal Flush, you always know exactly what you're going to play. You can craft all your support cards around that.

Erosion Joker gives +4Mult for every card below 52 (or your deck's starting size). So if you only had 5 cards, that would be +188Mult.

Trading Card Joker. If your first discard is 1 card, destroy it and gain $3. Take out the trash, one card at a time.

Immolate. From Spectral packs. Destroy 5 random cards but gain $20. Newbies might be reluctant to burn random cards because it makes it harder to figure out what to play. To pro players, Immolate is almost always worth grabbing.

Hanged Man and Death Arcana. Destroys the bad cards.

Option B: Duplicate Cards

Alternatively, if you end up with a deck with 200 cards and almost all of them are duplicates of something enhanced such as Steel Aces, that's another way to make a reliable strategy.

Hologram Joker gains XMult for every card added to the deck.

Cryptid. From Spectral packs. Makes 2 copies of a card (including Enhancements).

DNA. If your first play is only one card, add a copy to your hand. One of the best early game cards. Imagine every single blind, you start by copying an Ace. Maybe you manage to enhance that ace so it has +Mult and a Red seal. By the end of the game, you have a huge stack of them.

Death Arcana converts other cards into copies of your desired card.

Option Z: Really Metagaming

I'm not going to spoil the craziest strategies that exist out there. Let's just say that if you keep your mind open, you can totally break Balatro.

As an example. People have managed to make tons of copies of Cryptid (using something like Perkeo) to stack the Consumables area. Then use Cryptid to stack Steel copies of cards until you can make hands full of XMult. You might even pivot to High Card, where you play only one card, and everything in your hand triggers steel effect.

Brainstorm / Blueprint. It should be obvious how these can break the game. Each has the ability to copy another Joker (leftmost or to the right, respectively). Keep in mind you can rearrange Jokers. Some Jokers activate only on the first hand of a round, some cash out at the end of a round. You can rearrange these Jokers before, during, and after blinds to trigger the desired jokers at the right time. Imagine scaling up some "gains XMult" joker to X5Mult and then duplicating it with Blueprint. Note that they only copy "active" abilities which trigger. Stuntman gives +250 Chips and -2 Hand size. Copying it gives a total of +500 chips when scoring, but will not cause -4 Hand size. They can also copy each other! (Have a good Joker in the leftmost slot, Brainstorm in the rightmost, Blueprint to the left of Brainstorm).

Baron and other scaling XMult Jokers. As a Newbie you understood that each King held in hand was X1.5Mult. But did you understand that you could load your deck with dozens of enhanced Kings so those end up being all you have in your hand every time you play? There are several Jokers with similar abilities. Steel Joker gains XMult for every Steel card in your Deck, so you could get a double combo with a bunch of Steel Kings.

Burnt Joker. If you get this early on it can feel like cheating. Instead of playing your first Hand, discard it instead. This instantly levels up that hand. If you use something simple like High Card or Pair, you might be able to stack enough levels to overcome your late-game need for +Chips and +Mult entirely, meaning you can focus exclusively on XMult.

Power Combos and Secrets

Lower the Volume on Those Visuals

When you're a new player, Balatro can be sensory overload. After your first run. You may find your eyes are strained, but you definitely want to play more. Go into the settings and turn CRT Bloom off to make it easier on your eyes. Some players may also need to turn down the motion effects, that's up to you. Also crank the Speed up as much as you like. Longtime players will eventually go to max speed and never look back. But this is up to you. Just be warned - once you're used to max speed, watching a new player on default settings actually physically hurts.

Unlocks

Some items mentioned in this guide have to be unlocked. I suggest just playing the game for a while first, and unlock things naturally. After a few runs, you can start consulting the Collection for unlock tips. The only cards that don't get unlock tips are Legendary Jokers. These only drop from the Soul card in Spectral packs.

Help I Just Can't Win Any Runs

Here are some combinations to give you a feel for things that can win a run of Balatro. This will help you get a feel for the sort of decks you might want to build.

Lucky Cat Build

There are a lot of builds that work around re-triggering cards. Acquire a Lucky Cat joker, which gives XMult every time a Lucky card triggers. Use Tarot cards to stack your deck with Lucky cards. Note that you can always use cards like Death and Hanged Man to eliminate non-Lucky cards, meaning you draw your Lucky cards more reliably. You will then need something to re-trigger cards. Hanging Chad, Hack, Sock and Buskin, even Seltzer. With Hack and Lucky Cat, you might try to stack your deck with a bunch of copies of a Lucky 2 with a Red Seal. Late game, you might even end up playing Flush Fives with a handful of your power 2s.

Mime

The counterpart of re-trigger builds. Mime triggers abilities held in hand. Mime stacks well with the Steel Joker. Imagine a deck full of Steel cards. Not only does Steel Joker give you XMult based on your Steel cards in your deck, but Mime re-triggers all the steel in your hand. Note this is NOT cards played. So if you can scale this deck well, eventually you want to be playing High Card. If you play 1 card, and have 6 steel cards in your hand, Mime re-triggers all 6 steel cards for X1.5 mult each time. The real trick is, some effects like Red Seal also trigger in-hand. So if you can duplicate a card with Steel and Red Seal, Mime will end up triggering each card 4x! It's like having a hand of 24 steel cards backing your High Card.

Vampire Build

This got severely nerfed in 1.0.1 but it was a killer in 1.0, and it still does work somewhat, so I'll mention it anyway. Vampire gives you XMult, by "draining" the Enhancements off your cards. Combo this with something that will apply enhancements, like Midas Mask. Midas Mask applies Gold to all face cards, Vampire eats the gold off those cards, voila you have an XMult machine. Combos with all the face card jokers. But note Pareidolia, where ALL cards count as face cards! If you can grab Pareidolia + Midas + Vampire early on, just play 5-card hands to juice up your Vampire as fast as you can. This strategy won't take off until you get something for +Chips or +Mult for Vampire to play off of. So eventually you will probably sell Pareidolia and Midas for other Jokers. But if you can manage all of that, this is still a fun combo.

Obelisk

This one doesn't seem obvious to most new players. Obelisk gives XMult for every hand you DON'T play your most-played hand. But if you like playing Flushes so much, how do you power up Obelisk? By mid-game, you might have some scoring jokers so you could do just as well with Straights or Full House or whatever. That is how you get Obelisk online! You may already have your Flushes up to some decent number like 15 hands by the time you're ready to pivot. So then you can play Full House or Three of a Kind or whatever. As Obelisk powers up, you might even be able to go all the way down to High Card and still beat the later Antes. Once you string together 14 Full Houses, and 14 Three of a Kinds, and 14 Pairs... Obelisk probably won't last long in Endless, but it can last quite a while.

Great Cards and Combos Newbies Might Sleep On

Incinerate from Spectral packs is one of the most non-untuitive cards few newbies yet one of the best cards in the game. Delete 5 random cards to gain $20. Unless you're deep in a run with a heavily customized deck, losing 5 cards just means it's easier to know what you're going to draw next. You can then use Tarot and Spectral cards to fix your deck the way you want.

Hermit and Temperance because you should be realizing by now how important money is in later stakes. Always be ready to do some quick math if one of these pops up in the shop. If a Hermit costs $3. And you have $7. Hermit is already worth buying (7-3=4, and 4*2=8, so you gain $1). You will almost always take these cards on higher stakes. Economy is necessary to build interest between blinds, and re-roll for the jokers you need. And hit the Hermit before you spend money in the shop, otherwise it loses value! If you see these cards in a booster pack, always consider them first. Only take a different card if it's working toward your strategy. (If you're building a deck full of Steel Kings with Red Seals on them, and your jokers are in pretty good shape, you might prefer a Death to a Temperance.)

Cryptid and Death both provide ways to copy a card. These become critical especially once you have cards with good editions and seals on them. Let's say you manage to get a +Mult Queen with a Red Seal so it triggers twice. Then you can use Cryptid and Death to make copies of that card. You might be able to regularly play 4 of a kind - or 5! Since a lot of newbies have trouble with the wording on Death - select 2 cards. The card on the left is destroyed. The one on the right is copied.

Credit Card is situational, but newbies might not understand what it does. This lets you keep spending until you're -$20 in debt. You won't earn interest if you're in debt, but if you need that $20 to save a run, you might have to take this. There is also a boss blind that resets your money to $0. So if you luck out, you can charge yourself down to -$20 and reset yourself to $0 during the boss blind. That's basically a free $20. You might also be able to use that $20 to fish for a better economy card, anything from a Golden Joker to Gold Seals on your cards. You can use that economy card to get yourself out of debt, and sell off the Credit Card to free up the slot.

Gold Stake

Gold Stake deserves its own section. Completing all the gold stake challenges, including people who might want to beat Gold Stake with all the decks, are going to find tons of challenge in this mode.

What is Gold Stake?

As of 1.01 update, Gold Stake combines the disadvantages of all lower stakes. This means you get fewer hands, fewer discards, and Jokers can have Stickers. The Stickers are almost universally negative. A lot of Gold Stake runs just won't "feel good" because the average RNG is pretty bad. When I first beat Gold Stake, I got ridiculous RNG. I was raking in $100 and scoring 100,000 by the end of Ante 2. But that kind of run might only happen ever 1 in 100 runs. Your usual run just wont "feel good". That's okay.

Why are Stickers so Bad?

In Gold Stake, you are likely to need every single one of your Jokers contributing in Ante 8. If you pick an early-game economy Joker with an Eternal sticker, you can't sell it late-game. Only pick an Eternal Joker if you need it in Ante 8.

Perishable Jokers debuff over time. Since our goal is Ante 8, you're going to have to do some math on whether this Joker will be worth spending the money. Is this Joker worth enough economy to win back its purchase price, or enough score to get you through the next few Blinds? You'll have to use your experience here.

Rental Jokers are almost never worth it in the early- to mid-game, as they kneecap your economy. On the other hand, Perishable and Rental Jokers no longer matter if your Ante 8 strategy is locked in. You could go infinitely in debt, and if you're scoring enough to beat Ante 8, who cares? And this game always has exceptions to the rule. Scoring a Rental Lucky Cat is probably okay if you're setup with Lucky cards, because Lucky cards should make back the money.

So how do I beat Gold Stake?

In short. You need to memorize the most common strategies for beating Ante 8, and be prepared to pivot your strategy based on what you find. You will also generally need to switch up your strategy from early, to mid, to late game depending on the cards you get.

Early Gold Stake

Early economy is usually the most important thing in Gold Stake. If you can generate a lot of money in the early game, you can probably Re-Roll into a winning strategy. You will almost never take Skip Tags, because you need every dollar from unplayed Hands and Interest. Note that the skip tag to generate $25 after beating the boss blind is one of the most powerful tags for gold stake, especially if you see it in the first ante.

In 1.0.1, you are guaranteed at least one Joker or Buffoon Pack in the first shop. Your goal in the first few hands is usually to play the least amount of hands you possibly can to maximize money in the shop, hopefully buy a scoring joker, and have a couple bucks left to start building economy.

What Jokers to get early? The desirable Jokers are mostly the same, but you have to be more careful about balancing early-game Jokers versus finding something that can beat Ante 8. Generally you would like to find one economy Joker (Golden Joker = $4 per round). One Chips Joker (Blue Joker +104 chips for a 52-card deck). One +Mult Joker (basically anything). Then use this as a base to search for late-game XMult jokers and powerful combinations. It is also helpful at this stage if your Jokers are hand-independent. As an example, Blue Joker adds Chips no matter what your hand is. Odd Todd only adds Chips if you play odd cards (3, 5, etc.). The more hand-independent you are in the early stages, the more freedom you have to pivot if some good Joker shows itself. Cards that can grow - such as Red Card which gains +Mult whenever you skip a booster pack - tend to become more necessary on gold stake, and are better the earlier you get them.

Experience counts for a lot in Gold Stake. As an example, can you survive taking the Golden Joker ($4 per blind) in the first shop? Or do you have to settle for some mediocre +Mult Joker (Jimbo with +4Mult)? With Golden Joker you might have to play 2 hands to win the Big Blind, but the Golden Joker is worth $4 per round. So that's ($4 Golden Joker minus $2 for played hands = $2 net positive per round). Some decks like Plasma are also much more likely to beat the early Antes in a single hand, so you can go hard on economy.

Don't commit to one hand type unless it's the only way forward, or if your strategy can ramp for Ante 8. As one example, one of my favorite strategies uses the Lucky Cat. Lucky Cat gains power any time a Lucky card triggers. This means I'd prefer to play 5-card hands to increase my odds of triggering the Lucky cards. Full House, Flush, Straight, or any hand with Splash (Score all played cards) will work in the early- to mid-game. So maybe toward Ante 8 I'll need that little extra push and I'll see The Tribe for another X2 Mult anytime I play a Flush. Only then will I commit to Flush as my final strategy.

Middle Game, Ante 3-6 in Gold Stake

Unless you've got a ton of money to roll for some strategy, the mid-game is just about survival and finding your end game strategy. Even if you have to take some Perishable Joker to survive an extra Blind, just stay alive and don't nuke your strategy. Generally, you want to avoid Rental Jokers unless you have some other system for generating money. If the only way you can survive a Blind is by harming your late-game strategy, like selling off a late-game joker for something to survive the current Blind you have probably lost - but it is better to survive than to risk a total loss. You can keep playing to see what you can learn, but if you lose momentum in Gold Stake, you're really relying on RNG to get along.

Late Game in Gold Stake, Ante 8 and Beyond

The ideal scenario is that you "lock in" your strategy before the final boss. Keep your goal in mind. If you try to maximize your deck for an Endless run just to lose Ante 8, you don't get those cool stickers and unlocks you would have gotten beating Gold Stake. Although there are some bosses which result in extra-large Blinds, remember the base score you need to beat the Ante 8 boss is 400,000. In most cases this means you have some way of generating Chips, Mult, and XMult. To take my Lucky Cat strategy. Triggering Luck is a fairly steady source of Mult. So I really just need to make sure I have something for Chips (Hack or Sock & Buskin to re-trigger my cards) and maybe some extra XMult (Card Sharp).

If you have all your Jokers set, you no longer need to worry about money or Perishable effects. Take all the Rental Jokers you need. For example, let's suppose you're in Ante 6 and you see a Perishable Rental Ramen which can skyrocket your score to 1,000,000. Your strategy is now set. You can probably Skip all the non-boss Blinds and rush the final Boss. In this specific case, you'd take the Ramen even with all the bad tags on it, and even if it's way before Ante 8 so you could lose some value from Discards. You already won. (Unless you get a really bad boss blind, so try to have a reroll voucher if you can.)

Gold Stake Summary

Only experience can guide you. Don't be afraid to go back and play some other decks on lower stakes to learn more strategies. Keep your focus on making money early, and then scoring over 400,000 in Ante 8. Because of the the stickers on Jokers, you can easily lock yourself into strategies that can't beat those final bosses. And if lose focus on Ante 8, and try to maximize an Endless strategy, only to come up short on Ante 7, you lose! Pick one goal, beating Gold Stake, and stick to it. You're not trying to score infinite, you're trying to score 400,000 - plus some sort of buffer against a bad boss (reroll vouchers, extra score, etc.).

Changelog and Attribution

2025-2-18: General cleanup.

2025-01-20: Finally put in the time to beat Gold Stake, so putting in a section for that, general cleanup.

2024-06-04: Starting to change anything necessary since the first big update to the game. Jokers were rebalanced, higher Stakes were changed, and new Joker enhancements (Eternal, etc.) were added. Doesn't really change anything about beginner strategies.

2024-04-12: Commenters say I'm wrong about Ace, and that 5432A counts as a Straight. Confirmed in game. I swear I tested that but I was new to the game so maybe I messed that up. Thanks, all.

Feel free to use, translate, or repost this guide, so long as you give credit and allow others to do the same. I'm calderracrusade on Steam.

[calderracrusade]

Any adaptation is cool w/ credit.

[Beckistuta]

There is no guide on my language. Do you mind I adapt/translate yours and publish here with the credits?

[calderracrusade]

I do mention in the scoring section there are "secret" hands. It's a fine line for what to spoil or not. I'll have a think on wording.

[素晴らしいポッサム]

I was surprised you didn't mention that the AKQJ10 Flush is called the Royal Flush, I didn't actually notice if it did anything different besides the achievement, though.

[calderracrusade]

Updated after resting Ace. Thanks, all! Four Fingers: Yeah Balatro has a lot of weird mechanics. I have seriously seen streamers who will have a co-host who is running a calculator / simulator to try and perfect their run. Personally, not for me. The game is good as is. And the beta patch seems to address most concerns (smoothing difficulty a bit).

[Eternity]

Also, a fun fact about Four Fingers: It can make Straight Flushes out of combinations that otherwise wouldn't make one. If you can make a four card Straight where only three of the cards share a suit, and add a fifth card that's out of sequence but matches that suit, the hand counts as a Straight Flush. Because it has a Straight and a Flush, I suppose.

[Eternity]

It still scores as an 11 when used in a "low" Straight, though, instead of as a 1, unlike Poker.

[Shogal]

"Ace is a high card and straights DO NOT count it as a "1" (as in Blackjack)." - that's not true, A2345 is a valid straight in both Poker and Balatro.

[Cenabet Savaşçı]

tyvm

[precido]

Great explanations-worth reading just to find out what Double Tag means!!