How To Win A Run In Balatro

Balatro is a rogue-like deck builder based on the popular card game — Poker. Winning a run in Balatro requires beating progressively increasing boss blinds, all the way up to Ante 8, by playing powerful poker hands and using bonus cards. These bonus cards enhance your deck, allowing you to score additional points by means of multipliers and surpass seemingly impossible boss blinds.

If you’ve recently started playing Balatro and are having a difficult time understanding what it takes to win a run, this guide should help you understand the fundamentals and set you on the course to a quick victory in the next few runs.

Play More Runs To Unlock Powerful Joker Cards

Jokers Help Increase The Score Played Poker Hands

Jokers are the lifeblood of a poker hand in Balatro, allowing you to stack up additional chips or multiplier on the base hand score. The game features a total of 150 joker cards, each offering unique bonuses that cater to specific playstyles. The more Joker cards you unlock, the higher your chance of achieving victory goes up.

Jokers are unlocked when purchasing them from the shop or claiming them from Buffoon packs. However, some of the most powerful Jokers can only be unlocked upon meeting certain requirements like reaching a specific Ante, playing a certain hand, or scoring a specific number of chips.

Use Booster Packs To Improve Your Poker Hand And Deck

Booster Packs Offer Opportunities To Enhance Poker Hands & Joker Cards

Just like Joker cards, Booster Packs are usable bonus items that improve your deck during a run, upgrade poker hands, and unlock joker cards. There are a total of 32 Booster Packs in Balatro, categorized into the following:

• Arcana Packs: These packs are your source of acquiring Tarot cards, allowing for manipulation of your deck in a run by creating copies of certain cards, converting a random hand to a single suit, destroying weak cards, etc.
• Celestial Packs: These packs grant you Planet cards, with each card upgrading the level of a Poker hand. If you find yourself playing the Flush hand type, the Jupiter planet card allows you to upgrade that hand and score more points when the same hand is played in the future.
• Standard Packs: With these packs you can add regular and special playing cards to your deck, like aces or seal cards, allowing you to manipulate your hands.
• Spectral Packs: Like the joker cards, Spectral packs contain powerful modifiers that can not only enhance the cards in your deck, but also your joker cards, making them even more powerful.

Whenever you’re in the shop, make sure to purchase booster packs to improve your deck and raise your chances of emerging victorious.

Play Easy, But Powerful Hands

Some Hands Are More Likely To For Strong Arrangements Than Even The Most Powerful Hands

While the Straight Flush hand-type is the most powerful hand in Poker, it isn’t a hand that can be arranged in every single run easily, unless you have powerful jokers and strategy. However, if you resort to playing hands like Flush, Full-House, and Three-Of-A-Kind, you’re chances of arranging them are much better than a Four-Of-A-Kind or Straight Flush.

Moreover, upgrading hands like Flushes, Straights, and Full-Houses with Celestial Packs allow you to score more with these hands. So, it’s recommended to stick to this strategy if you want to increase your chances of winning a run in Balatro.

Use Glass, Lucky & Polychrome Cards

Increase Your Score Multiplier With These Cards

In Balatro, certain card variants are more powerful than some of the poker hands. These bonus cards allow you to add to your score multiplier.

• Glass cards increase your multiplier score by x2, but there’s a 1 in 4 chance that the card will break when played and removed from your deck.
• Similarly, Lucky cards add +10 chips when scored and have a 1 in 5 chance to add +20 to the multiplier, as well as a 1 in 15 chance of earning $20.
• Finally, Polychrome cards always add an x1.5 multiplier to your score upon playing a hand.

Polychrome Jokers can greatly boost your chances of winning in Balatro by applying a 1.5x multiplier to your hand score.

Reroll The Game To Shuffle Blind Skip Rewards

Each time you start a new run in Balatro, the game randomizes the rewards you can earn upon skipping a blind. Blind skipping is a risk and reward mechanic in Balatro that rewards you with powerful Joker cards, Booster Packs, and money, but raises the stakes of a boss blind by limiting your economy and deck enhancement potential.

The risk of skipping blinds in the early game isn’t too high, and re-rolling a new game can potentially let you start the run with Rare, Holographic or Polychrome Jokers, allowing you to tailor your deck and strategize for mid and late game Antes.

Seek Out Negative Jokers

Adds +1 Joker Slot

As mentioned earlier, Joker cards are the lifeblood of a run in Balatro, and there is a limit to how many Jokers you can have in the Joker slots — the usual number is 5 cards for early decks. However, Balatro also features a special edition of Joker, called the Negatives. These Joker cards do not take up any space in your Joker slots, allowing you to hold as many as you can acquire, in addition to regular Joker cards. The more Jokers you have in possession, the higher are your chances of raising the chips and multiplier.

Purchase Vouchers To Guide Post-Blind Rewards

Influence Content & Variants Of Joker Cards, Booster Packs, And Playable Hands

Vouchers are powerful items that enhance your run in several ways, including increasing the playable hand and discard amount, influencing Booster Pack rewards, and improving the economy. Vouchers cycle after every boss blind, so you don’t necessarily have to prioritize purchasing them over Joker cards and Booster Packs.

With Vouchers you can influence how often a specific type of Booster Pack appears in the Shop, allowing you to tailor your playstyle and enhance your preferred poker hands, and ultimately scoring big as a result.

Understand Joker Placement Order

Incorrect Joker Card Placements Can Impact Overall Hand Score

Unless you’re mathematically inclined, you wouldn’t realize that Joker order plays a huge role in determining the scoring potentiality of a poker hand in Balatro.

In Balatro, Joker cards are always processed from left to right. For example, if you have a Joker with a x3 multiplier on the left and another with a +4 multiplier on the right, the game will first apply the x3 multiplier to the base score, then add the +4. This order results in a lower final score compared to having the x3 Joker on the right. So, ensure that Jokers that multiply the score are placed on the right, and Jokers that add to the multiplier are on the left.

Let’s understand this impact with an example:

• In Balatro, playing a pair scores a default value of 10 (chips) x 2(multiplier)
• For example, a pair of sevens adds 7+7 chips to the default value, making the score: (10 + 7 + 7) x 2 = 48
• With a x3 Joker on the left and a +4 Joker on the right, the score is calculated as: (10+7+7) x (2×3+4) = 240
• Reversing the Joker order changes the calculation: (10 + 7 + 7) x (2 + 4 x 3) = 432

As you can see, it’s extremely important to order your Jokers strategically to maximize your score.