Balatro (Joker) Advanced Strategy - Card Draw and Deck Optimization

Section 1: Crawl Rate

First of all, it's important to be clear: no matter how strong a player's deck is (except for the Joker's hand), they will only get enough points if they play the target hand. Most of the cards in the game need to play 3~5 specific cards, which leads to the concept of "catch rate" - how many times can the player play the target card before the end of the level?

Under the default 8-hand cap, 4 out + 3 folds, from my personal experience, the average can play about 3 flushes, or 2~3 straights/full houses, or 1~2 fours, and less than 1 straight flush. In the case of ghost drawing, you can only play 1 flush in the end, and you may not make up a straight and a gourd at all.

Therefore, the first thing players should consider is how to increase the catch rate of the target card type compared to playing big cards to get a high score, so as to prevent the ghost draw from causing a round of violent death.

There are a few ways to increase your catch rate: increase the number of cards played or folded, increase your hand limit, and improve your deck.

There's nothing to say about increasing the number of times you play or fold, and having more opportunities to swap cards by playing and discarding will naturally increase your catch rate.

Section 2: Hand Cap

The 8-hand limit is a pretty delicate number - since many of the games require 5 cards, the 8-hand limit means that when a player has 4 cards left and wants to draw the last one, they can only discard up to 4 cards, and the efficiency of the hand starts to drop to 80%.

However, if there are cards in the deck such as "steel cards" that need to be retained to exert their effects, the efficiency of the hand operation will further decline, and eventually fall into the vicious circle of "the card is not good and you can only keep the card", → "the hand is not running smoothly and the hand is not running well", → "the hand is not running smoothly and it is difficult to make up the hand", → "the hand is not full and you can only keep the card".

It has to be said that the "8 hand cap" is really cleverly set, especially for players who have played the checkered deck, and it is a number between "smooth work" and "bad work". With just one more point increase, the 9-hand cap checkered deck will be able to reach the ultimate state of "no folding, unlimited flush combos".

Therefore, it is highly recommended here: if you are playing a 5-card hand, then try to increase the hand limit to 9; In addition, in the absence of a 9 cap, try not to rely on "steel" and other retained cards to create income, otherwise it is very easy to die due to card operation.

Section 3: Deck Optimization

In the game, the effect of the card deck can be expanded, reduced, and enhanced by purchasing card packs, clown card effects, tarot card effects, and phantom card effects. One of the most intuitive ways to improve your grab rate is to get rid of low-quality or useless cards in your deck, so that you can better grab useful cards.

The poker cards used in the game are essentially composed of two dimensions: "suit" and "points", and all the card types in the game can also be distinguished according to these two dimensions.

Epilogue:

These are just general ideas for optimizing your hand and deck, but because the game itself has quite a lot of mechanics, it doesn't need to be followed in every hand. For example, combined with the method of "increasing the value through the growth of the clown card" mentioned in the previous chapter, the hand type can become insignificant - in fact, just before writing this guide, I cleared the purple bet purely by raising the joker card, and there was no strengthening of the overall card type.

For advanced positions, especially after the gold bet is -1 hand cap, the operational pressure of the hand can become very high. In this environment, it may be better to abandon the 5-card hand and turn your focus to strengthening the joker and game cards.