The Dishonesty of Balatro

There’s a kind of video game that claims to be one sort of game, but is actually a very different kind of game once you get into it. Inscryption, for instance, pretends to be a card game, but is actually a weird sort of Blair Witch-type mystery-horror game. Doki Doki Literature Club looks to be a pretty standard visual novel dating sim, but turns out to be a story about a video game character who very much doesn’t want to be one. Papers, Please pretends to be a game about matching patterns, but is actually a story about finding yourself the face of an oppressive government.

Balatro pretends to be a game about making poker hands, then does everything in its power to stop you from making poker hands. It’s another game that takes your expectations about card games, and then weaponizes them.

Balatro is (or claims to be) a game where you make poker hands — pairs, full houses, flushes, straights. You score some number of chips, which are the point values of the cards (from 2 to 11, with aces being the 11s). That is multiplied by the value of the hand to be the total score of the hand. You have typically four hands in which to hit an ever-increasing point target, with four discards.

You can level up hands by buying Celestial cards. You can level up the cards themselves by buying Tarot cards. And you can change the rules of the game by buying Jokers. You earn this money by winning “blinds” — point targets — and by not using the maximum number of hands to reach the blind; you get a buck for each one you have left over.

Each round consists of a “small blind”, a “big blind” and a “boss blind”. Beating a boss blind advances you to the next ante. There are eight antes. Beat them all, and you win Balatro.

The boss blinds add new rules; for instance, making it so you can’t see the cards, removing points and abilities for certain suits or for cards you already played in the small or big blinds, stopping you from playing a certain hand more than once, forcing you to always play a certain hand, and so on.

How do you win?

Well, the game is telling you in really unsubtle ways that if you thought the game was being at all honest about the game being about making poker hands, you’re going to have a bad time.

You win the game by choosing the best jokers.

In my winning game, and the one right before it, I decided I would make only one hand — a pair. Every time I would open a Celestial booster pack, I would choose the planet (Mercury) that leveled up pairs. I had a Joker that added 50 chips to hands with pairs. I had a joker that leveled up each time I played a hand I’d played before (in the end, I had played pairs 61 times, so the multiplier was 61). Leveling up a hand increases its base chip value and multiplier. I think in the end I was adding over a hundred chips and a multiplier of 15 or more each pair — the chips from card values were insignificant by that point. I bought a voucher that said that every time I would open a Celestial pack, I would get the planet that would level up my most played hand. I had a Joker that leveled up every time I opened a Celestial pack.

During my playthrough, I had to stop myself from accidentally making any hand but a pair, because by the end, even a royal flush would have been a downgrade. When a boss blind turned all the cards around, I just assumed the top five would have a pair. (I’d also leveled up High Card some). The last boss blind forced me to put a specific card in my hand. I’d play a pair — and that card. I was doing about 27,000 points per pair I played. I also had a Joker that took away all my discards but gave me three more hands, so my expected total point value at that point was 7 x 27,000 = 189,000 points — well above the 120,000 points I needed to win the game. You can continue after that, but my strategy had pretty much reached its limit, and I wasn’t going to be able to beat the next boss at 220,000 points.

The answer: break the game even more. Expert Balatro players manipulate the decks to their liking — in my winning playthrough, I didn’t modify the deck at all. Going further, I’m going to need to.

But one thing I won’t be doing is trying to make poker hands. Making poker hands in Balatro is a losing strategy.

Don’t believe its lies.