Balatro Tips and Tricks

Balatro combines all the compelling gameplay loops of roguelikes with the thrill of poker. As you build your deck and progress through the blinds, the challenge multiplies along with the ante, so be sure to make use of these Balatro tips and tricks to help you improve your runs.

Be Willing to Experiment

In most roguelikes, inexperience with the game is just another natural hurdle to overcome. Playing more and more will grant you more knowledge on what to look out for and foster a better understanding of what combos you can build towards. Balatro accentuates this as there’s multiple different aspects of the game to discover, from Jokers, to Vouchers, to Tarot Cards.

The more outlandish plays you make, the closer you can get to finding unlocks you may have not found otherwise. While losing may sting in the short term, a willingness to accept defeat will give you more knowledge of what to do and what not to do, and you’ll come out better in the long term.

Establish Your Strategy Early

In similar fashion to other roguelikes when you’re starting out, you can try out a few strategies to see what works for you. The initial learning curve can be rough for some games, and Balatro is no exception! Get a feel for which playable hands are the most effective, lean all in on get used to the play patterns of certain common jokers, once you’ve played enough your fundamental understanding of what’s familiar to you will grow.

Know When To Change The Plan

This immediately contradicts the previous tip at face value, however another skill that you're regularly tested on in roguelikes is the ability to adapt on the fly. There will be moments where you will need to examine chances to drop your current steady plan you may be building towards for an even stronger objective. Balatro is no different than other mainstays in the genre, some runs may present you a passable path forward but being able to see other powerful opportunities and seizing them is your ticket to getting better as a player.

Collect Interest

As you do a run in Balatro, one thing you’ll learn immediately is how important your money is. The starting point to getting strong enough to progress is intrinsically tied to spending money at a shop. One key aspect to making money during a run is having money stored after each fight. For every $5 you have (up to $25 outside of certain voucher enhancements) you get an additional $1 as a reward.

This means you should pay attention to your $5 breakpoints, especially in the earlier game, as every bit of money you save is exponential growth in the future. However this advice isn’t to say to never spend your money if you don't have 25$, as if you wait too long to spend your money then you run the risk of failing a Blind before you can use it!

Navigating this delicate balance is a key step to becoming a better Balatro player.

Note Card Order

While it’s fair to not pay much mind to it when you’re starting off your Balatro journey, one aspect of the game that will become more apparent is how the order of your cards matters in nearly everything! From the position of your jokers, to the order of scoring the hands you play, to even the activation process of certain Tarot cards.

Everything goes from left to right, so when your Jokers are adding to your score, you should put Jokers that add to your Chips and Multipliers on the left and multiplying Chips and Multipliers to your score to the right. There are also Jokers (like Ceremonial Dagger, Brainstorm, Blueprint, and Swashbuckler) that are mindful of the position of other Jokers when triggering their effects.

While it may sound like you may need to be lucky with the order you purchase Jokers or draw your playing cards, you are free to rearrange the order of your cards at any point!

For a visual example of this, the order of the playing hand matters here! Going by the default order of the played hand the game provides you (arranged by Suit) going left to right would be A-Q-9-4-2. But that hand would score for less than what is currently pictured (A-9-4-2-Q). The reason for this is because every Spade scored will contribute +4 Multiplier to you score thanks to the Wrathful Joker, and once the Queen is scored she will provide X2 Multiplier to your score due to the Photograph Joker. As mentioned earlier, it's better to provide flat bonuses first before you involve any multipliers. Even in this screenshot it would be possible to get a slightly higher score if Photograph was moved to the right of Wrathful Joker.

It may take a bit to get used to it, but there's small opportunities everywhere to look out for to improve your score!

Look for Power Scaling Opportunities

Balatro is a game that is filled to the brim with opportunities of doing tasks over the course of a run. Fans of other popular roguelikes in the genre like Slay the Spire may remember cards like Feed, Ritual Dagger, and Genetic Algorithm, that change the usual course of how you play the game and reward you for paying mind to them.

There are card modifiers (like the Blue, Purple, and Gold Seals), and Jokers (like Ride the Bus, Square Joker, and Burnt Joker) that can increase their power if you can fulfill their conditions.

Consider Skipping Blinds

One key feature that Balatro offers is the chance to skip an encounter entirely. Whenever you choose to avoid an encounter, you are given a Tag which will activate an ability. Most of the time you’ll want to just do an encounter, because if you skip a fight then you lose out on potential money and the chance to go to a shop. However, some Tags are too enticing to pass up if you find yourself needing a specific answer to a problem.

While the first instinct to skip would solely be for Tags, there are other reasons you can keep in mind! One important instance of this is if you need to preserve diminishing Jokers or line up a specific ability for a Boss Blind (like Seltzer, Popcorn, Ice Cream, or Loyalty Card), you can skip the blinds to save them a bit longer.

Understanding when to skip is a key tool you should keep in the back of your mind and ready to use.

Take Every Chance to Scale

While scoring tremendous hands does feel good, especially when you get to bring out the fiery animations to blow up a Blind’s required score, you’re not making extra money for over scoring. Under most circumstances, a lot of your money will be accrued from holding interest, winning a fight with hands remaining, modifiers from your cards, or Jokers.

The rush to winning a fight is understandable, but make sure to always remember the aspects of your run where you can scale your strength! A quick example is if you have a Joker like Trading Card or Mail-In Rebate and if you have a winning hand already, then see if you can fulfill their condition before victory, try to achieve that! Alternatively if you you know you have cards with a Gold/Blue/Purple Seal (or a Gold Card) in your deck, then you can fish for those with your discards.

Study Your Face Down Cards

There will be times when you’re forced to contend with either having your playing cards or Jokers flipped face down. While it can be disheartening to not know what cards you’re potentially sending out to be scored, or the optimal order to have your jokers in, there are a few ways around this!

One example with Jokers being flipped that becomes more apparent when it happens, is that not every Joker shares the exact standard size. Compare a base Joker to a card like Half Joker, Joker Stencil, or Wee Joker, they’ll retain their distinct silhouette shapes when flipped. In addition to the previously mentioned jokers with glaring silhouette variations, there’s also jokers with more subtle variations like Misprint, and Burnt Joker if you really look out for them.

There is one advanced tactic you can do if your Jokers are all the same size and you need to figure out how to order them after they get shuffled face down. If you turn down the game speed in the settings once you score a hand, you can see which face down scores in which specific way, so if you see flat Chips and Multipliers are triggering on the right of your multiplicative Chips Multipliers, then you can rearrange the Jokers in the proper order.

For playing cards being flipped face down, there is a slight work around in figuring out which card is being hidden away. As an example, if you have a few cards turned face up, like a Queen of Hearts, a Ten of Clubs, and a Three of Clubs, you can sort cards by their Rank and Suit and ascertain a bit more information and see where the face down cards are laid. If you sort by Suit and there are face down cards in between the Seven and Three, then you know those are Clubs. If you sort by Rank and there’s a singular card between the Queen and Ten, then you know for certain that card is a Jack.

This isn’t a surefire way to guess a face down card, as face down cards to the side and not in between could introduce a ton more guesswork to perform. Sometimes you have to take a chance and play suboptimally to figure out certain flipped cards, but if you pay attention you can find yourself in a good spot to not worrying about face down cards.

One last important note is that cards that trigger in hand (most notably Steel Cards) will still trigger face down, so if you know for certain a flipped card is Steel you can still reap its benefits by keeping it in your hand.

Hold Down R to Restart

Once you’ve finally grown adept enough at the game and you’re trying to grind through higher difficulties or challenge runs, you’ll find that you may need a perfect starting hand in the first round to have a chance at ultimate victory for a run. Instead of going to the main menu and starting a new run, you can simply restart a run by Holding R which saves a ton of time when you’re trying to fish for a better start.