Overview

Welcome to the Balatro Beginner Guide, a sort of crash course on things you should know before jumping in to play the game for yourself. As someone who has 100% completed the game and plans to do it again, words of advice, you’ll never stop improving. There’s always some area you can improve at when playing. However starting out you are completely lost, not being able to beat white stake or get builds off the ground. You may scream that it’s “bad luck” or “#%?@ draws” but I can assure you that while there is randomness, it still requires some skill and decision making to win, it isn’t finding certain jokers and having them carry you.

To win Balatro, it requires using what is given to you effectively, digging through packs and the shop to find items to help fix your deck and level hands, tailoring your build around only 1 or 2 hand types, knowing when to pivot to save a run, and developing your overall game sense. It’s a lot to consider and some players may fall into bad habits like playing unoptimal hands or trying to force hands when it isn’t appropriate. These can lead to players getting stuck at certain stakes due to their relative inexperience with many aspects. This is exactly why I wanted to create this site, to share my knowledge with new and improving players, so that they can learn to consistently win and hopefully even beat some gold stake run while they’re at it.

For the purposes of this site, I’m going to assume you at least know little about Balatro so I have written a short description of what the game is, just in-case you are new or need a refresher.

Balatro Description

Balatro is a roguelike, deck builder with poker inspired elements where you watch numbers go from really small to really big. Each run starts with you choosing a deck and stake and having to progress through 24 rounds across 8 antes to win. An ante is like a floor, with a small blind, big bling and boss that increase in score the more you go. Scoring is built up by making hands and playing cards to earn chips, which is multiplied by some mult. If you fail to meet the score in the given hands you fail the run and have to start from square one. Players are given 4 hands and 3 discards to be used in the rounds to make poker hands and build up enough score to win. You earn money to buy items in a shop to help improve your run. In order to win, you need the help of Jokers, each one having their own effects, from giving +4 mult to letting you go into debt. Every joker has a different way of using it and many have synergies that you may naturally discover as you play. To help tip the odds in your favour, there are items like Tarot cards to help enhance or remove cards to make hands easier to draw and Planet cards to make your Poker Hands better.

With that out of the way, below is some common terminology I may be using as you read through the site, these are terms both used by the game and by the community:

Terminology

Chips: One half of your scoring, the blue number. Some sources of chips include; Cards, Tarots (Hierophant and Tower), Jokers (Examples: Square Joker and Sly Joker)
Mult (plus[+] or exponential [X]): The other half of scoring, the red number. +mult adds onto the red number, Xmult multiplies that number. Some sources of include (Tarots [Empress, Chariot, Justice and Magician], Jokers ([Examples of +mult: Green Joker, Drool Joker, Onyx Agate] Examples of Xmult: Constellation, Cavendish, The Duo), Holding planet card with the Observatory voucher (Doing this gives X1.5 mult per planet of that hand type held).
Econ (or economy): A players money and interest that they have during a run. Can be help by Jokers and interest earnt from holding money. Some sources of helping with econ include: Jokers (Examples: Mail-In Rebate, Reserve Parking, Credit Card), Vouchers (Seeded Money, Money Tree), Selling items, Interest.
Utility: Jokers that don’t give score or money but give valuable perks. Examples: Chaos The Clown, Drunkard, Juggler
Deck Fixing: The practice of manipulating your deck to helps make hands and cards easier to draw. This is done by removing cards, adding cards, copying a card or converting one card to another.
Scalers: Jokers that scale certain attributes of themselves by meeting certain conditions (will be explained in more detail later)
Stake: The level of difficulty on a run.
Ante: Like floors of a dungeon, increases the score required as you go up.
Retrigger: An effect that makes a cards repeat actions, Examples of things that have retrigger effects: Red Seals, Mime, Hack.
Debuff: A status that can affect Jokers and cards. Makes all abilities and effects not activate, no matter if they are played or their condition is met.