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So, you want to be a poker master in one of the coolest roguelikes around? We get it; Balatro is an enticing, multifaceted challenge, but you want the best tips and tricks for beginners to become the master. Our guidance is not an instant path but a rewarding one that teaches you about the game through practice and exposure to a deepening pool of ideas.
What Are the Best Tips for Beginner Players in Balatro?
Balatro is a welcoming game for beginners with a low barrier to entry but an impressively high skill ceiling, thanks to cool tricks. It is based on a solid foundation, with poker now being hundreds of years old. Beyond the fundamentals, however, you have to play by Balatro’s bizarre house rules. Lucky for you, the house won’t always win.
10. Allow Yourself to Lose
Playing Balatro on your first day, you might be excited to crush your run. 8 Antes? That’s a breeze, you might believe. But then your first run-in with The Mouth after getting comfortable or running into The Wall will remind you that Boss Blinds shift Balatro’s goalposts on a dime. Allow yourself to lose because each run allows you chances to discover new tricks in Balatro, and you can see the flow of the game in motion.
9. Save Those Seeds
So you lost a run in Balatro. It’s already not the end of the world, but sometimes it can be discouraging when you make a mistake or run into some especially cruel RNG. At the game-over screen, copy that seed data before starting a new run. If you did well and want to try out tricks you discovered, this is a reliable way to rerun those scenarios.
8. Don’t Ever Knock Standard Packs
Standard Packs aren’t the best items in the Shop, but they’re also consistently good compared to other packs. In Balatro, one of the best tips is to start hoarding these once you’re satisfied with Planet Card buffs and have a decent arsenal of Joker cards. All you need is one good pull from a Standard Pack like a Purple Seal to dominate on the table.
7. Seek Your Play Style
While it’s good to try new techniques, you can still personalize your approach. If you prefer prioritizing suits, face cards, or specific hands, you can keep things general while building around them.
This doesn’t mean buying everything you see at the Shop just because you have the money. It means occasionally buying placeholder Joker cards until you can sell them off to get something that truly helps. It means playing certain hands more frequently than others because they suit your playstyle better, and you should use Discards liberally as a result.
6. Don’t Play Every Type of Hand in One Run
This lends to the previous point but nails it down further. Instead of snazzy tips and tricks for the best hands in Balatro, like an Ancient Joker-empowered Flush with multiple Jupiter cards applied, it’s as simple as picking your favorite hands. It means experimenting and sometimes realizing that even weak hands like Pairs or Two Pairs can be devastating with enough Planet Card investment.
5. Experiment, Discover, and Grow
While this sounds contradictory to Point #6, sometimes you might find your playstyle needs a slight tweaking. You’ll also notice that as you play runs, buy items at the Shop, and cross milestones, new Jokers and Vouchers become available to discover.
This means you might not have had a good run last time, but you’re always welcome to revisit previous ideas in light of new assets. I wasn’t as open to buying Arcana Packs until I discovered a Soul card, giving me my first Legendary Joker, for instance.
4. Pick 2-3 Preferred Planet Cards
You don’t want to be a generalist in Balatro; you want to be a specialist. Pick a few preferred Planet Cards and begin stacking levels on them. My preferred Planet Cards are Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn. This is nothing against Earth or the Full House hands it buffs; I just find my brain prioritizes suits or number sequences better for other hands, and that’s okay.
Plus, if you gain enough levels with these, prepare to cackle at the utter insanity when you create a multiplier stack to rival the Tower of Babel against tough Blinds.
3. The Hieroglyph is an Excellent Asset
Certain Vouchers are better than others, as we’ve been over before. The Hieroglyph, while having the drawback of removing 1 hand per round, buys you precious time and chances to farm more buffs, find the best Jokers, and adjust your deck. This is invaluable, although you shouldn’t abuse it lest you risk having too few hands to survive later rounds.
2. Synergize With Your Jokers
The Joker Cards are my favorite asset in Balatro, and my most important tips involve how they’re used. They function almost like enchanted armor in an RPG, with diverse effects you can stack to give you an epic boost to your play style. One of my favorite Jokers is the Ancient Joker, empowering a randomized suit every round and stacking on hilarious amounts of multipliers. It synergizes well with the following Jokers:
- Card Sharp
- Cavendish
- Hanging Chad
- Smiley Face
- Photograph
- Shortcut
- Perkeo
You can build it around a certain best use, like Flushes for the Ancient Joker, but Straights still allows you to benefit from any card in its affected suit. From there, the other cards from this list can help with the heavy lifting. You’ll get multipliers in the hundreds by stacking good Jokers that work well together. But more on Jokers…
1. Jokers Come First Above All Buffs
You must prioritize Joker cards, having at least 1-2 before getting any other types of buff. This will almost always give you a better run. Even if you have a Joker you don’t particularly like, you can play to its strengths to typically get better rewards than relying on the more situational benefits from Planets, Tarot Cards, or Vouchers.
These tips and tricks are designed to help you survive in Balastro when all the proverbial cards are on the table. Use these so that you don’t fold in the face of a worthy challenge but rather evolve, opening yourself to new ideas as you form bold new strategies on a whim.
