Poker has had many variations over the years. At its core, it’s a simple enough game. Whomever has the best hand wins the pot that all players have contributed to. It’s usually money or chips on the line, but when I was a kid, I gambled with candy.

The most popular variation of the game in the United States is Texas Hold ‘Em, where players have a few cards in the middle of the table that they all must play in addition to their own private hands. 

I could sit here and list all of the variants of poker, as there are a lot, but there’s one I want to focus on today: LocalThunk’s Balatro.

When Balatro started gaining steam near the end of 2024, people could be put into two camps: those who had played it and those who hadn’t. I know that seems obvious, but there was such a sharp divide between those who had experienced this gambling fever dream and the rest of us. 

I kept wondering why the silly little poker game was getting so popular, while my friends were going on about jokers and tarot cards and whatnot. Eventually, I had a little extra Steam money to spare, so I picked up the game for a respectable $15. 

I almost immediately got hooked. It starts simple: the player is given a regular 52-card deck and can play any of the standard poker hands. The better ranking a poker hand has, the more points it is worth. 

For example, a pair is only worth 10 chips and two mult, while a straight flush is worth 100 chips and eight mult. At the end of a hand, chips and mult are multiplied with one another to get the hand’s total score.

When a round is won, the player receives money and is moved to the next blind, where the stakes to beat are higher. Balatro keeps going until the player is unable to defeat a blind within their allotted number of hands.

On that, I have to discuss Balatro’s scoring system. As mentioned earlier, each hand has a base score of chips and mult. Cards add their value to the chips when played. For example, if playing three fours for three-of-a-kind, each would add four to the chips, for a total gain of 12. 

All of that seems like basic poker and math, and it is, but that’s only the surface of what Balatro can accomplish. In between rounds of poker, the player will be brought to the shop, where they can spend in-game money on different equipment and upgrades.

Enter the joker, tarot and planet cards. 

Jokers make or break Balatro. They have abilities that add to the chips and mult in different ways. Some are as simple as adding four mult to the player’s hand every time, while others are much more complex, such as a banana that will triple the player’s mult only if the older genus of banana has gone extinct. 

Entire runs are built around jokers. Simply put, it is nearly impossible (but not totally impossible) to make good progress in the game without the correct joker setup. As the stakes get higher on each blind, jokers are going to be the main tool the player uses to get their scores up. 

Planet cards are a simple, welcome assistant – they upgrade one poker hand, making it permanently worth more chips and mult. Earth upgrades the full house, Jupiter upgrades the flush and so on. 

Tarot cards are where the absurdity of Balatro begins to show its face. Their effects range from creating a random joker to switching three selected cards to the same suit.

Between tarot card conversions and buying playing cards in the shop, there is an unreal amount of deck combinations possible in Balatro. If a player is creative, they can unlock little easter eggs for having their deck be all one rank and/or suit. 

And yes, that is possible in Balatro. With a little bit of luck and know-how, it is well within the realm of possibility to have a deck that is all two of hearts. This one’s for you, Stacey Q. 

This unlocks possibilities such as the flush house, five-of-a-kind or the coveted five flush. 

If Balatro sounds crazy, I haven’t even scratched the surface. It sounds like a lot, but it’s truly one of those games that makes sense as you play it. I genuinely understand poker better now, too, but I’m only going to use that knowledge to play more Balatro.

The creative genius behind the innovation on a game as old as poker, combined with a developer so based that he will never allow casinos to lay a finger on his property,  results in Balatro receiving a deserved 5/5. This is a game I’d even recommend to non-gamers.

Tolbert can be contacted at [email protected]. Tell him your highest-scoring Balatro hand.