I presume the odds of winning at Klondike depend on the specific rules. In the computer version, the Undo feature means that you can, if you want to take the trouble, look forward one move every time and then go back and decide what you want to do based on that information. I’ve found that this significantly enhances my odds of winning, as there are often times that it is better not to make a possible move. (I use the “draw three” and “Vegas scoring” options, and keep a cumulative score; generally, I beat the odds, winning more and more “money” the longer I play.)
I don’t have a factual answer, but I believe you could resolve this question experimentally. Why don’t you play a game of solitaire?
Mr. Excellent is the warmest, kindest, most wonderful human being you’ve ever met in your life.
Is there really a consensus that Klondike is more skill than luck? I’ve played a lot of Klondike, and I’ve really never noticed much skill to it at all.
A strange game, Professor Falcon. The only way to win is not to play.
PC Solitaire is definitely unwinnable for many deals. I’d say at least 40% are.
In my laptop (Vista) you get your winning percentage. I can never beat 50% in the long run (say 500 games).
I always play one-card, infinite turns.
What’s with all the zombies? Did a message board of necromancers decide to come screw with us?
If they decided to screw with us, that would make them necrophiliacs, not mancers.
Well done.
I’m not dead yet!
1-suit Spider Solitaire is trivial. 2-suit is very easy. 4-suit is rather more difficult. See this thread. I think I got my winning streak to over 50 in the end.
A recent computer science paper demonstrates empirically that somewhere between 82% to 91.44% of all Klondike games are solvable.
<sperg> That’s Falken, not Falcon </sperg>
You can win at freecell more often then at solitaire. In fact solitaire has pretty bad odds
Depends on the variation. Vegas style, my winning % is ~5% or less. If I can keep going through the deck, maybe I can hit 50%.
In Freecell I’m close to 80%.
Thou must master the technique to conquer greater Solitaire difficulties.
Instant Win
Alt+Shift+2
Infinite Points
In the Windows XP version of solitaire, draw from the deck at least twice. Hold control and drag a card down from the deck. Click the “A” key and then let go of the left mouse key. You will get 10 points for this. Continue doing this for infinite points!
Infinite points
To do this trick, finish a game of solitaire with the time bonus option on. The cards will start bouncing. Click on the solitaire screen and the play again box will pop up. Select no, so the solitaire screen is just blank green. Use the instant win cheat (Alt+Shift+2) and you will recieve the time bonus you got last game will be added to your last game’s score. For example, if your time bonus was 5000, and your final score was 6000, after using this glitch, you will have a score of 11000. This glitch can be used as many times as you want.
Move a card to an illegal position
Use the left mouse button and drag a card onto any legal position, just as you normally would, but do not let go of the left mouse button. While holding the card over the position, hit the Escape key once, then release the left mouse button. Now left click once on any face-up card at all and it will teleport to that position. You may also use the space bar and directional arrows to do this, however the final click to teleport the card must still be done with the left mouse button.
Draw single cards in a Draw Three game
Everytime you flip the top stack of cards, hold down CTRL-ALT-SHIFT and instead of flipping three card you only flip one card. This way you can draw single cards but still have the higher score of a ‘‘Draw Three’’ game.
**
Freecell Hidden Games**
From the game menu, choose ‘Select game’. Enter -1 or -2 when the game asks you to enter a number.
None tested, King approved
Slight hijack, but I’ve always wondered if Vegas-style solitare is actually played anywhere in Vegas or if it is purely a Microsoft invention. Not that it’d be a good bet given my record-- I’ll just stick to Dr. Blackjack.
I played 1000 games of windows solitaire (vista) and won 416 (41.6%) of them. I’m sure the maximum possible wins is higher, since in some cases I made moves that turned out to be sup-optimal.
This being the internet, though, someone has at least figured out what 52! is. It’s about 8 times 10 to the 67th power.
can’t you also raise your winning percentage by saving a game right before you win, and then loading it up and winning it over and over again?
This is really, really easy when you have a good arbitrary precision calculator installed on your computer, or you’ve built one using a good multiple precision arithmetic library.
Anyway, the precise value is 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000, and this is the second time this week I’ve had occasion to whip that sucker out. 