How often can you win Solitaire?
A lost game is not automatically an unwinnable one. See how the rules, face-down cards and your own choices change your chances.
There is no single Klondike Solitaire win rate that holds regardless of the rules and how you play. A deal can be winnable in principle and still be lost. And a game you abandoned does not prove there was no way through. Spielaro does not check in advance whether a deal can be solved.
Three different questions behind one win rate
When someone asks how often Solitaire comes out, they can mean three different things. First: if you could see every card, is there a legal sequence of moves that wins? Second: can a player find that sequence while many cards start face down? Third: how often does one particular person win under the conditions they actually play?
These questions have different answers. A method that already knows the face-down cards has information you never get in a normal game, so its result is not a forecast of your own win rate. Nor can you simply carry over experience from another Solitaire variant to Klondike.
Which rules make a difference?
In Solitaire on Spielaro free play lets you draw one or three cards. With draw three, only the top card of the turned-up pile can be played, which changes the moves available and how much their order matters.
The number of passes through the stock, whether you can undo moves and the rules for empty columns all belong in the description of a game, too. Here only a king may start an empty column, you can go through the stock again, and you can take back moves during a game. A percentage without these details is hard to interpret.
What does this mean for the daily game?
The daily game uses one shared deal and draws one card, so everyone starts under the same conditions. There is no check, though, that guarantees this deal can be finished. And an identical start does not mean two people turn up the same cards afterwards: that depends on their moves.
You can restart the daily deal to try a different route. By then you may already know some cards from your first attempt. For a fair comparison, keep your first attempt separate from later replays. "Same starting position" describes the deal, not automatically what the player knows.
How to judge your own results
Say you start 40 different games and win 18 of them. Your observed win rate is 18 divided by 40, which is 45 per cent. That describes those 40 attempts. It is neither a general Klondike figure nor proof that the other 22 deals were unwinnable.
Count every game you start, including the ones you give up. Note the draw mode, replays and any help you used separately, or you will mix different conditions. More games make the figure more meaningful, but they do not replace a clear definition of what you are counting. The number of wins alone is not enough without the number of games started.
What helps next time?
Look first for moves that free face-down cards. Before you empty a column, check which king could move into it. If you are stuck, an earlier choice can matter more than another pass through the stock. These ideas improve your planning, but they cannot guarantee a win.
Sudoku is different: the generator checks that every puzzle has exactly one solution. In Mahjong it pays to look at which tiles a pair frees up when you remove it. More on chance and decisions is in our odds section.