This guide will help you:
Increase the odds of finishing a game of Klondike Solitaire.
If some card deals are absolutely impossible to win, most dead-ends happen because of bad decisions by the player.
Minimize the number of moves needed to finish, by avoiding the useless (if not harmful!) ones.
On average, it takes 120 moves and to win a game (i.e.: to put all the 52 playing cards in their final places.)
Below is the ranking of moves, ordered from most preferable to least preferable.
At any time in the game, pick option 1. if it’s available. If it isn’t, see if you can do 2. If you can’t do 2., go for 3. And so on.
After you’ve done a move, repeat the evaluation process.
The key for effective play is to follow this procedure systematically, making sure to always choose the best available option.
This can be moving the top card from the waste pile, or moving a tableau card. If there are several possibilities, pick any of them to begin with; the order doesn’t matter.
What matters here is to fill the foundation piles evenly (±1 card). Otherwise you may deprive yourself of crucial possibilities later on. Note that moving a Deuce (2), or an Ace of course, to a foundation is always OK.
See if you can free a tableau pile so that you can put a King there. Do this only if there actually is a King ready to go to the emptied pile. Otherwise you are just wasting a move for now!
First, if you can, by moving some card(s) between two tableau piles.
As second choice, by moving a tableau card to a foundation
This makes the game progress. Moreover, in “turn three” mode, such a move may “unlock” access to the other visible cards of the waste pile.
Again, first consider moving the card to a tableau pile.
If you can’t, move it to a foundation.
Drawing a card (or 3 or less cards, in “turn three” mode) from the stock, or “rewinding” the stock if it’s empty (moving back all the cards from the waste to the stock) shall be done now.
Unless you would be endlessly looping through the stock, of course! If you already went once through all the cards in the stock, consider the last option:
This is the last resort. This can be either:
The strategy presented here is the basis of the computer algorithm of our Klondike Solitaire web app, which is used to select finishable deals, offer hints, and detect dead-ends. You also see it surface when you are told that The computer could do it in N moves
at the end of a game.
This strategy/algorithm is quite simple. It does not require to “count cards”, i.e. keep track of which cards were seen in the stock. It doesn’t require to make guesses on where such or such face-down card must be located. And the procedure is the same all along the game; there is no special treatment of the opening or ending. It’s stateless, a programmer would say.
As such, this strategy is also not optimal: it cannot win all the deals that are theorically finishable. It has a winning rate of 52% in “turn one” mode, and 18% in “turn three”. For something more successful (but also much more complex!), see this strategy by Jupiter Scientific.