If You Can't Lend Your Hand Trivia Quiz

Answer: Flush Five

Once you've played one of these hands in a given hand, their associated Planet cards will start to appear in Celestial Packs. Since the standard poker hands are each linked to a planet (with High Card represented by Pluto), secret hands are linked to "arguable" planetesimals. Five of a Kind is boosted by the (hypothetical) Planet X, Flush House by the (dwarf planet/asteroid) Ceres, and Flush Five by the (dwarf planet) Eris.

If you're trying to get late into the game, and you've managed to get lots of duplicate cards in your deck, it can pay to scale one of these higher hands, as each level upgrade gives much higher Mult and Chip increases than the highest standard hands. Just don't play any you don't intend to use long-term - you don't want their Planet Cards in the shop unnecessarily!

Answer: Lose all discards

Burglar grants you three additional hands, but takes away all discards (no matter how many you have). This gives it a variety of use cases. It's great with Jokers that power up the more hands you play, such as Ride the Bus or Green Joker. It also has natural synergy with Mystic Summit, which activates when you have no discards, and the Ramen, which depletes as you play discards. Finally, it helps deal with The Needle and The Water, Boss Blinds that, respectively, reduce your hands to 1 and your discards to 0. Burglar gives you four hands total on The Needle and three bonus hands for The Water.

Generally speaking, hands are worth more than discards, since you can always play a hand to function as a discard. Unlike discards, a hand earns you $1 at the end of a round, which essentially makes the Burglar function as a money-generating Joker.

Answer: Sock and Buskin

Several effects are only triggered by cards held in your hand, irrespective of the hand you played. Shoot the Moon gives you +13 Mult for each Queen held in hand, while Baron grants a whopping x1.5 Mult for each King in hand - essentially treating them like Steel Cards, though Steel Kings do trigger twice with Baron. Mime is the cornerstone of several game-breaking strategies, retriggering all in-hand effects - Steel Cards, Jokers, and even Red Seals. With enough Red Seal Steel Kings, you can earn a score that is literally larger than the game's programming language will calculate, making the score display a value of "naneinf" (not a number to the power of infinity). Any number over 1.80 x 10^308 will display as naneinf, the "end" of "Balatro".

Sock and Buskin retriggers played face cards. It has no effect on cards still in hand.

Answer: Mr. Bones

Mr. Bones, Luchador, and Chicot all break how "Balatro" Boss Blinds work. Mr. Bones, a Joker that looks like a skeleton, simply saves your life once, as long as you earn at least 25% of the required chips. It immediately ends the round, and you lose the reward for beating the round. You can even use this to win a run!

Luchador deactivates the current Boss Blind during the round it is sold. The skin-saving is similar to Mr. Bones in many cases, but it can also prevent some of the permanent Boss Blind effects, such as The Ox and The Tooth depleting your wallet. Luchador does not, however, save your run if you don't hit the target.

Chicot is a Legendary (read: extremely rare) Joker that disables all Boss Blind effects for as long as you keep it. Like Luchador and Mr. Bones, Turtle Bean is one of the few Jokers with a consumable effect: it grants up to 5 additional cards in your hand, with that number decreasing by one after every round.

Answer: Yes

In the lingo of "Balatro" Jokers, the verb 'contains' has a specialized meaning. If a Joker specifies that you must *play* a Flush, then only a Flush will trigger it - not a Straight Flush, Flush House, or Flush Five. If it says *contains* a Flush (such as The Tribe), then any of the above hands will work. Ergo, a Full House contains a Pair, Three of a Kind, and a Two Pair (and I suppose a High Card, but that's true of every hand, and the game doesn't make use of it).

The one exception to this, which may or may not feel intuitive, is that Four and Five of a Kind do not contain a Two Pair/Full House, since they don't contain a match set of two different ranks of card.

Answer: Flushes

"Balatro" lets you choose one of fifteen decks to use during your run. Every deck tracks the stakes you've beaten separately, and they vary greatly in strength, from the cheat code-esque Plasma Deck to the almost pointless Black Deck. Thus, it's better to think of each deck as a separate challenge to complete.

Checkered Deck reduces your entire deck to just two suits, with Clubs replaced with another set of Spades and Diamonds replaced with another set of Hearts. The very few Jokers that don't harmonize with this deck (such as Flower Pot, which requires you to play a card of all four suits) pale in comparison to the virtual guarantee of drawing a Flush every discard. It also synergizes well with Jokers that activate with Hearts or Spades, including the powerful Bloodstone.

Answer: Half Joker

Under The Psychic, hands will not score unless five cards are played. It's one of the less troublesome Boss Blinds, namely because you can play any hand, even High Card, by adding unscored junk. Usually, Psychic only creates problems with the handful of jokers that depend on exact numbers of cards being played, which include Square Joker and Half Joker. Half Joker will give you +20 Mult, which is enough to get many Pair and High Card builds started. However, it does nothing if you play more than three cards (whether or not those cards score), so the Psychic effectively debuffs it.

The Psychic can also sour Jokers which require you *not* to play certain cards, such as Ride the Bus, which resets to +0 Mult if you're forced to play a face card. But - ask anyone - by far the most common reason for Psychic to affect your runs is if you forget you're on Psychic, and play a short hand by mistake.

Answer: Spare Trousers

Spare Trousers are, in other words, a second pair. Spare Trousers gains +2 Mult every time you play a hand containing a Two Pair (ergo, a Full House would also count) For any "Balatro" run, it generally pays to get a steady source of increasing +Mult (lest your xMult be left with nothing to multiply), and I always take Spare Trousers if I can get it early.

Other sources of +Mult are harder to work around (like the Green Joker or Ride the Bus), or add to their +Mult less often (like Red Card and Flash Card). Compared to the alternatives, restricting yourself to Two Pairs and Full Houses isn't so bad - it's usually best to stick to a specific hand throughout the game.

But as an exception, see...

Answer: You will NOT be playing Full Houses

Obelisk gains x0.2 Mult every time you play a hand that is NOT your most-played hand. In practice, it forces you to completely overhaul your strategy midway through a game. If you've played twenty or thirty Full Houses to this point in the game, you can switch to Flushes or Two Pairs or any other hand for big points. Less than 20, and there's a good chance you'll prematurely catch up to your old standby - and you'll be forced to reset your x5.0 Mult to x0.0.

Both powerful and situational, Obelisk requires careful timing. Many people hate playing it because it feels like "starting over." If the Obelisk finds you around the midgame, and you have at least 20 of a certain hand played, *and* you aren't using a hand-dependent Joker like Spare Trousers, then the Obelisk can easily clear a stake. Also good: you can usually tell if the Obelisk is worth the investment or not, so in that sense it sometimes feels like a free win. (Doesn't stop people from hating it, though!)

Answer: Space Joker and Burnt Joker

Space Joker has no major downsides, but it's not particularly powerful: it only upgrades your played hand 1 in 4 times, and if the Wheel of Fortune Tarot has taught us all anything, it's that 1 out of 4 is a much lower probability than we think. Of course, this is one of the better Joker effects to double using Oops! All 6s.

Burnt Joker is another that can be hard to get aloft. It upgrades the level of the first hand you discard, whatever that may be. Given only one random draw, you aren't likely to find any particular hand besides a Pair or a High Card. The odds of you getting those bigger hands increase as you alter your deck, but by the point you're that powerful, you're usually depending on scoring Jokers, not utility Jokers like the Burnt Joker. With that said, both of these Jokers can level up your hands a lot before you're ready to replace them - but, in my experience, even one Blue Seal card tends to be even stronger than either of these Jokers.