Las Vegas Solitaire

Buy-in and payout

How to play Las Vegas Solitaire

Twenty-eight cards go out as the seven-column Klondike staircase, with only the last card of each column face up. The other twenty-four are the stock. Foundations build up in suit from the aces and the tableau builds down by alternating colour.

You begin at minus fifty-two dollars, as though you had bought the deck at a dollar a card. Every card you get to a foundation returns five. The stock is drawn one card at a time and cannot be recycled — when it runs out, whatever is on the table is all you have.

The one rule that changed

What changes and what does not

Banking the deal

Las Vegas Solitaire strategy

Treat every draw as final. Twenty-four cards, one pass. Before turning a card, know what you would do with the one currently on the waste.

Uncover face-down cards before banking money. Nineteen of the twenty-eight tableau cards start hidden, and a five-dollar foundation play that leaves a column stuck is a poor trade.

Know where break-even sits. Eleven cards. Once you are past it, playing on costs you nothing; below it, a stalled deal is a losing one however tidy the board looks.

Do not hold aces back. They are the only cards that start a foundation, and with a single stock pass there is no coming round again for them.

Where the money goes

How the buy-in gets lost

Playing it like ordinary Klondike

The habit of drawing freely through the stock because you can come back to it is exactly wrong here. Twenty-four cards pass you once. Every draw taken without a plan for the card is a card gone for the rest of the deal.

Rushing cards to the foundations for the money

Each foundation card is worth five dollars and the temptation is to bank every one on sight. But a low card sent up early is a card that can no longer accept anything in the tableau, and a stalled tableau costs far more than five dollars.

Ignoring the eleven-card line

Eleven cards on the foundations is break-even. Below that you are down on the deal however good the position looks; above it, everything is profit. Knowing where that line sits changes which risks are worth taking late in a deal.

Beating the buy-in

Is Las Vegas Solitaire winnable?

A complete win — all fifty-two cards up for the full $208 — is rare, considerably rarer than clearing an ordinary Klondike deal, because the single stock pass removes the recycling that rescues most Klondike games.

But winning outright is not really the point. The scoring gives a partial result a meaning: eleven cards is a profit, thirty is a good deal, and a stalled board at eight cards is a quantified loss rather than a vague one. We do not publish a win rate; the interesting number here is the average score, and that depends entirely on how carefully the single pass is used.

Four settings of the stock

The four Klondike settings here

This site runs Klondike at four settings. Three differ only in how the stock behaves; Las Vegas is the one that also attaches a number to the result.

The last column is the real difference. Everywhere else on this site a deal is won or lost; here it has a value, and most deals land somewhere in between.