Winnable Solitaire — Deals a Solver Has Already Beaten
A winnable solitaire deal is one that a computer solver has played to completion before you ever see it, proving at least one sequence of legal moves clears the whole board. Clear Solitaire has Winnable deals only switched on by default in Klondike, Spider and FreeCell, so when you lose, you lost a game you could have won. Winnable is not the same as easy, and this page explains exactly what the guarantee does and does not cover.
Why unwinnable deals exist at all
Shuffle a deck properly and deal a Klondike game and you may have created a puzzle with no solution. Nobody did anything wrong; the arrangement simply forbids it.
The usual culprit is a burial. Suppose the Ace of spades sits at the bottom of column 7 with six cards on top of it, and the only cards that could legally take those six cards away are themselves stuck under each other. No amount of drawing from the stock introduces a move that unlocks the chain. The board looks lively — there are always a few legal moves — and then it isn’t. You cycle the stock a third time, find nothing, and the game quietly ends.
With a genuinely random shuffle, roughly 82.7% of Klondike Draw 1 deals and 51.1% of Draw 3 deals have any winning line at all. The remainder cannot be won by anyone. For most players that is the single most frustrating thing about solitaire, because from the inside a dead deal and a badly played deal look identical.
What “proven winnable” actually means
Before a deal reaches you, a solver plays it. The solver knows every card, including the face-down ones, and searches for a sequence of legal moves that ends with every card on a foundation. If it finds one, the deal is kept. If it cannot, the deal is discarded and another is generated.
Three details matter, and most sites do not tell you any of them.
The solver sees the hidden cards. You don’t. In the research literature this distinction has a name: solving a deal with full knowledge of the face-down cards is thoughtful solitaire, and it is a strictly easier problem than the game you are actually playing. A deal can be provably winnable and still be unwinnable in practice for a player making decisions blind, because the winning line depends on knowing which card is under column 5. This is not a loophole — it is the honest boundary of the guarantee, and it is the reason unlimited undo exists.
The solver’s rules have to match yours. Whether the stock can be cycled unlimited times, whether cards can come back down off a foundation, whether a partial run can be moved — each of these changes which deals are solvable. Our solver plays by exactly the rules the game plays by: unlimited passes through the stock, foundations you can pull from, and standard tableau moves. Change the draw mode and the deal is re-verified for that mode, because a deal winnable at Draw 1 is often not winnable at Draw 3.
“Winnable” is a proof of existence, not a difficulty rating. The solver stops as soon as it finds one line. That line may be 140 moves long and depend on a single non-obvious decision at move 12.
Winnable does not mean easy
This is worth its own heading because it is the most common misunderstanding.
Among deals that are provably solvable, the difficulty range is enormous. Some resolve themselves in three minutes of obvious moves. Others have exactly one viable path through a bottleneck, and every plausible alternative loses. Expect to lose solver-verified deals — regularly, and especially in Draw 3 and four-suit Spider.
What changes is what a loss means. On a random deal, losing tells you nothing: you don’t know whether you missed something or the deal was dead on arrival. On a verified deal, losing tells you there was a move you didn’t find. That is information you can use, and it is the reason the setting is on by default.
How your strategy should change
Knowing a deal is solvable is not just reassurance; it should alter how you play.
Undo becomes a search tool. If a line runs out of moves, the position ten moves ago had a better option. Press U back to the last real decision and take the other branch. On a random deal this is often wasted effort. On a verified deal it is guaranteed to eventually work.
Stop hunting for a “good deal”. The habit of restarting until the opening looks promising is a response to unwinnable deals. When every deal is winnable, restarting just throws away a puzzle you had already partly solved.
Slow down at the bottleneck, not at the start. Verified-but-hard deals usually have one pinch point — a column that has to come apart in a particular order, or a King that has to go into the empty column before a specific card is uncovered. The opening moves are rarely where the game is decided.
Trust the priority order. Aces and 2s home immediately. After that, prefer any move that flips a face-down card, and prefer flipping in the column with the most hidden cards. Hold mid-rank cards in the tableau as landing spots rather than sending them to the foundations early. Only empty a column when you know which King is going into it. These are the moves the solver’s line almost always uses too.
If you want the true odds
You can turn Winnable deals only off. Deals then come from an unfiltered shuffle, with the real proportion of dead ones included, exactly as a physical deck would give you. Some players prefer this — a random deal is the honest game, and beating one feels different. The setting sits with card size and draw mode, and it is remembered on your device.
Either way, every deal has a number shown in the footer. Add ?seed= and that number to the URL and you get the identical layout again, on any device — useful if you want to hand a friend the exact deal that beat you.
Frequently asked questions
Is any game of Solitaire winnable?
Not every one. With a genuinely random shuffle, a substantial minority of Klondike deals have no winning sequence at all — around 82.7% of Draw 1 deals are solvable and around 51.1% of Draw 3 deals, so the rest are lost before the first move. The reason is structural: face-down cards can be arranged so that the cards needed to unlock a column are themselves locked under it, and nothing in the rules lets you break the loop. Different games differ sharply — FreeCell, where every card is face up from the start, has a solvable rate of about 97.6%, while four-suit Spider is far lower — low enough that our own solver has proved only 1 of the 67 deals it scanned, too small a sample to state a rate at all. Clear Solitaire’s Winnable deals only setting removes the unwinnable ones by running a solver over each deal before you see it. It is on by default and can be switched off if you would rather face real odds.
What is the easiest type of Solitaire to win?
By solvable rate, FreeCell is the easiest of the common games: roughly 97.6% of random deals can be won, and because every card is dealt face up there is no hidden information — a careful player converts a much higher share of those into actual wins. After that, one-suit Spider is very approachable, since every descending run is automatically same-suit and therefore movable as a block; 69.3% of random deals are solvable. Klondike Draw 1 comes next, at around 82.7%. The hard end of the scale is Klondike Draw 3 and four-suit Spider. Worth separating two things, though: a game’s solvable rate is not your win rate. FreeCell’s near-total solvability only helps if you plan carefully, and Klondike’s hidden cards mean even a proven-winnable deal can be missed. Turning on winnable deals raises your ceiling; it does not play the game for you.
Is today’s daily solitaire solvable?
Yes. Every Daily Challenge deal on this site is solver-verified before it is published, in the exact game mode the challenge is played in — so the deal everyone is playing today has at least one complete winning line. That is a firm guarantee about the deal, not a prediction about your afternoon: daily deals are chosen from the verified pool without smoothing out the difficulty, so some days are a gentle five minutes and some days will beat most of the people who try them. If today’s is beating you, unlimited undo is the tool for it. Back up to the last point where you had a real choice and take the other branch; on a verified deal, a working line is definitely in there. The board and your streak are unaffected by undo.