A poker solitaire you can always finish, and how we know

Poker Solitaire is an old card game. You deal 25 cards one at a time onto a five by five grid, each card stays where you put it, and when the grid is full every row and every column is a poker hand. Pip scores them on the American table: royal flush 100, straight flush 75, four of a kind 50, full house 25, flush 20, straight 15, three of a kind 10, two pair 5, pair 2. A better hand always scores more, so nobody has to learn a second ranking.

Dealt one at a time, it is mostly luck. You place the seventh card without knowing the eighth, and some deals are worth far less than others before you place a card. That is fine for a round on the bus. It is no good for a puzzle that everyone plays on the same day, where a bad deal is just a bad day for everybody.

So the Puzzle takes the luck out. All 25 cards start on the grid, face up. Tap one to pick it up, tap another to swap them, and keep going until the ten lines make the target. The Daily puzzle is the same cards and the same target for everyone that day.

Every puzzle can be solved. Before it reaches you, Pip arranges the same 25 cards itself and keeps its grid. The target is 90% of what that grid scored, rounded down to a five. So a grid that makes the target exists, and Pip has already seen it. You get one star at 60% of the target, two at 80%, and three when you make it.

It swaps two cards at random and keeps the swap if the score went up. Sometimes it keeps a swap that made things worse, which sounds wrong but stops it settling on a grid that only looks finished. It does that less and less as it goes, and runs through the whole thing three times. The method is called simulated annealing, after the way metal is cooled slowly so it sets without weak spots.

That does not find the best grid there is. It finds a good one, quickly, on a phone.

We dealt every Daily puzzle from 1 January to 31 December 2027, which is possible because each day’s cards come from its date. Then we ran a second search on each one, the same method with more than five times as many swaps and a different seed.

The longer search beat Pip’s grid on 178 of the 365 days, by between 1 and 36 points. It fell short of Pip’s grid on 11. So Pip’s grid is often not the best one, and the target is 90% of a good grid rather than a perfect one. That is on purpose. Matching the best grid exactly would be a chore. Ninety per cent of a good one takes some thought and gets finished.

Over the year, the cards as they first lie on the grid scored 0 to 47 (half the days 13 or less). Pip’s grids scored 140 to 370, and the targets ran from 125 to 330, with half the days at 185 or less.

Poker Solitaire is one of the quick games, dealt one at a time or as the Puzzle. The quick games come with the membership, and without it you get one free round of each a day. Your best is yours alone. There is no leaderboard, and nothing touches your Roll.

The rules and the scoring table are src/lib/quick/solitaire.ts, and the puzzle, the target and Pip’s search are src/lib/quick/solitairePuzzle.ts. The year of Daily puzzles and the longer search are scripts/solitaire-targets.ts, run on 10 November 2026. The scoring table and the stars on this page come from the code at build time. The other figures are from that run, and the same dates give the same cards, so anyone can run it again.