Solitaire Win Rates: All 17 Variants Ranked (A Data Study)

Two solitaire games can sit a single menu click apart and be separated by a factor of fifty. FreeCell is solvable 99.99% of the time. Pyramid, under classic rules, is winnable less than 2% of the time. We pulled the win-rate data for 17 variants into one chart — and then went a step further: by comparing what a perfect player could win against what a real player actually wins, you can measure exactly how much each game rewards skill versus luck. That gap turns out to be the most interesting number in solitaire.

The Chart: 17 Variants, Ranked

Every bar below is the practical win rate — what a typical human player actually wins, not the theoretical ceiling. Colour is the difficulty tier. It is, as far as we can tell, the single most lopsided chart in casual gaming: the top bar is forty-five times longer than the bottom one.

The shape tells a story. There is no smooth curve — instead there are clear bands. A cluster of genuinely winnable games up top (FreeCell, 1-suit Spider, TriPeaks), a broad middle where most classics live (Klondike, Yukon, Golf), and a long, grim tail of games that were often designed to be nearly unwinnable (Forty Thieves, La Belle Lucie, Pyramid).

Why Every Game Has Two Win Rates

You cannot talk about a solitaire win rate without saying whose win rate. There are two, and they can differ by seventy percentage points:

1. Theoretical win rate — the share of deals a flawless player with full information could win. It is a fixed mathematical property of the shuffle, measured by exhaustive computer solvers.
2. Practical win rate — the share a real person wins, complete with missed lines, dead ends, and hidden cards. It is always lower, and the size of the shortfall is where the game actually lives.

The Skill Gap: A Way to Measure Skill vs Luck

Here is the idea that makes the data interesting. Subtract the practical rate from the theoretical rate and you get the skill gap — the room between how a deal could end and how it usually does. A wide gap means the deal is often winnable and humans keep fumbling it: skill decides the outcome. A near-zero gap means once the cards are down, the result is essentially fixed: luck decides it.

*FreeCell's gap is small for the opposite reason to Pyramid's: almost every deal is winnable, so there is little luck left to remove — the only thing standing between you and a win is your own play. A small gap can mean "pure skill" (FreeCell) or "pure luck" (Pyramid). You have to read it alongside the win rate itself.

The win rate tells you how often you'll win. The skill gap tells you whether winning was up to you.

Reading the Tiers

The winnable top (FreeCell, 1-Suit Spider, TriPeaks)

These are the games to play when you want to actually finish. FreeCell is the purest: every card is face-up from the first move, only one deal in the first 32,000 (#11,982) is provably unsolvable, and a careful player clears the large majority. If you lose at FreeCell, the deal almost never gets to take the blame.

The honest middle (Klondike, Yukon, Golf, 2-Suit Spider)

This is where most people's idea of "solitaire" sits. Klondike Turn 1 at roughly 40% is the archetype — winnable often enough to feel fair, hard often enough to matter. Yukon trades the stock pile for a fully dealt board and rewards players who plan several moves deep.

The brutal tail (Forty Thieves, La Belle Lucie, Pyramid)

Several of these games are old casino games, and it shows. Canfield was sold by the card and paid out by the card at a ruinous house edge; Forty Thieves uses two decks, strict same-suit building, and a single pass through the stock. Pyramid sits at the bottom because most deals are simply impossible — the pairs that sum to 13 are buried out of reach before you make a move.

The Luck-to-Skill Spectrum

Put the two ideas together — win rate and skill gap — and every variant lands somewhere on a single line, from "the deal decides" to "you decide."

Which Game Should You Play?

Methodology & Sources

Theoretical rates are drawn from published solver work and exhaustive deal analyses (notably large-scale Klondike solvability studies and FreeCell's well-documented solvability of the standard 32,000 Microsoft deals). Practical rates are best-estimate ranges for experienced human players, compiled from simulation studies and large samples of recorded play. Solitaire win rates vary with exact rules (redeal limits, draw count, empty-column rules), so every figure here is a representative range, not a single authoritative constant. Where a precise figure is unknown, we give the consensus band rather than invent precision.

Want the rules and strategy behind any of these numbers? Each game on Mr. Solitaire has its own full guide — and you can test these win rates yourself, free, with no download.