Is Solitaire Winnable?
Most solitaire deals can be won, but not every one. Some shuffles are lost before you touch a card, and plenty of the winnable ones are hard to win when half the cards are face down. Here is what the research says and how this site makes sure a Winnable deal really has a way through.
The short answer
Klondike is the game almost everyone means by solitaire, so start there. If you could see every card and never put a foot wrong, you would win about 9 deals in 10 at Turn 1 and a little over 8 in 10 at Turn 3. The rest cannot be won by anyone, down any line of play, because the shuffle has locked them before the first move. So solitaire is usually winnable, though not always, and no amount of skill rescues a deal that was lost in the shuffle. If you are still learning the moves, the how to play guide covers them first.
What the research found
For a long time nobody knew the exact share. You would expect a game this old and this plain to have a settled answer, but counting the winnable deals means searching an enormous number of possible games. The Stanford probabilist Persi Diaconis has called the missing number one of the embarrassments of applied probability.
The best figures now come from Charlie Blake and Ian Gent, whose study The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games was first posted in 2019 and published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research in 2026. Their program played huge samples of random deals with unlimited passes through the stock and found 81.945% ± 0.084% winnable at Turn 3 and 90.480% ± 0.116% at Turn 1. A 2025 follow-up from the same research group, Constraint Models for Klondike, tightened those to 81.942% ± 0.080% and 90.454% ± 0.090%.
There is a catch. The program knows where all 52 cards are, including the face down ones. You don't. A sensible move made without that knowledge can lead away from the only win the deal had, so a real player's win rate sits well below these numbers. Losing a winnable deal is normal, and it rarely means you missed something obvious.
The same study covers other games too. FreeCell comes out at 99.999%, which is why a lost FreeCell deal is nearly always down to the player. Black Hole is about 87% and Golf, played without the King to Ace wrap, about 45%.
Why some deals cannot be won at all
A dead deal rarely looks dead at the start. The usual cause is a card that everything depends on, trapped under cards that in turn depend on it. Picture a black 2 you need early, buried deep in the seventh column, while the only cards that could clear the pile above it are themselves stuck until that 2 is on its foundation. The deal has tied itself in a knot that no order of moves can undo. A buried King with nowhere to go can look like the same problem, but often it isn't: a different order of play may still open a column for it.
Turn 1, Turn 3 and why the draw changes the odds
At Turn 1 every stock card comes up on every pass, so nothing in the stock is out of reach. At Turn 3 the cards come off in groups of three and only the top one of each group can be played. Play a waste card and the groups shift on the next pass, which can bring a stuck card within reach. Play nothing and the next pass shows you exactly the same cards. That accounts for most of the gap between the two figures above. Pass limits widen it further, which is why Vegas scoring, with its limited passes, is harder again.
How we check that a deal can be won
When you play a Winnable deal here, you are playing a shuffle that has already been won once. The check happens before the deal ever reaches you, in three steps:
- A computer plays the deal with every card turned up, searching through possible moves until it finds one complete game that ends with all the cards on the foundations.
- That winning game is then played back move by move from the very first card, under exactly the rules the game on the site uses. If any move is illegal or the board does not end fully cleared, the deal is thrown out.
- Deals that pass are kept with their winning moves and sorted into Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert.
What that promises is simple: the starting position can be won. It does not promise that every position after it can. One careless move can turn a winnable game into a lost one, and the solution we found is rarely the only one. A Random deal is a fresh shuffle with no check at all, so it may or may not have a solution.
What the Is it winnable? button tells you
Press Is it winnable? during a game and the panel compares your moves with the known solution. If you are still following it, the panel says how many moves remain. From there Show next move gives you one step of the solution and Play it out finishes the game for you. A win after Show next move is recorded as Assisted. A game finished by Play it out counts as practice, so it does not add a win or extend your streak.
Once your moves differ from the known solution, the game is not lost. You have simply taken a different path. In Klondike the panel then runs a quick search from your current position. It may find a way to finish, it may find that no finish exists, or it may run out of time, which tells you nothing either way. In the other games the panel tells you that you have left the known solution, and you can keep playing, step back with Undo or restart the deal.
Knowing a deal has a solution changes how you play it. When you lose, you know the cards were not against you, so it is worth going back to find the choice that went wrong.
Telling a live game from a lost one
A stalled board is a reason to look again. Check whether you can shift a run from one column to another, whether taking a card back down from a foundation would help and whether playing a waste card would shift the Turn 3 groups. If a whole pass through the stock changes nothing, use Undo to go back to your last real choice and try the other branch. The Klondike strategy guide goes through these checks in more detail.
See the limits for yourself
Two short exercises show two different ways a game runs out of options. The Turn 3 stock exercise shows why some stock cards stay out of reach. The FreeCell exercise shows a game where every card is visible and the limit is how many cards you can move at once.
Common questions
Are all solitaire games winnable?
No. Under standard Klondike rules roughly 1 deal in 10 at Turn 1, and nearly 1 in 5 at Turn 3, cannot be won even with perfect play. Every Winnable deal on this site has a known solution from the start.
What percentage of solitaire games are winnable?
About 90% at Turn 1 and about 82% at Turn 3, according to Blake and Gent's study. Those figures assume a player who knows where every card is and has unlimited passes, so treat them as a ceiling. Anyone playing with face down cards will win fewer.
Is Turn 3 harder to win than Turn 1?
Yes. Fewer stock cards are playable at any moment, and some can stay stuck in their group pass after pass. With perfect knowledge the difference is roughly 90% against 82%, and pass limits widen it.
Can a deal be unwinnable even if I play perfectly?
Yes. Some shuffles have no solution at all, so flawless play still loses them. That is different from a winnable deal you stalled through an earlier choice, where Undo or a restart can still find the win.