Home › Guides › Are deals winnable?

Is every solitaire deal winnable? The published numbers, game by game

By Gleb Tkatchouk · last updated 2026-10-03

No: some deals cannot be won whatever you do, and how many depends on the game and on its exact rules. This page collects figures published by researchers and solver authors, with their sources. Each figure belongs to the rules named in its row; Decks's rules differ in places (noted below), so treat the numbers as a guide, not as a promise about any deal in any app.

Game	Rules the figure is for	Share of deals that can be won	Source
Klondike, draw one	standard rules, every card's position known	about 90.5% (±0.1)	Blake & Gent, "Solving Klondike" (arXiv 1906.12314; JAIR 2026)
Klondike, draw three	same	about 81.9% (±0.1)	same
FreeCell	the 8.6 billion FreeCell Pro deals	all but 102,075 — about 1 deal in 84,000 is impossible	Pringle & Fish (2018), reported in Wikipedia's FreeCell article
Spider, four suits	PySolFC deals 1 to 65,000	64,998 won (99.997%)	Alex Robinson, plspider (tranzoa.net/alex/plspider.htm)
Black Hole	ace of spades in the hole, king and ace neighbours	87.0% (869,979 of 1,000,000)	Politaire
Golf	queens may go on kings, no wrap from king to ace	45.1% of 100,000	Politaire ("Golf-B")

Play it on iPhone — no ads, no account, works offline. Free to download; daily game limit without Premium.

Scan with your phone to install

What the numbers mean

"Winnable" here means a solver, which can see every card, found a win. A real player cannot see face-down cards, so the share you win is lower — often much lower — than the share that can be won. For Klondike the two published figures are a ceiling for draw-one and draw-three play.

Where Decks differs

Decks deals Klondike one card at a time and lets the stock be redealt five times; its five levels also change the number of columns, so the Klondike figures are indicative only. In Black Hole, Decks starts the game with a random card in the hole, where Parlett's original uses the ace of spades. In Golf, Decks uses the rule set of the "Golf-B" row. Decks does not promise that any particular deal can be won.

FreeCell is the exception

FreeCell is the one popular solitaire where nearly every deal can be won: of the original 32,000 Microsoft deals only No. 11982 is impossible, and in the 2018 study above about one deal in 84,000 was.

Spider

With four suits Spider looks hopeless and is not: plspider has won all but two of the first 65,000 PySolFC deals, and Robinson estimates about one deal in 40,000 is unwinnable. See the Spider page for what changes between one, two and four suits.

Games not in the table

Pyramid, TriPeaks and Spanish Solitaire are not listed: we do not print a figure we could not check against a published source. To compare variants by rules rather than solver figures, see Which solitaire to play.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of solitaire games are winnable? It depends on the game and the rules: about 90% for draw-one Klondike with every card known, about 82% for draw-three, 87% for Black Hole, and nearly all for FreeCell and four-suit Spider.

Is every game of Klondike winnable? No. Some deals are impossible from the start.

Are unwinnable FreeCell games real? Yes, but rare: deal 11982 of the original Microsoft set is the famous one.

Does Decks guarantee a winnable deal? No.