Solitaire Scoring Explained: Standard and Vegas Rules

Solitaire scoring comes from Windows Solitaire, which offers two systems. Standard scoring pays for moves: 10 points for each card you put on a foundation, 5 for each card from the waste to the tableau, 5 for turning over a face-down card, minus 15 for taking a card back off a foundation, and a penalty for going through the deck too often. Vegas scoring is a bet: you pay $52 for the deck and win $5 for every card on the foundations, so you need 11 cards just to come out ahead.

Poozee's Solitaire doesn't keep score (it counts moves and time), so we wrote both systems as code, checked every rule against the sources below, and had a program play 20,000 deals in Draw 1 and Draw 3 to see what the scores look like and which habits raise them.

Standard scoring, rule by rule

Your score starts at 0 and never goes below 0: a penalty you take at zero costs nothing.

Where these come from:

• The help file that came with Windows Solitaire (Keeping Score, mirrored at documentation.help) lists the 10 points per card to a suit stack, the 5 per card from the deck to a row stack, the minus 15, and the pass penalties: 20 points per pass after three passes in Draw Three, 100 per pass after one pass in Draw One.
• Microsoft's support note KB101766, written for Windows 3.0 to 3.11, gives the same 5 and 10 points and the bonus of 700,000 divided by the seconds for games longer than 30 seconds.
• The help file doesn't list the 5 points for turning over a card. Wikipedia's Klondike article and online-solitaire.com, which uses the Windows values, both do.
• The 2 points off every 10 seconds is in Woody Leonhard's Windows 7 All-in-One For Dummies and Giant Bomb's Solitaire page. Giant Bomb and Wikipedia both give 0 as the lowest score.

Versions differ most on the stock penalty. solitaire.com's scoring guide, for example, lists 100 points off for every redeal in Draw 3, where Windows charges 20 and only after the third pass. We found no official description of how Microsoft Solitaire Collection (the version in Windows 10 and 11) scores Klondike, so this guide sticks to the documented classic rules.

The most a game can score

Without the timer, a won game can earn at most 745 points from moves: 520 for putting all 52 cards on the foundations, 105 for turning over all 21 face-down cards, and 120 for playing all 24 stock cards through the tableau first. The best score in all of our test games below was 735.

With the timer on, the bonus for a win dwarfs all of that:

Any win in under 15 minutes earns a bonus bigger than the 745 points you can get from moves, so in a timed game winning, and winning fast, matters far more than any single move.

Vegas scoring

Vegas turns the game into a bet with play money:

• You pay a $52 ante for each deal and win $5 for each card you move to a foundation (help file).
• There is no timer penalty or bonus (help file).
• You get one pass through the stock in Draw 1 and three passes in Draw 3; then the game is over (Leonhard's Dummies article and Giant Bomb).
• The Keep Score option carries your total from game to game (help file), which is what people call cumulative Vegas.

Ten cards on the foundations pay $50, so you are still $2 down. Eleven cards pay $55: that's the break-even point. A win pays $260, a profit of $208. The sources don't say what happens to your money when you take a card back off a foundation, so in our measurements a Vegas game is paid for the cards on the foundations when it ends.

A worked example: scoring the start of a deal

Here are the first 14 plays of deal 12 in our test set, played in Draw 1 by following the game's Hint, and scored by the same code as everything else in this guide. Draws in a row share one line, and columns are numbered 1 to 7 from the left:

Moves that send a card home and turn over the card beneath it are the best value in the game, 15 points each. Drawing never scores, and moving cards between columns only scores when it turns a card over.

The rest of the deal shows the trade-off at the heart of Standard scoring. After one pass through the stock the program had 8 cards on the foundations and 210 points; as a Vegas game that's 8 × $5 - $52 = -$12. Going through the stock twice more got 16 cards home (worth +$28 in Vegas money, if Vegas allowed the extra passes), but the two passes cost 200 points and the Standard score fell to 105.

What 20,000 deals score

We dealt games 1 to 20,000 with Poozee's solitaire engine and had a program play each one by following the game's Hint button: send any card it can to a foundation, then make moves that turn over a card, then play the waste card onto the tableau, then draw. It never undoes, never takes a card back off a foundation and never peeks at face-down cards. It stops when the passes run out, or when a pass would only repeat the last one. It's a simple, consistent player, so read these as a baseline, not as what a strong player scores.

First, under the classic pass limits: one pass in Draw 1 and three in Draw 3. That's the Vegas rule, and it's also exactly where Standard passes start to cost points.

Vegas is a losing bet for a basic player. Only about one game in six (Draw 1) or nine (Draw 3) got the 11 cards needed to make money, and the average loss was $16.83 and $23.03 a game. With Keep Score on, that's a running total about $1,683 or $2,303 lower every 100 games.

Then with no limit on passes, the way Poozee's Solitaire plays:

Extra passes nearly doubled the cards home in Draw 1, and with unlimited passes a Vegas player would come out ahead in 40.7% of games and make money on average. That's why Vegas limits the passes. Under Standard scoring the same passes are ruinous in Draw 1: at 100 points each, almost two games in three ended at 0.

Where the points come from

Average points per game, by source, under the classic pass limits:

Cards sent home earn about half the points; the other half comes from turning cards over and playing from the waste. With unlimited passes in Draw 1, the passes cost 237.8 points a game on paper, almost all of the 248.7 the program earned from moves. The floor at zero handed back 59.0 points a game, which is why the average was 69.9 and not 10.9.

How to get a higher solitaire score

We played the same 20,000 deals again with one habit added at a time.

1. Put waste cards on the tableau before the foundation. If a waste card can go to its foundation but also fits on a column, play it to the column first and send it up from there: 5 + 10 points instead of 10. It added 6.0 points a game in Draw 1 and 4.6 in Draw 3 (one and three passes) and didn't change how a single game ended, because the card goes up on the next foundation play anyway.
2. In Draw 1, stop when another pass would cost 100. Stopping after the first pass averaged 148.7 points against 69.9 for going round again and again. The catch is wins: the program won 61 games stopping and 1,809 going on. Untimed, stop unless you can see a win. Timed, a win's bonus is 1,000 points even at 11:40, the cost of ten extra passes, so keep going on a deal you think you can finish.
3. In Draw 3, extra passes are cheap. At 20 points each, going on past three passes cost only 3.7 points a game on average (123.2 against 126.9) and won 360 games instead of 150.
4. Take a card back from a foundation when you're stuck, if that lets the waste card or a card covering a face-down card move onto it. It costs 15 points, but with unlimited passes in Draw 1 it won 342 more games (2,151 instead of 1,809), and was worth +3.9 Standard points and +$2.78 a game. Under Vegas pass limits it barely mattered: +$0.04 a game in Draw 1, too small to tell from chance, and +$0.22 in Draw 3.

For the moves that win more games in the first place, see our guide on how to win solitaire, and for why Draw 3 scores and wins less, Draw 1 vs Draw 3 solitaire.

Keep playing

Play Solitaire on Poozee in Draw 1 or Draw 3, with unlimited passes, Undo and Hint, and try to beat your best time. If you're new to Klondike, start with how to play solitaire, and if a deal won't come out, are all solitaire games winnable explains why some can't.