Solitaire Turn 3: how much do three-card draws cost you?
Click the stock and three cards flip onto the waste. You may play the top one. The two beneath it wait, and if the top card has nowhere to go, all three slide past you until the next lap. That is the whole of Solitaire Turn 3, the Klondike game on this page, and it changes your odds more than any other single setting in solitaire.
We wanted a number, not a feeling, so we played the same 10,000 numbered deals twice with a simple program that sees only the face-up cards and never undoes a move. Drawing one card at a time, it won 42.3% of them (95% range 41.3%–43.3%). Drawing three, on exactly the same deals, it won 10.6% (10.0%–11.2%). Same layout, same seven columns, same program: roughly one win in ten instead of four in ten.
solitaire-turn-3.com is built around that gap. Below you will find what Turn 3 does to a perfect player, to the stock, and to the length of a game, and then how much the draw and stock rules matter in every other game on the site.
Turn 3 against Turn 1, figure by figure
| What we measured | Turn 1 (draw one) | Turn 3 (this page) | Deals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple program, no look-ahead, no undo: won | 42.3% (41.3–43.3%) | 10.6% (10.0–11.2%) | 10,000 each |
| Solver that sees every card: found a win | 76.6% (73.9–79.1%) | 66.2% (63.2–69.1%) | 1,000 each |
| Solver: proved no win exists | 2.1% (1.4–3.2%) | 9.5% (7.8–11.5%) | 1,000 each |
| Solver: ran out of search before deciding | 21.3% (18.9–24.0%) | 24.3% (21.7–27.1%) | 1,000 each |
| Laps of the stock in a won game | 2.34 (2.32–2.36) | 3.81 (3.73–3.90) | 4,229 / 1,063 wins |
| Moves in a won game, draws included | 126.2 (125.9–126.4) | 111.2 (110.5–111.8) | 4,229 / 1,063 wins |
| Published winnable share (Blake and Gent, 2026) | 90.48% (±0.12) | 81.95% (±0.08) | their sample |
Read the rows as a floor and a ceiling. The simple program is the floor: a patient human with Undo will beat 10.6%. The solver is the ceiling: it knows where every hidden card is, which you never do. Somewhere between 66.2% and 90.5% of Turn 3 deals can be won with perfect knowledge; the program found a win in about a tenth of them.
Two rows surprise people. First, a won Turn 3 game is shorter, about 111 moves against 126. Winning Turn 3 deals tend to be the ones where the cards fall kindly, so there is less to untangle. Second, the laps go up, from 2.34 to 3.81: you spend far more time cycling the stock to shift which card sits on top.
What Turn 3 does to the deal you are dealt
The deal itself is identical in both modes: 28 cards in seven columns, 21 of them face down, 24 in the stock. On average 1.60 of the four Aces start face down (1.59–1.62), and 88.0% of deals bury at least one (87.4–88.7%, 10,000 deals). In 8.6% of deals (8.1–9.2%) no face-up card can move at the start.
Buried Aces hurt a little in both modes. In Turn 3, the program won 12.3% of deals with no Ace face down (10.6–14.3%, 1,196 deals) and 10.1% of deals with two or more (9.4–11.0%, 5,333 deals). In Turn 1 the same split was 44.5% against 41.6%. The ranges are close; the draw rule moves your chances far more than the Aces do.
How many passes you are allowed would matter too, but we cannot give you a figure for Klondike: the site allows unlimited redeals in both modes, and we did not simulate a limit. The one pass-limit figure we have is for Pyramid, below.
How much the stock matters in every other game here
Stock turned more than once
- Klondike Turn 1: the other half of the table above. Real players on solitairex.io won 44.8% of 913,106 games.
- Solitaire Double: two decks, always draw one; the simple program won 81.5% (80.7–82.2%, 10,000 deals) using 2.69 laps per win. No Turn 3 version exists here, so we have no figure.
- Pyramid: the only measured pass limit. One pass: 7.3% solved (6.5–8.2%). Three passes, as on this site: 62.2% (60.6–63.6%), 4,000 deals, many undecided.
Stock used once, no redeal
Golf (92.7% winnable, 10,000 deals), Spider, Diplomat, Forty Thieves, East Haven and Scorpion. We did not vary their stock rules, so each page gives the figures for the rule as played.
No stock at all
FreeCell, FreeCell Two Decks, Baker's Solitaire, Eight Off, Yukon, Alaska, Flower Garden and Simple Simon. Here the deal is everything; no draw rule can work for or against you.
Playing Turn 3 better
Count the waste in threes
With 24 cards in the stock you see the 3rd, 6th, 9th and so on. Play one card off the waste and every later group shifts by one, bringing new cards to the top on the next lap.
Spend a lap on purpose
Winning games averaged 3.81 laps. A lap is not wasted if it changes which cards surface.
Turn over hidden cards first
21 cards start face down. Freeing them is worth more than tidying the waste.
Use Undo freely
The program that won 10.6% never undid a move. You can.
What you get when you play here
- Free play in any current browser on computer, tablet or phone, with no download and no account.
- Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play to finish a won game.
- A Draw 1 / Draw 3 toggle: switch to Turn 1 any time. /solitaire-draw-3 is this same game.
- Drag-and-drop or tap-to-move, zoom, fullscreen, sound on or off and a choice of table colors.
How we got these numbers
- Rules from the code: the Klondike rules were read from this site's own game files (Kings only in empty columns, unlimited redeals).
- Numbered deals: seeds 1–10,000 for the program, 1–1,000 for the solver, the same deals in both draw modes.
- Two players: a simple program with a fixed priority list, and a solver that sees every card and searches up to 150,000 positions per deal.
- 95% ranges: Wilson score intervals for percentages, normal intervals for averages. Compared with Blake and Gent (2026).
Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic, helped write the code and draft this page. It produced no figures; every number comes from running the code or from a linked source, and our team checked them.
Questions about Turn 3
Is every Turn 3 deal winnable?
No. The solver proved 9.5% of deals lost even with every card visible, against 2.1% in Turn 1.
Are these my odds?
No. You will land between the program's 10.6% and the solver's ceiling. Longer write-ups are on the blog; every game is on the games page.
By Admin, solitaire-turn-3.com (Forty Media). Research run September 2026.