FreeCell: no stock, no draw, nothing hidden
On solitaire-turn-3.com most of our attention goes to one rule: turning the stock three cards at a time. FreeCell is the game where that rule simply does not exist. All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns, there is no stock pile to turn, and four free cells sit in the corner as your only spare room. Nothing arrives late, nothing is buried under a group of three, and nothing depends on the order a pile gets turned.
That changes the odds completely. In Solitaire Turn 3, our simple bot won only 10.6% of 10,000 deals (95% range 10.0%–11.2%), against 42.3% at Turn 1, because the three-card draw keeps useful cards out of reach. In FreeCell our solver, working through 10,000 deals on this site's rules, found a win in 99.68% of them (99.55%–99.77%) and proved none impossible. When there is no draw to go against you, the deal and your planning are all that is left.
At a glance: FreeCell on this site
| Measure | Result | 95% range | Deals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solved (200,000 positions, then 1,000,000 for open deals) | 99.68% | 99.55–99.77% | 10,000 |
| Proven impossible | 0.00% | 0.00–0.04% | 10,000 |
| Still undecided after the second pass | 0.32% | 0.23–0.45% | 10,000 |
| Solved on the first pass only (200,000 positions) | 99.13% | 98.93–99.29% | 10,000 |
| At least one Ace playable at once | 48.95% | 47.97–49.93% | 10,000 |
| Length of the first solution found | 62.17 moves | 61.93–62.41 | 9,913 solved deals |
The solver sees every card, but in FreeCell so do you, so this is close to what a patient player with Undo can reach. The published figure for 4-cell FreeCell is 99.9989% winnable (Blake and Gent, 2026); ours is consistent, with our gap made up of undecided deals rather than lost ones.
Free cells do the job a stock does elsewhere
In Klondike the stock is your reserve: a place cards come from when the table is stuck. In FreeCell the free cells play that role, except you choose what goes in and when it comes out. That is why they matter so much. We ran 3,000 deals each with fewer cells:
| Free cells | Solved | Proven impossible | Undecided |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 (this site, 10,000 deals, first pass) | 99.13% (98.93–99.29%) | 0.00% (0.00–0.04%) | 0.87% (0.71–1.07%) |
| 3 | 96.03% (95.27–96.67%) | 0.97% (0.67–1.39%) | 3.00% (2.45–3.67%) |
| 2 | 74.00% (72.40–75.54%) | 20.20% (18.80–21.67%) | 5.80% (5.02–6.69%) |
| 1 | 17.37% (16.05–18.76%) | 79.57% (78.09–80.97%) | 3.07% (2.51–3.75%) |
| 0 | 0.20% (0.09–0.44%) | 99.73% (99.48–99.87%) | 0.07% (0.02–0.24%) |
Losing cells hurts FreeCell the way the three-card draw hurts Klondike: both take away access to cards you need. Each empty cell you keep is worth protecting.
FreeCell rules on this site
- Deal: 52 cards face up in eight columns (7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 6, 6).
- Free cells: four, each holding one card.
- Building: down in alternating colors on the columns; up by suit from Ace to King on the foundations.
- Empty columns: any card or valid run may go there.
- Moving runs: up to (empty cells + empty columns + 1) cards at once; this never changes what can be won.
- No stock: there is nothing to draw, turn or redeal.
Playing FreeCell well
Read the whole deal first
Every card is visible, so the first minute is free information. Find the Aces and 2s and note what sits on them.
Treat each cell as a loan
Park a card only when you can see how it will come back out. A full set of cells is the FreeCell version of a stock that won't give you the card you need.
An empty column beats an empty cell
A column can hold a whole run and doubles the size of runs you can move.
Don't rush cards home
A low card on the foundation can no longer hold a card of the other color. Play it up when it is not needed as a landing spot.
Use Undo freely
None of our 10,000 deals was proven impossible. If you jam, back up and try another line.
Turn 1, Turn 3 or no draw at all
For reference, here is what the draw rule does in Klondike on this site. Our simple bot, which sees only face-up cards and never undoes, won 42.3% of 10,000 Turn 1 deals (41.3%–43.3%) and 10.6% of 10,000 Turn 3 deals (10.0%–11.2%). In the games it did win, it went through the stock 2.34 times at Turn 1 and 3.81 times at Turn 3. FreeCell asks for none of that. There are no laps of a stock to make, so the time you would spend cycling cards goes into planning instead.
Without a stock, the chance a deal gives you is fixed the moment the cards land. Nothing you turn later can help or hurt, so every decision you make on the table counts for more.
Playing on solitaire-turn-3.com
FreeCell is free in any current browser on computer, tablet or phone, with no account. You get Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play, plus zoom, fullscreen, drag or tap moves, a counter for wins, time and moves, and sound and table-color settings. For the three-card challenge, go to Solitaire Turn 3; for the one-card version, Klondike.
How the figures were made
The solitaire-turn-3.com team ran these tests in September 2026 on this site's FreeCell rules, in Python 3.11 with the standard library only.
- Rules from the code: the move rules above, read from the game code of this site.
- Numbered deals: seeds 1 to 10,000 with four cells, 1 to 3,000 for 0–3 cells.
- Best-first solver: up to 200,000 positions per deal, then 1,000,000 for deals still open.
- Three outcomes: solved, proven impossible (whole search exhausted) or undecided.
- Cross-check: impossibility proofs were spot-checked by an independent brute-force search, and compared with Blake and Gent (2026).
- 95% ranges: Wilson score intervals for shares, normal intervals for averages.
Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic, helped write and review the code and draft this page. Every figure comes from running the code or from the linked study, and the team checked them.
FreeCell questions
Is every FreeCell deal winnable?
Almost. We proved none of 10,000 impossible; the published rate is 99.9989% winnable.
Does a draw rule matter here?
No. FreeCell has no stock, so there is no Turn 1 or Turn 3. The free cells are the rule that matters.
How does it compare with Solitaire Turn 3?
Our Turn 3 bot won 10.6% and the Turn 3 solver found wins in 66.2% of 1,000 deals, with 24.3% undecided. FreeCell is far more forgiving. More games are on the games page and the blog.
By Admin, solitaire-turn-3.com (Forty Media). Research run September 2026.