How often do people win at solitaire? What 16 million games show
Data
Since April 2024, people have finished 16.4 million games on Solitaire Land. Here is what they tell us about each game: how often it is won, how long a win takes, and whether a loss is bad luck or a missed move.
Ask how often people win at solitaire and you get guesses. Articles online put Spider 2 suits anywhere between 20% and 80%. We don't have to guess: every game on Solitaire Land sends us its result, so we can count. These numbers cover 16,401,085 finished games, from April 2024 to October 2026, and 8,487,517 of them were won, a little over half.
Win rates, game by game
The table covers every game with at least 25,000 finished games. The typical winning time is the median: half of the wins are faster, half are slower. Deals won at least once looks at random deals that were played at least five times, and counts how many of them somebody has won.
| Game | Games played | Win rate | Typical winning time | Deals won at least once |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spider Solitaire 1 Suit | 840,474 | 79.6% | 5:00 | 100.0% |
| FreeCell Solitaire | 6,350,987 | 70.3% | 2:59 | 99.9% |
| Tripeaks Solitaire | 28,064 | 58.7% | 1:11 | 94.2% |
| Klondike Solitaire 1 Card | 4,419,902 | 46.2% | 3:06 | 85.7% |
| Spider Solitaire 2 Suits | 1,841,166 | 37.1% | 8:05 | 98.4% |
| Yukon Solitaire | 252,779 | 27.5% | 3:49 | 66.9% |
| Alaska Solitaire | 87,715 | 24.6% | 2:46 | 40.0% |
| Scorpion Solitaire | 48,687 | 23.1% | 3:06 | 49.1% |
| Russian Solitaire | 497,520 | 22.3% | 2:41 | 7.4% |
| Klondike Solitaire 3 Cards | 718,615 | 20.4% | 2:55 | 53.6% |
| Spider Solitaire 4 Suits | 1,273,799 | 18.4% | 16:07 | 95.4% |
The easiest game here is Spider 1 suit, won four times out of five. The hardest is Spider 4 suits, won less than one time in five. The two most played games, FreeCell and Klondike, sit in the middle.
Klondike: turning three cards halves your chances
Klondike is the game most people simply call solitaire. With one card turned from the stock at a time, players win 46.2% of their games. With three cards at a time, they win 20.4%. That is the same layout and the same rules, only the stock changes, and the win rate falls by more than half.
The deals show why. 85.7% of the one-card deals have been won by someone, but only 53.6% of the three-card deals. When you turn three cards and can only play the top one, some cards stay out of reach for the whole game, however well you play. If you are learning Klondike, start with 1 card and move to 3 cards when one card feels too easy.
FreeCell: almost every deal can be won
FreeCell players win 70.3% of their games. But look at the deals: of the 37,210 random deals that were played at least five times, 37,185 have been won by somebody. That is 99.9%. FreeCell is known for this. In the famous set of 32,000 deals that came with Windows, only one, number 11982, is thought to be impossible.
So when a FreeCell game is lost, it is almost never the deal's fault. The usual reason is filling the free cells too early. Undo, empty a cell, and try again: there is very probably a way through.
Spider: the more suits, the longer and harder
Spider uses the same rules with one, two or four suits. The numbers change a lot:
- 1 suit: 79.6% won, a typical win takes 5:00 and 128 moves.
- 2 suits: 37.1% won, 8:05 and 167 moves.
- 4 suits: 18.4% won, 16:07 and 309 moves.
The surprise is in the last column of the table. 95.4% of the four-suit deals that were played at least five times have been won by someone. So four-suit Spider is not mostly luck. It is long, and every mixed column makes the next moves harder, but nearly every deal has a way out. Patience and undo do most of the work.
Russian Solitaire: the hardest to crack
Russian Solitaire looks like Klondike with every card dealt at the start, but you build down in the same suit instead of alternating colours. Players win 22.3% of their games, close to Spider 4 suits. The deals tell a stronger story: of the random deals played at least five times, only 7.4% have ever been won. Compare that with 95.4% for Spider 4 suits. In Russian Solitaire, many deals simply have no way through, or a way so narrow that nobody has found it yet.
Short games and long games
A typical TriPeaks win takes 1:11, a FreeCell win just under three minutes, a Klondike win about three. At the other end, a four-suit Spider win takes 16 minutes. If you have a five-minute break, the table above is a good menu.
How we counted
- A game counts once at least one move has been made, and only when it is finished: won, given up, or stuck with no moves left. Games closed halfway are left out, so the win rates are not pushed down by people who just looked at a deal.
- The win rate is games won divided by games finished.
- The typical winning time and moves are medians of the won games.
- "Deals won at least once" only looks at random deals that were played five times or more, so that a deal nobody has won has really been tried.
- Every game page shows these numbers for that game, updated every day. These figures are from 14 October 2026.
In short
- About half of all solitaire games are won: 8.5 of 16.4 million.
- Easiest: Spider Solitaire 1 Suit (80% won) and FreeCell Solitaire (70%). Hardest: Spider Solitaire 4 Suits (18%), Klondike Solitaire 3 Cards (20%) and Russian Solitaire (22%).
- In Klondike, turning three cards instead of one cuts your chances by more than half (46% to 20%), and makes many more deals impossible.
- A lost FreeCell or Spider game is almost never the deal's fault: 99.9% of FreeCell deals and 95% of four-suit Spider deals have been won by someone. Undo and try another way.
- A lost Russian Solitaire game often is: only 7% of its deals have ever been won.
Want to see where you stand? Pick a game, play a few rounds, and compare your own statistics with these numbers. Every game page shows them, updated every day.
