Poker Solitaire Games

• Repeat Poker
• Drop Down Solitaire Poker

Repeat Poker

Contributed by Pramod Mulay

This is a solitaire game in which the player tries to score as many points as possible by creating poker hands from cards dealt from the deck. Repeat Poker can be played using a normal 52 card deck. It has similarities to Poker Solitaire or Poker Patience, with extra opportunities for strategy and memory.

Cards are drawn from the deck and laid out in a 5×5 grid, as in the diagram. Each completed 5-card row (not column) is evaluated as a poker hand. If a row contains a poker combination (Three of a kind, Two pair, etc), points are scored. See the ranking of poker hands page for definitions of the hands. The playing process is as follows:

1. Start with a stack of full deck, 52, shuffled cards (face down)
2. Draw the top card from the deck, look at it and place it in any of the 5 rows
3. As you place cards, try to form Poker Hands (Straight, Flush, Full-House, Pair, etc)
4. After a hand is complete (all 5 cards placed), check for the highest Poker Hand it contains.
5. Note down the points gained for that Poker hand, according to the reference table below.
6. Remove the poker hand cards from the row, but not the kickers, which remain. So you remove the 2 cards of a pair, the 3 cards of three of a kind, the 4 cards forming 2 pairs of 4 of a kind, and all 5 cards in other cases. Example: If the hand was a pair, remove those two cards that form the pair and keep the rest as is. If the hand was a flush, remove all 5 cards to make the row empty.
7. Continue steps 2-6 with the rest of the cards in the deck
8. Game Over: After you have placed all 52 cards in the deck, that level is over. Total the points you gained during this level.
9. Aim Of the Game: Score as many points as you can.
10. Next Level: Once you have completed the first level, make the game tougher by now placing the newly shuffled, full deck of 52 cards, within just 4 rows (instead of 5). The third level would have three rows, and so on. Keep in mind, as you go through various levels that your earlier strategies may not work with fewer rows.

Reference table: Poker Hand Points

Royal flush	1000
Straight flush	750
Four of a kind	500
Full house	250
Flush	200
Straight	150
Three of a kind	100
Two pairs	50
One pair	20

Drop Down Solitaire Poker

This variant of Repeat Poker was contributed by Ben Rushing . It is played with a 53-card deck: a standard French-suited 52-card deck with 1 Joker card included. 

At the start the cards are shuffled and dealt to create a reserve with 3 columns of 13 cards and one of 14 cards. Instead of drawing the top card of the deck the player takes a card from the bottom of one of the four reserve columns and moves it to the 5×5 grid of scoring hands, which begins empty. In the grid, each column must be filled from the bottom upwards, no cards are removed, and the play ends when when the grid has been filled with 25 cards.

There are 6 different ways to deal the reserve, providing different amounts of information to the player by dealing some of the cards face up.

1. The last card of each column is turned face up.
2. The last two cards of each column are turned face up.
3. The last three cards of each column are turned face up.
4. The last four cards of each column are turned face up.
5. All cards of each column are turned face up. 
6. All cards are left face down.

The player can choose which version to use, or select one at random by rolling a 6-sided die.

A move consists of taking one card from the bottom of one of the four reserve columns and playing it face up in the lowest empty space in one of the grid columns - this can be thought of as similar to the way O's and X's are played in Connect Four - 'gravity' causes the card to fall as far as possible towards the bottom of the grid.

A card that has been played to the grid remains in place and cannot be moved. Once a column or a row of the grid contains 5 cards, no further cards can be added to it.

If the card taken from the reserve was face up, then after it has been placed in the grid the lowest face down card remaining in the column (if any) is turned face up, thus preserving the number of face up cards at the bottom of the column. (This does not apply in versions 5 and 6 where the whole reserve is either face up or face down).

If an entire column from the reserve has been used, no further cards can be played from that column, and from that point on the player has only three reserve cards to choose from.

When 25 cards have been played to the grid (leaving 28 unplayed cards in the reserve) the grid is scored as twelve 5-card poker hands: the five rows, the five columns and the two long diagonals. The scores for each hand are as follows:

Royal straight flush	30 points
Five of a kind	28 points
Straight flush	24 points
Four of a kind	20 points
Full house	18 points
Flush	14 points
Straight	10 points
Three of a kind	8 points
Two pairs	4 points
One pair	2 points

The 12 scores are added up to give the player's total score for the game. Players may like to record these scores and see whether they can beat their previous scores.