How to Play Poker Solitaire

Solitaire is a time-honored cure for boredom and it can be played so many different ways you can entertain yourself for hours. If you're tired of Klondike, switch to Poker Solitaire. All you really need to play is knowledge of winning poker hands.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Deal 25 cards to the stock. Set the rest of the deck aside.
2. Place the cards from the stock onto a tableau five cards across and five cards down. Place the cards one at a time. Once a card is played it can't be moved.
3. Lay out the cards to create trying to create the ten best poker hands. The hands are counted from the five rows and the five columns. You can move as many as five cards to the waste pile, but once a card is moved to waste it can't be played until the remaining cards are in place.
4. When all 25 cards are played the game ends. Count the point value of each hand to calculate your score for the game.

Tips & Warnings

• The Hoyle scoring system is based on difficulty, not poker rules: royal flush (100), straight flush (60), four of a kind (30), straight (25), full house (20), three of a kind (15), flush (10), two pairs (5) and one pair (2).
• As with all Solitaire games, Poker Solitaire has a number of variations. The easiest variation allows you to deal the cards directly onto the tableau and rearrange them as often as you need to make the best ten hands.
• If you want more of a challenge, play without a waste pile.
• Since a hand with four of a kind contains one wasted card, you can discard a card that doesn't play in another hand in the final space.