"I might have exhausted all my luck": Balatro God-King hits lucky streak so powerful that 1-in-1 billion odds don't even begin to describe it

The luckiest Balatro run I've ever seen was so fortunate that I can barely even write down just how good it truly was.

In a clip posted to Twitter last week, steamer Yahiamice said "I think I might've exhausted all my luck for the rest of the year." Starting at the very beginning of his Balatro run, he tells his chat "you're either a doubter or a winner, and today, we're doubting."

That doubt was short-lived, however, as he found a Stuntman joker on his very first pack, kicking off the run with very fortunate 0.5% odds.

Stuntman put Yahiamice in a great position. It limits hand size, but gives each played hand a massive 250 bonus chips, kicking off punchy High Card runs. Finding that right at the start of the game, was, to quote Yahiamice, "so good," granting more than 17,000 points from a single card off a single hand. That's thanks to playing on the Plasma Deck, which averages out a hands' Chips and Mult scores, meaning that all those bonus chips went even further than normal.

The run of good fortune continued. The problem with digging too deep into any one strategy in Balatro is that a particular boss might stop your run in its tracks. To help with that, Yahiamice picks up the Director's Cut voucher, which lets him re-roll a Boss Blind once, only to immediately find the Retcon upgrade, which lets him re-roll that Boss as many times as he likes, at odds of 6.25%.

There is a dip in that good fortune – Yahiamice finds the Blueprint joker, which would have copied the Stuntman's effect, but doesn't have enough money. Not long after that, however, his chances pick up. Opening up an Arcana pack, he decides to chance it on a Wheel of Fortune – a card that grants 1-in-4 odds of upgrading one of the player's Jokers.

Mathematically, those odds might be 25%, but anecdotally, they are not – in fact, players' experience of Wheel of Fortune were so unlucky that Balatro creator Localthunk had to come out to vouch for its odds.

Yahiamice didn't fall prey to that, however, claiming a very helpful Foil upgrade to elevate his Stuntman even further than before. But then the same thing happened on his next three Wheel of Fortunes – each time, those 25% odds delivered, and each time, they delivered the 33% chance of a Foul upgrade that the streamer was looking for. And in between, he finds the perfect Red Seal King card from their Certificate Joker, and use a Judgement Tarot card to pull out the Brainstorm Joker, which further buffed up their Stuntman start. By the time he reached the final round of Ante 8, he was able to hit the 200,000 score threshold with a single card.

If you're struggling to keep up, the good news is that Yahiamice has done most of the maths himself. The odds on that first Stuntman Joker were already 1-in-200. Getting the perfect result on four Wheel of Fortune pulls in a row offers odds of 1-in-5,000. Add to that the odds behind the Vouchers, the Red Seal King, and finding Brainstorm, and the streamer calculates odds of 0.00000000072%.

Now, I tried for some time to boil that down to an accessible number, and I think it means the chances were 72 in 100 billion, which I think comes to 1-in-1.3 billion odds of this whole thing coming together. Suffice to say, it might be one of the perfect Balatro runs, and if I were Yahiamice, I'd probably quit and find something new to play, because he's almost certainly peaked.

Hey, if he needs a new game, he should check out our list of the best roguelike games.