Balatro Basics 2: Tips for Early-Mid Antes (Signals, Pivoting, Build Orders) 

Y'all think you're being funny (and for sure it is, yeah), but the jokes on you. All this "engagement" is going to be great from the RU-vid algorithm.

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Hey, reminder that your fun to watch too! Yes, your tips are great, but your easy going vibe and sense of humor are why I keep coming back, not just the hopes to get better. Thanks for making your stuff

It’s so funny I watched hours of runs and thought I understood the game, then finally played and never got past ante 3, then started watching this series and won 3 runs in 2 days….bravo

I play Balatro on my laptop while watching your videos on my desktop. we have the technology!

I'm a somewhat competent player already, but your commentary is impressively articulate and thoughtful, you explain just about everything instead of leaving aside things you'd take for granted with your knowledge base. Good stuff!

idk what you do outside of youtube but you have a real talent for teaching. wish my university lecturers were more like you.

I am an actual human being who is thoroughly enamoured of your Balatro playstyle and enjoy hearing your thinking process. That being said, educational video this is, helpful wow, now I'm watch going to videos your now other all.

Really been enjoying these. I've got about 60 hours played now and have almost beaten all the green stakes. While I feel reasonably confident and already knew quite a few of the concepts presented here, just watching these first two videos has really helped condense my knowledge and exopand my understanding. You've really helped me get a better lid on the chips/mult equation, and perhaps more so how you think about the joker value and just picking up what you need and saving for economy rather than just gtabbing anything to hand.

1:05:00 Thanks for demonstrating the order the jokers trigger here, I didn't know photograph could be used like that.

Wow, this is helpful this is educational. I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Not only are your videos exceptionally educative and helpful, they are also so relaxing. I absolutely love listening to your thorough analysis of game mechanics and approach to strategy and tactics. You are the best "game teacher" I have ever seen! Thank you very much for your dedication. Plz continue your work! Thank you Bro.

I love how the answer to the first blind is +42 chips for flush to one-shot Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Yo thanks for all the tips btw. Finally bought the game and already got my first 1.5 mil hand. Feel like I'm missing out on so many good jokers though. Everything I get is so mediocre

Advice I would give based on your gameplay: I would have bought the hermit shop one, and hold for doubling 10~17 gold on the next round, or next next round. Hallucination is fine but I don't think its very good, not compared to pay 3 get 10 gold. Though it seems like you're trying to teach general principles that you can get past the first couple of fights quite easily. Hand 2, you're trying to teach, again like previous example hard to say, but the optimal play is 3 10s 2 6s, and then search for the spade flush. You only discard one spade, leaving 2 in hand, with that fullhouse and any spade flush finishes. If you find equal or more hearts to spades on the following hand, then its better to go for heart flush. On Round 2 shop, you should have taken pluto and bought splash, I believe that combo is better than investing into fullhouse. With 1 extra discard fullhouse is maybe slightly better, but splash+pluto = 100 chips for a played hand that's intention is basically a discard. This will enable 2 flushes+ any hand to win the 3rd fight, and on low stakes also the fight after that, giving you some breathing room after the next fight. Splash is also a barely okay joker early. Not taking this combo you find another pluto on the subsequent shop, and no scoring jokers, cementing this play as better ( I am writing this as I'm watching, it was not hindsight advantage), however you end up finding trousers on the next shop, making the 'best play' been having invested into full house, but of the best scalers in the game, more of them are better with pluto than earth, particularly green joker, and they are common vs. uncommon, making the best play splash+pluto but in this instance, earth paying out You advise against buying packs before you have an economy setup. Your reasoning is true for higher stakers, but on lower stakes arcana is revenue neutral very early. I think probably around 12 gold in wallet after pack purchase, 6 gold in jokers, it's probably about revenue neutral to buy, meaning its free value. You'd need to math it, I'm not sure what the exact number is, and it changes based on amount of gold in jokers. Spectral packs early is the best time to buy spectral packs. Immolate creates an economy, and can't hit an important card since you have no decided a build path yet. Copy 1 joker, for instance if you had hit it with pants gives you 2ce the multi scaling, and at the very beginning, and the downside is normally forcing you to sell all your jokers, but you could have boughten it with only 3 jokers in hand. Polychrome, same thing, it normally forces you to sell all your jokers, but early you could have boughen the spectral pack and only had to sell 2 jokers first. I would say spectral packs, even with no economy, given you have a decent joker in your hand, are always worth taking. Even setting economy to 0 from buying it. At 27 minutes the optimal shop purchases was buying the observatory, which seeing it in shop at the beginning of the ante you should have immediately started looking at types of hands played and tried to set yourself up for getting that online asap, and the tarot pack. Observatory sets up chips for you, no matter what you're playing, but particularly with 2 pair decks does pretty well, compared to plutos. The fist is more value than Aces joker, in almost all circumstances, so replacing should have happened. This also gives you value for proper play in a 2 pair deck, which is using strength and deletes on the lower cards, and then discarding from the bottom ranks.

So im gonna be honest. I wanted to go into this game as blind as possible as to not spoil myself from different playstyles etc. but when i stumbled upon your channel you really opened my eyes on how to play optimally! Its fun learning on your own for sure but having that little extra know how helps out A LOT

Wow this is helpful this is educational! I’m going to go watch all your other videos now.

EDIT: Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now original: -Nah dude, you misunderstand. Back in the day I had a friend who would come over and play on my pc all day, as he didnt have a machine himself. It was always fun watching him play, even though it was slightly more interactive. But this is the fun. I am happy to explore the game without having to do the tideous clicking ;)-

Basically completed a bunch of runs with the basic decks, and now I'm just playing along with this playlist. So, jokes on you, I'm playing AND watching.

Wow this is helpful; this is educational. I’m going to go watch all your videos now. video idea: Maybe you could react to games by viewers and explain what mistakes they are making?

This one really helped me out! Managed to get to ante 10 with the early game tips, especially when you said to kind of keep your level of jokers with the ante level. I was also spreading my celestials too thin, trying to level up all hand types equally instead of focusing on what I’m building towards. This definitely broke that habit and develop critical thinking skills on what I wanted to do last the early game. So thanks again for the great advice!

i always see you talking up bloodstone, meanwhile my bloodstone runs are like "nice sock & buskin, oops all 6s, blueprint and brainstorm on a 5 flush of kings. you will get two triggers" i have stopped going for bloodstone after the 5th run killed by low rolls

As a lower-mid range player (still going for a purple stake win), I found the Balatro daily series great to get an idea for decks and difficulties but the little bits of info dropped in those were good concepts that I wish you were able to dive deeper into but weren't for the sake of the run at hand, and I really hope this series will help drive those strategies home!

Interesting concept "scoring joker" which is about 12mult. If we try to calculate "scoring joker" worth in chips, how much would that be? About 70? I understand that chips are worth less when the blinds are higher. But still, that would be nice to understand approximate value of a chip in comparison with a mult. Thank you very much for the video again. Watched it from start to finish.

8:14 I actually like earth. It's relatively easy to find from my experience and it's basically an upgraded two pair to reward you if you find another card on top of an existing two pair I may be biased because I won with a polychrome pants before where full house and two pair were really powerful

I'll never ever ever play the game since your videos are so comprehensive. There's nothing for me to gain by playing

I stopped watching this video and will now proceed to watch all your videos. On purpose.

Not only a great balatro player but a great guy too cheers 🥂

New to the game. I just watched your basics pt 1 series and beat my first run 🚀🃏ty!

Wow this is watch this is videos, I’m going to go helpful all your other educational now

Skipping that red seal polychrome really hurt lol

We makin outta white stake with this one 🗣️

So good! Be right back, making Balatro Academy as a RU-vid channel 😂

Wow this is helpful this is educational, im going to watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

The Boss Blinds are merciless. I get so proud of what I’ve got going only for The Ox to crush my money or selling a critical joker.

hey u got any other videos so I can watch em all? Great video explanations, helped me with upping my stakes

I think I'm being funny (but for sure I'm not), the joke is on me. I've been tricked into "engaging" with the video.

Question for 29:03 - isn't converting Jacks to Queens inefficient here, because you already have 2 extra Jacks and after the conversion you have 6 queens but youre back to 4 jacks now. Wouldnt it be better to choose the two 5s so you end up with 6 Jacks and 6 sixes. and 2 fives

🃏

I pick up a lot of good little things from your decision making process. Thanks for making these videos ❤

I am a mediocre player at best for Balatro, I do find getting the right Jokers more difficult early than what I see the "YT Balatro Infuencers" seem to get lucky every single time. Any way playing yesterday, and about ante-3 I get a foil non sellable Credit Card, was needing some coin value to go along with the Madness Joker which I picked up early. Again, not the best player but wanted to see where this would take me, and was able to beat blue chip with this due and some decent mult jokers, but the CC allowed me to open packs and upgrade the deck while the Zany at the end was over 7X. Any way that is what always surprises me about this game, there are some really funky ways to get through Ante-8, but you maybe dot really see it early until like Ante-4 when your Jokers start taking off.

Wow this is helpful; this is educational. I’m going to go watch all your videos now.

Genuine question, in 1:03:50 I'd definitely bought the hand-size voucher, do I overvalue vouches too much? because u can't ever get more vouchers, but for jokers u can always re-roll later

I’m confused why you don’t put an X mult joker like Photograph to the far right. Is it due to the method of how/when it’s triggered?

I appreciate the effort you put into this video, but I really wish you would have put the cursor on each joker in the shop so we could read the description. Newer player don’t know what they all do just by looking at them so we don’t know why you’re skipping them in the shop.

This is awesome! Thanks for the great videos man!

Wow this is helpful, this is educational, I’m gonna watch all of your videos now

Need you to teach Go

I’m feeling called out by the intro (I am binging the entire channel) I don’t have the game either though

This is a great idea, having multiple run starts packed together is.. well it's just great! 🎉

1:12:00 "so I'm gunna take the 4 here" oh my heart, ow

Personally I cannot wait to see the video clip of all the failed draws ending runs. We know they exist somewhere...it happens to all of us. :)

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Does the joker position matter?

If I needed to be talked through landing a plane in an emergency with no experience, I'd want drspectred to be the one coaching me through it.

To your comments at the start of the video, I'd like to add my scenario so you can understand your viewership a little more. I'm watching these videos while I'm at work, paying half-attention to them, and then playing when I actually do have free time to play.

help educate video watch

Just want to ask, would taking hieroglyph be ok in the first ante? I know it cripples the economy, but going to ante 0 would help finding scoring

This is helpful and educational, but I'm a bad student. I cannot pass through ante 7. I need to watch all of your other videos now.

Amazing video. im learning a lot, keep going, and just win a subscriber ❤

I was goin for a king spade 3 of a kind and i got the debuffed face card and i used my boss reroll and got the spades debuffed

thank you very much for this series, it is incredibly helpful and also oddly relaxing!

ngl the early game is the worst part of the game a run can end purely by luck on discards , when your in the stage of not having any mult or chip joker everything becomes impossible by ante 2

Thank you so much for making these videos! I've never played a game like Balatro before and your videos are super helpful for learning and getting better at the game

29:54 How exactly is turning jacks into queens going to help with full house consistency? Didn’t you already have 6 jacks?

My comment means that in the eyes of the algorithm we are legally engaged 💍💍

Almost got 1200 on small blind ante 2, but not quite.

selling the egg at 32:09 was so funny

Wow this is helpful this is educational, im going to watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational. I’m going to go watch all your other videos now

I'm specifically looking for tips and strategies, but a 2-hr video is so inaccessible. Please consider doing more of this content but in more reasonable chunks.

Wow this is helpful; this is educational. I’m going to go watch all your videos now.

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

Wow this is helpful this is educational, I'm going to go watch all your other videos now

nobody is watching a two hour video of u playing the game bruh. condense this shi

PLEASE stop putting ads every few minutes on a 2hr video