Solitaire — Turn 3

Three cards come off together and land face up on the waste with the last one on top. Only that top card is in play. Click again and the next three arrive on top of it. When the stock empties, the whole waste is turned over and the process repeats — and it repeats identically, because the cards go back in the same order they came out.

That identity is the rule most implementations get wrong, and it is the one that makes turn 3 a puzzle rather than a slot machine. If a card you need is the middle card of a triple, cycling the stock forever will never expose it. The only way to reach it is to play a card off the waste, which shifts every later grouping by one and re-partitions the whole stock.

By treating the waste as a phase control rather than a pile. The single most valuable skill in draw three is noticing that a card you do not especially want is worth playing anyway, because playing it re-groups the stock and brings a card you do want to the top of a triple.

• Cycle the stock once at the start and note where the cards you need are sitting inside their triples. This costs three clicks and is worth more than any single move.
• Play a waste card whenever you are stuck, even a mediocre one, to shift the phase. A stock you have already exhausted is not exhausted — it is one card out of alignment.
• Be slower to send cards to the foundations than you would be at turn 1. In draw three you cannot easily fetch a replacement, so a card sent up early is a card genuinely gone.
• Turn over face-down tableau cards first, always. The hidden twenty-one are still the biggest unknown, exactly as they are at turn 1.

81.956%, plus or minus 0.096% — Blake and Gent, The Winnability of Klondike and Many Other Single-Player Card Games (2019), over a million deals. Read the qualification carefully, because it is usually dropped: that figure is for thoughtful Klondike, meaning a solver that can see every face-down card before it decides. It is the ceiling for a perfect player with perfect information, not a claim about what you will manage.

Playing blind, as a person, on a board where the face-down cards are actually face down, real win rates are far lower — the same paper's figures for play without lookahead are dramatically worse. The 82% number is genuine and it is widely misquoted.

Because that is correct behaviour, not a bug. A redeal in draw three reproduces the identical triples; the groupings only change when you play a card off the waste. Most clones shuffle or rotate the stock on redeal, which quietly hands the player back most of the difficulty of the game. This one does not.