How to play Klondike Solitaire Turn 3
Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, building each suit up in order from ace to king. Clear every card and you win.
The deal lays out seven tableau columns of one to seven cards, with only the top card of each face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock in the corner.
- On the tableau, build downward in alternating colors: a red six goes on a black seven.
- Tap or drag a card to move it; face-up runs move together. Turning over every face-down card is the real puzzle.
- Tap the stock to deal three cards at a time onto the waste - only the top card of each group is playable until you cycle back to it. When the stock runs out, tap again to recycle the waste, as often as you like.
- Only a king can fill an empty column, and aces start the foundations.
Klondike solitaire turn 3 tips
- This draw is fixed to three cards, so a card you need can end up buried two deep in a group - track what's underneath before you commit a foundation move.
- Flip face-down cards before anything else: a hidden card is worth more than a tidy foundation.
- Empty a column only when you have a king ready for it, ideally one with a useful run behind it.
Turn 3 is Klondike the way it has usually been played in competition and in the old desktop editions: the stock comes up three cards at a time, and only the front card of each group is yours. This page is fixed to that rule, so the setting cannot drift on you mid-game. If you want the gentler one-card draw, play turn 1 solitaire, and the full strategy guide, history and scoring live on the main Klondike solitaire page.
Turn 3 is not harder because it deals you worse cards. It deals exactly the same cards. It is harder because of where they end up standing in the queue, and that is a problem you can learn to work with.
Why turn 3 solitaire buries the cards you need
Twenty-four cards go into the stock, and turn 3 splits them into eight groups of three. Two cards out of every three are locked underneath a card you may have no use for. They are not gone, but reaching them means playing the card in front, or cycling the whole stock back around and hoping the groups land differently.
That is the trick worth understanding: the groups are not fixed. Every card you take off the waste shifts the boundaries on the next pass, so a card that was second in its group can become the front of a group next time round. Turn-3 play is largely the art of nudging those boundaries until the card you want arrives on top.
It also means a pass through the stock is never wasted, even if you play nothing. It is information: you learn what is in there and where. But a pass that changes nothing changes nothing next time either. If you cycle the whole stock and the same three cards keep surfacing, the stock is stuck, and the only way to unstick it is a move somewhere in the tableau.
Turn 3 Klondike strategy: play the queue, not just the board
Take the free waste card when it is genuinely free. Playing a card off the waste is the cheapest way to reshuffle the group boundaries, and it often unlocks a card two positions back that you had written off. If a waste card has a legal home that costs you nothing, taking it is usually right in turn 3 even when it would be neutral in turn 1.
Count your passes rather than clicking through on autopilot. Before you commit to a recycle, look at what the tableau can still do. A tableau move made before the recycle can change which cards you meet on the way round; the same move made after it is a pass wasted.
Be more careful about the foundations here than you would be in turn 1. If you send a low card up too early and the card that needed it is sitting second in a stock group, you may not get another chance at it for several passes, if at all. In turn 1 that mistake costs you a lap. In turn 3 it can cost you the game.
Undo is unlimited on this page, and turn 3 is where it earns its keep. If a pass through the stock leaves you no better off, back up to before it and try a different order of tableau moves first.
How winnable is turn 3 solitaire?
81.945% of draw-3 Klondike deals can be won, give or take 0.084%.
That is Charlie Blake and Ian P. Gent's figure, published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research in February 2026. Their solver ran over 1,000,000 draw-3 deals: 819,371 winnable, 180,472 unwinnable, and 157 it could not settle either way. The full paper is published in JAIR. Its rules are a 24-card stock drawn in threes with redeals allowed without limit, which is exactly what this page gives you.
For comparison, the same solver put draw-1 at 90.480%. The three-card rule costs about 8.5 percentage points of winnable deals, which is a real price for a rule that changes nothing about the shuffle. If that sounds like a bad trade, turn 1 is one click away.
Now the part most sites get wrong. That 81.945% is measured with the face-down cards visible: the solver sees the whole deal before it moves. It says a deal is winnable by someone who already knows where every card is. It does not say you will win it, and the paper is careful to call that second question unanswered.
The honest expectation is far lower. In a 2004 study, expert human players who were also shown every face-down card won 36.6% of 2,000 draw-3 games, give or take 2.78%. Computer players working with the cards genuinely hidden land in the same region, around 36% to 37%. So roughly four deals in five can be won, and roughly one in three actually gets won by very good players. The main Klondike guide goes through where the rest of that gap goes.
Deals here are seeded, so the same seed always deals the same game and you can replay one exactly. They are random by default: close to one turn-3 deal in five is lost before you touch it, and we don't quietly drop those to flatter the win rate. If you'd rather skip the lost causes, turn on "Winnable deals only" in the settings menu and we'll deal you a game the solver has proved can be won.
Turn 3 solitaire FAQ
Is turn 3 solitaire harder than turn 1?
Yes, and it has been measured. With a solver that can see every face-down card, 81.945% of turn-3 deals are winnable against 90.480% of turn-1 deals. The three-card draw costs about 8.5 percentage points on its own.
Is every turn 3 solitaire deal winnable?
No. Close to one deal in five cannot be won even by a player who can see every face-down card from the start, and the opening layout gives you no way to tell which ones those are.
Why is turn 3 called the tournament rule?
It is the traditional and stricter of the two draw rules, and the one most competitive and desktop versions of Klondike settled on. Leaving two cards of every three out of reach turns the game into a test of planning rather than of the shuffle.
How many times can I go through the stock in turn 3?
On this page, as many times as you like. That matters for more than convenience: unlimited redeals are the exact rules the 81.945% study measured, so the figure describes this game. Versions that cap you at three passes are harder, and that number does not apply to them.
Why do the same cards keep coming up in turn 3?
Because the group boundaries only move when you take a card off the waste. If you cycle the stock without playing anything, you meet the same front cards in the same order. Playing one waste card shifts every group behind it and changes what you see on the next pass.