I’ve been trying to be more reactive to the jokers and lean into synergies. It’s really let me explore a lot of different builds (going for orange stake now, so it’s easy to try new things with how often I fail).

First ante, I mostly just save up money, no jokers unless there something that’ll carry me through the third ante. That way I can maximize interest and have a lot of leeway for reacting to the jokers that came up.

As things pick up, I like going for scalable jokers that increase when you play a card, suit, or hand. I’ll play weak hands to strengthen those jokers instead of beating a round quickly trying to collect bonus hand money. Same for later stakes, where I was initially biased towards skipping the first round of an ante, because of the low payout. In other words, I ignore the bonus hand incentive so I can play more hands and strengthen jokers like Spare Trousers).

I do well when I watch hand score totals and make an effort to balance the chips and multipliers so they’re not too lopsided. I’ve burned myself a lot by favoring multipliers but then having low chip totals. Still, I do like an X multiplier when I see one. Especially scalable ones like Red Card

As far as poker hands go, I love four fingers because it really opens up straights, flushes, straight flushes, flush house, and flush fives. Get a synergy with shortcut and the world is your oyster.

If you can get good joker RNG and a critical mass of tarot packs, building for Four/Five of a Kind is where you’ll see your insane scores.

Straights are usually where I aim as they scale really well and can be reliable to finish a game.