Isn't 8.5% low?<p>My mom didn't use the computer much except she did play solitaire on her Windows laptop all the time. She had over a 2000 game win streak until she got dementia and stopped using the computer altogether.
Winning 2000 games in a row sounds statistically unlikely unless the Windows version of solitaire does something behind the scenes to make the game more winnable.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probability_of_winning" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...</a>
The current version, you can play on 'Easy', I think my kindergartner wins all his games on that setting.
Could there be mixup with FreeCell?
I suspect that the later (Win 7+) versions of Windows solitaire (and minesweeper, for that matter) did, in fact, cull the unwinnable games.
I don't know of any algorithm to cull non-winnable Klondike games. Playing deal-1 instead of deal-3, and with unlimited flipping of the stock, the win chance is probably close to 50%, but that still makes 2000 in a row statistically impossible.<p>My guess is that the poster's mom was actually playing FreeCell, in which nearly every game is winnable and people do get streaks like that.
Similarly, my half-sister's mother was almost allergic to anything technology, except for to play Solitaire, which she did every single day. I think many of the games offer configurable "difficulty" though, there are modes where it's guaranteed to be solvable for example. And most of them surely are made slightly easier by default.<p>With a randomly shuffled real deck, wouldn't surprise me that it would be ~10%,.
Draw 1 is much more winnable than draw 3. With perfect knowledge (or an infinite undo stack), evidently ~80% of Klondike games are winnable. With imperfect knowledge but good strategy, humans win about 11% of draw 3 games. So given they have implemented a more rudimentary strategy (first come, first serve), 8.5% doesn't seem that low.