around november to october 2025, i competed in a tournament for the video game balatro called "BalatrORG: Chlorofold". this was BalatrORG's 4th season, and the first i was invited to compete in. i placed 10/28 in that season. not bad, but not great either. originally, i had only placed 20/28, but won the rejoin round to get back into the game. the gimmick of the rejoin round was a challenge from the previous season, Planetfall. it was called Mirrorgate.
Mirrorgate's premise is extremely simple. you just need to score the lowest possible score to still be able to win the blinds. how bad could that be? not at all! that's why it was extremely easy to win the challenge (my other competitors apparently forgot about mr. bones (more on this later)). today, as of 1:40 AM, it was revealed that diego, a player currently playing in season 6, got a score of 8848 with a whopping 25 hands on non-black deck, with 7 burglars. that is hella impressive, but it's just not cutting it for me. this can be optimized so much further, and that was the rabbit hole i put myself in at approximately 2:40 AM of today, lying in bed, completely sleep deprived.
here's some quick calculations: each burglar gives you 3 hands. with 9 burglars + 6 hands, you get 33 hands. if you're not on black deck or didn't get antimatter, that's 8 burglars, or 30 hands. that's already a lot less than diego's. dividing 200000/33, you get approximately 6061. 200000/30, on the other hand, gets you approximately 6667. so that's the maximum score that you can get per hand to do a perfect mirrorgate, right? no, not really. see, there's this card in balatro called "mr. bones". he prevents you from losing if you scored at least 25% of the blind requirement, meaning he can cut this max score in 4. some more quick math, you'll notice the final score has now jumped down to 1516 with 9 burglars and 1667 with 8.
so all you need to do is get your burglars and a negative mr bones, which is very much easier said than done. if you get antimatter and 3 ectos, you get 9 joker slots. that's 8 burglars and a mr. bones. on black deck, that's 9 burglars and a mr. bones. the odds of you getting all of this perfectly lined up, however, are EXTREMELY low. you have to get burglar, get showman, and buy a shit ton of burglars. if your seed doesn't have a ton of burglars, you need to get a ton of invisible jokers, blueprints, brainstorms, and even that's not guaranteed. natural negatives, which would make your life much easier, are also extremely rare, so it's worthless to count on them.
in short, this post isn't really meant to lower the score of my friend diego. he's an insanely talented player, and his feat was one of a kind. this post is more of a concept that could be theoretically achieved. it's like TASing a game and seeing how close we can get to perfection after. the most optimal setup for the "perfect" run would be: 9 burglars, mr. bones, level 12 high card on a hikered ace or any form of 12 chips that we can get consistently, with an overscore of approximately 240 points, for a total of 1524 per hand.
my god, that was a lot of math. but it's finally over. i'll see y'all in the next post!! :]