THE CASINO SOLITAIRE, REDEALT
Canfield Solitaire
Play Canfield solitaire free online — no download, no sign-up, works on any device. This is the game a Saratoga casino actually sold in the 1890s: buy the deck for $50, win $5 back for every card you bank, and try to dig out the 13-card reserve before the rotation runs dry. Every deal here is honestly random, hints run a real search solver on your actual deal — and because that solver banks cards the way the casino paid for them, this page can do something no other Canfield site does: re-run the casino’s math. The verdict: perfect play would have averaged about $137 back on the $50 deck — the house edge was never the rules; it was the player.
- 52
- cards
- 13
- in the reserve
- 33.1%
- proven win-rate floor
13
2♥2♣2♠ Learn Canfield in 90 seconds: rules and tips
The reserve-and-base-card deal, building with wrapping ranks, the three-at-a-time stock, and five habits that win more games. Full written rules follow below.
In this video
01 · THE TABLE
How Canfield works
The deal is fixed and famous: thirteen cards to the reserve (only the top one playable), one card to the first foundation — its rank becomes the base rank every foundation starts from — four cards to the tableau, and the remaining 34 to the stock. Foundations build up in suit around the corner: base 7 runs 7 8 9 … K A … 6. The tableau builds down in alternating colors, also wrapping, and packed sequences travel together. The stock deals three at a time with unlimited redeals. One rule does more work than any other: when a tableau pile empties, the reserve refills it immediately — that automatic refill is the only shovel you get.
02 · THE PAYOUT
The casino that paid $5 a card
Richard Canfield ran the Saratoga Club House in the 1890s and sold this game at the tables: $50 for the deck, $5 back per card on the foundations — break even at ten cards, get rich at eleven-plus. Legend says he retired the game because dealers could not supervise it fast enough, not because it lost money. We put his price list to the test: our search solver played 1,000 random deals under the strict rules and banked 27.4 cards per deal on its best line — $136.75 at Canfield’s payout, against the $50 buy-in, and since the solver sometimes misses better lines, that figure is a floor. So the game itself was a money-printing machine for the player — in theory. Card-room lore puts the real 1890s customer nearer five or six banked cards, under $30 back, and that gap between perfect play and human hands is exactly what Canfield was selling. The house knew its business. The full numbers live beside every other game we measure on our win-rates page.
03 · THE SHOVEL
Why the reserve is the game
Everything in Canfield is a means to one end: emptying those thirteen reserve cards. The tableau only ever holds four piles, the waste recycles forever, but the reserve pays out exactly once per pile you manage to empty — and the refill is automatic, so every pile you clear is one reserve card released. That is why experienced players evaluate every move by a single question: does this help empty a pile, or bank straight from the reserve top? Our solver’s search order encodes the same doctrine — reserve banks first, reserve-freeing pile moves next, everything else after. The honest odds from those 1,000 deals: 331 proven winnable (a 33.1% floor), 441 proven unwinnable within the solver’s three-redeal search cap (play here allows unlimited passes, so a deeper cycling line could in principle rescue some), and 228 undecided when the two-million-position budget ran out.
→EMPTY04 · THE RULEBOOK
The ruleset, honestly
Canfield has one genuinely contested rule, and we choose the modern side of it openly. The classic Morehead & Mott-Smith text moves each tableau pile as a whole unit; most implementations you have played allow any properly-packed tail of a pile to move on its own, and so do we. Everything else here is the classic game: spaces fill from the reserve automatically, then — once the reserve is spent — from the waste only, when you choose (parking a mid-pile card into a space is not on the menu); the stock turns three at a time with unlimited passes; foundations wrap from the dealt base rank. When a full pass through the stock surfaces nothing playable, the game honestly ends — grinding an unchanged rotation is theater, and this site does not do theater.
→
A base 7 foundation runs through King, Ace, then ends at 6.
Playing one waste card changes which cards surface on later passes.
→A legal alternating-color tail can move together in our modern ruleset.
05 · PLAY THE LESSON
Two fixed deals. Two Canfield instincts.
Both lessons use the real game engine and solver-verified winning deals. First learn to count foundation progress; then learn how an empty pile releases the reserve automatically.
01 Bank three more cards Count the way the casino counted: $5 a card, $50 a deck. This real deal is provably winnable — our solver holds a full winning line — and its first eleven moves bank three more cards. The counter starts at 1 because the dealt base card is already home. +
02 Release two reserve cards The reserve is the game — and this exact deal is provably winnable, so dig without fear. The first two moves can each free a reserve card: one empties a tableau pile and the refill is automatic; the other banks the reserve top straight to a foundation. +
06 · THE HABITS
Five habits that win more Canfield games
Canfield was engineered to take money off careful people. These habits are how you keep some.
- 01Serve the reserve
Serve the reserve first: given two legal moves, take the one that empties a tableau pile or banks the reserve top — everything else is decoration.
- 02Keep useful ranks down
Do not bank mid-ranks reflexively. A card one below the base rank is the LAST card its foundation ever wants — on the tableau it may still carry a build.
- 03Track deal-three
Track the rotation phase: with deal-3, playing exactly one waste card changes every card the stock will surface from then on.
- 04Protect empty space
After the reserve is gone, spaces are precious again — fill them from the waste at the moment that unlocks a build, not the moment they open.
- 05Redeal with a target
Use redeals to plan, not to hope: if you cannot name the card you are digging for, a full pass will not name it for you.
07 · QUICK ANSWERS
Canfield solitaire FAQ
01Is every Canfield deal winnable?+
Far from it — and we measured rather than guessed. Our solver proved wins on 331 of 1,000 random deals (a 33.1% floor), proved 441 unwinnable within its three-redeal search cap, and left 228 undecided at its budget — so roughly a third of deals are provably yours to win, and nearly half are provably not, no matter how well you play. Deals here are honestly random, with no pre-filtered pool; the casino did not curate decks for you either.
02Why did my empty pile refill itself?+
That is the classic rule, not a bug: an empty tableau pile fills at once from the top of the reserve — the move and the refill are one action, and undo reverses both together. Once the reserve is exhausted, spaces stay open until you choose to fill one from the waste.
03Why do the foundations start at a random rank?+
The first card dealt after the reserve sets the base rank for all four foundations, and building wraps around the corner: base 7 runs 7 to King, then Ace to 6. It is the game’s signature randomizer — some bases play noticeably harder than others.
04Can I go through the stock forever?+
Yes — redeals are unlimited, three cards at a time. But the rotation is deterministic: if a complete pass surfaces no playable card and nothing else on the board moves, no number of further passes will change that, and the game declares itself honestly over at that point.
05What was Canfield’s casino payout actually worth?+
The 1890s price was $50 per deck, $5 per banked card — breakeven at ten cards. Our solver’s best lines across 1,000 random deals averaged 27.4 banked cards, about $137 back — perfect play beat the table nearly three to one. The house edge lived entirely in the distance between that solver and a human at a card table in 1899. See the casino section above for the arithmetic.
06How do the hints work?+
The Hint button runs a real search solver on your actual position — the same standard as every game we host. When it proves a winning line within its budget, hints follow that line; when it cannot, it plays the strongest continuation it found, and its priorities mirror the classic doctrine: the reserve comes first.