Klondike Solitaire: History, Records and Competitions

It came free with Windows and all but took over the word "Solitaire". Yet the game was in print more than 80 years before it reached Windows, and nobody knows where its name comes from. Here is what the records show, and what they don't.

September 23, 2026 · 7-minute read

Name and origins

In North America, "Solitaire" with no qualifier usually means this game; in Britain it is often just "Patience". Games historian David Parlett dates the worldwide spread of the word "solitaire" to 1990, when Microsoft shipped "Solitaire" — really Klondike — with Windows. The wider story is in A History of Solitaire.

The earliest rules: 1905 or 1907

Wikipedia cites the 1907 edition of Hoyle's Games as the earliest description of today's Klondike, under the name "Seven-Card Klondike", with the stock turned three cards at a time. In the 1913 Official Rules of Card Games it is simply "Klondike", and the stock is turned one card at a time — the rule this site uses. Researcher Michael Keller reports an earlier printing: "Gambler's Delight" in the second edition (1905) of Tarbart's Patience Games. Only Keller's page supports the earlier date, so it is safest to say "1905 (Keller) or 1907 (Hoyle's)".

A name nobody can explain

The Klondike is a region of Canada's Yukon, where gold was found on Bonanza (Rabbit) Creek on 16 August 1896, setting off a rush that lasted until about 1899. The card game is widely assumed to be named after it, but no document shows that, and the earliest known rules were printed about a decade after the rush.

In America Klondike was once also called "Canfield", perhaps because it was dealt as a casino game at Richard Canfield's club in Saratoga Springs, New York. A player bought a deck — for $50 or $52, depending on the source — and was paid $5 for every card played to the foundations. Today "Canfield" in America names a different game, the one the British call "Demon". Wikipedia notes that Canfield himself called his game "Klondike", and Keller argues that the casino game probably was Klondike.

Timeline

Solitaire on the computer

An intern's side project

Windows 3.0, released on 22 May 1990, included Microsoft Solitaire. Microsoft intern Wes Cherry wrote it — in summer 1988 by most accounts, 1989 according to The Register. He built it in his own time, missing the card games he had on his Mac, and shared it internally; a Windows 3.0 program manager spotted it and added it to the official install. Cherry received no royalties; all he got was an IBM XT for fixing bugs during the school year. His "boss key", which swapped the game for a fake work screen, was removed before release.

Susan Kare, who shaped the look of the original Macintosh, designed the cards in the 16-colour VGA palette. Microsoft says Solitaire was included to teach people to use a mouse, especially to drag and drop — an explanation given years later, not a 1990 design document.

Vegas scoring

Windows Solitaire has offered "Vegas" scoring since Windows 3.0. Microsoft's Solitaire help describes a $52 stake per game and $5 for every card moved to a foundation, so 11 cards ($55) puts you ahead and clearing all 52 nets $208 — but with Draw One you get only one pass through the deck. That is almost exactly the Canfield casino's arithmetic.

The Collection and the Hall of Fame

Windows 8 and 8.1 left Solitaire out, so players downloaded Microsoft Solitaire Collection, released on 26 October 2012 with Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid and TriPeaks; it has come preinstalled again since Windows 10. In 2019 The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Microsoft Solitaire into its World Video Game Hall of Fame, saying it had likely been installed on more than a billion computers. For the 30th anniversary in 2020, Microsoft reported more than 35 million monthly players and more than 100 million hands a day — its own figures.

How often can you win?

"It is one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics that we cannot determine the odds of winning the common game of solitaire," wrote Yan, Persi Diaconis and colleagues in their 2004 paper Solitaire: Man Versus Machine. They studied "thoughtful solitaire" — Klondike with every card's position known, draw three, unlimited passes. A former president of the American Mathematical Society won 36.6% of 2,000 games; their best program won 70.20% of 200.

In 2019 Charlie Blake and Ian Gent pinned the numbers down to within ±0.1% with their solver, Solvitaire. With every card known, 81.945% of deals are winnable with draw three and 90.480% with draw one. Let any card fill an empty column and draw three rises to 94.959% — the King-only rule is a large part of what makes Klondike hard. In the ordinary game with hidden cards, a 2009 program by Bjarnason and colleagues won just over 35% of draw-three games, which the authors called the first reported empirical lower bound for optimal play. The true odds with perfect play are still unknown.

Myths and misunderstandings

• "Gold-rush prospectors invented it." There is no evidence; nothing documents where the name comes from.
• "Microsoft invented Solitaire." Cherry programmed a Windows version of a game that had been in print since 1905–1907.
• "80–90% of games are winnable." Only if you know every card. With hidden cards, the 2009 computer strategy above wins just over 35% at draw three.
• "Cherry was an unpaid intern." The sources show only that he got no royalties or extra pay for Solitaire.
• "The Monte Carlo method came from Klondike." Stanislaw Ulam traced the idea to 1946, when he wondered how likely "a Canfield laid out with 52 cards" was to come out. Which game he meant by "Canfield" is unknown.
• "The Guinness record for the fastest solitaire is 10.0 seconds (1991)." That entry is for peg solitaire, which Guinness labels a board game.

Competitions and records

The surest way to compete fairly at a one-player game is to give everyone the same deal. That is the principle of duplicate bridge, where different competitors play the same hands, and the organiser of the 2026 championship below says its players all got the same deal too.

A championship with prize money

Papaya, maker of the real-money Klondike app Solitaire Cash, billed its event as the first World Solitaire Championship. The final took place on 20–22 February 2026 at Temple House in Miami, with a $300,000 prize pool. According to Papaya, more than 500,000 players entered qualifiers inside the app, 400 from four continents reached the final, and Sidney Ha, a 25-year-old pharmacy student, won by finishing the last round in 31 seconds.

It was a commercial event run by one company, sanctioned by no independent body, and no recurring national or world championship could be found. Paid-entry prize apps are covered separately on the competitions and communities page.

Records and events

Guinness World Records lists "Fastest completion of Solitaire" as 8 seconds, set by the Australian player DDos-Dan on 23 October 2015 in Draw One mode. But speedrun.com's Draw One board for the same Windows version (2000/ME/XP) now shows several 5-second runs, so 8 seconds is the Guinness-listed record, not the current best. Checked on 23 September 2026, the top Windows 8/10/11 times were 5 seconds for Draw One and 17 seconds for Draw Three.

Since 2018 Microsoft has marked 22 May as National Solitaire Day — a company-promoted date, not an official holiday. No final count has been found for its 2020 one-day attempt at the most games completed, and no public results or winners are on record from its 2015 anniversary challenge, which opened an employee tournament's challenges to everyone. Everyday competition lives inside Microsoft Solitaire Collection: daily challenges and events with worldwide leaderboards.

Competing on this site

Klondike here works the same way: a deal number fixes every card, including the face-down ones and the order of the stock. Each number has two rankings, fastest time and fewest moves; stock clicks count as moves, and undone moves drop out of the record. There is no prize money.

The stock turns one card at a time, as in the 1913 book, and you may go through it as often as you like — the most winnable draw size in Blake and Gent's figures. Even so, when a solver that knows every card checked deals #1–#5,000, it judged 105 (2.1%) unsolvable and could not decide 796 (15.9%) within its search budget. All 901 numbers were given new layouts, so every deal you are served can be solved. Other games' contests are in Solitaire Competitions and Communities.

Sources

1. Klondike (solitaire) — Wikipedia
2. History of Patience/Solitaire — David Parlett
3. What game was played at Canfield's — Michael Keller
4. Klondike Gold Rush — Wikipedia
5. How an Intern Developed Microsoft Solitaire — Mental Floss, 2016
6. The longest card game in the world: Microsoft Solitaire is 30 — The Register, 2020
7. Areaware Windows Solitaire Cards — Vintage Computing and Gaming
8. Microsoft Solitaire — The Strong
9. Celebrating 30 Years of Microsoft Solitaire — Xbox Wire, 2020
10. Celebrating National Solitaire Day — Xbox Wire, 2018
11. Solitaire Help — copy of Microsoft's help text
12. Microsoft Solitaire Collection — Wikipedia
13. Solitaire: Man Versus Machine — Yan et al., 2004
14. The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire — Blake, Gent, 2019
15. Lower Bounding Klondike Solitaire with Monte-Carlo Planning — Bjarnason et al., 2009
16. Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method — Los Alamos National Laboratory
17. Fastest completion of Solitaire — Guinness World Records
18. Fastest game of solitaire — Guinness World Records
19. Solitaire leaderboards — speedrun.com
20. The 25th Anniversary Star Club Collection — Windows Experience Blog, 2015
21. Sidney Ha Becomes First-Ever World Solitaire Champion — PR Newswire, 2026
22. First Ever World Solitaire Championship Announced for Miami 2026 — STG Play
23. Duplicate bridge — Wikipedia

Keep reading: How to Play Klondike Solitaire · Klondike Solitaire Strategy Guide · A History of Solitaire · Solitaire Competitions and Communities