Solitaire Competitions and Communities

Can you compete at a game you play alone? Yes — but almost always by giving everyone the same deal and comparing time, moves or score, usually online. No independent body runs a recurring world championship. Here is what actually exists, and what doesn't.

September 23, 2026 · 8-minute read

How do you compete at solitaire?

With no opponent at the table, a fair contest needs identical conditions. David Parlett notes that the oldest competitive method is a race in which each player plays the same game with their own pack — and the earliest patience on record (1788) was itself a two-player game with onlookers betting.

The way to squeeze out luck comes from bridge. In duplicate bridge the same deals are played by different competitors and scored by relative performance, so "the element of skill is heightened while that of chance is reduced". The idea began with whist: "Cavendish" tested it in 1857, and an 1891 book says it was played in Berlin and Paris as early as 1840. Same-deal solitaire contests use exactly that principle, comparing time, moves, score or winning streaks.

Computers made sharing a deal easy. The original FreeCell on PLATO (around 1978) already kept a ranked list of the longest winning streaks and ran tournaments on hand-picked deals. Jim Horne numbered the deals in Windows FreeCell "so that people could exchange the numbers of difficult/interesting deals with their friends".

Patience games built for two or more

Some patiences were built as head-to-head games, but we found no regular championship for any of them.

• Racing Demon / Nerts / Pounce — According to Parlett it is English and dates from the 1890s as Racing Demon; American publications call it Pounce from 1934. Everyone plays at once with their own pack. The US National Nertz Association ran small online knockout tournaments on AOL Games around 2009–10 (four players a match, first to 100 points; 62 registrants in the 2009 season), but we found no world championship.
• Russian Bank / Crapette — a two-player, alternating-turn game with two packs. It was described in German as "Zank-Patience" in 1884/85, became a US fad after World War I and got its own treatise, Foster's Russian Bank, in 1922.
• Spite and Malice — a 1960s American game whose formal rules were recorded in 1965; Mattel's Skip-Bo is one commercial version.

For Golf, Morehead and Mott-Smith (1949) describe "Tournament Golf" for two: each plays nine deals ("holes") with their own pack, the lower score takes each hole for a point, and the better nine-hole total earns three. It is a home rule from a book, not an organised event.

Online: where competition lives

freecell.net

Run by Dennis Cronin since 1996, freecell.net (NetCELL in older sources) is still active. Free tournaments start in 15-minute slots around the clock; each has 8 to 48 random games, and whoever solves the most games in the least time wins. Named weekly events include the Masters on Sundays. The site tracks streaks and an Elo rating, has no undo, and deals harder layouts as your streak grows. According to Michael Keller's FreeCell FAQ, the all-time record streak is 20,994 wins by a player called "Ki". The site says all revenue goes to charity.

Communities that solve together

In August 1994 Dave Ring recruited more than 100 volunteers on Usenet and elsewhere, handing each a block of 100 of Windows FreeCell's 32,000 deals; by April 1995 every deal except #11982 had been reported solved. Keller lists about two dozen people who have played all 32,000 in order. TriPeaks players have a fan forum that posts the best solution to a mobile app's daily deal every day. These groups are cooperative more than competitive.

Microsoft Solitaire Collection

Microsoft's app has a Daily Challenge for each game, themed Star Club challenges, and Events of 5 to 30 challenges with worldwide leaderboards. We found no official statement that Daily Challenges give every player the identical deal.

Microsoft's events

2015: the 25th-anniversary tournament. On 18 May 2015 Microsoft began an internal tournament among its employees, covering Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, TriPeaks and Pyramid. On 22 June the challenges from its quarterfinals, semifinals and finals went public as the "25th Anniversary Star Club Collection", and the first 250 US residents to complete it and post proof received a $25 gift code. The press framed it as the public against Microsoft's best, but no public winner or tournament prize is documented.

2018 onward: National Solitaire Day. On 15 May 2018 Microsoft declared 22 May — the day Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990 — National Solitaire Day, every year. It is a company-promoted observance, not a public holiday, and we found no "World Solitaire Day".

2020: a one-day record attempt. For the 30th anniversary on 22 May 2020, Microsoft invited players to an online event "aiming to reach the most games of Microsoft Solitaire completed in one day". It was a collective record attempt, not a tournament, and no final count was published; Microsoft's posts do not mention Guinness.

Guinness and speedrun records

Guinness World Records lists "Fastest completion of Solitaire" as 8 seconds, by the Australian gamer DDos-Dan in Draw One mode of the 1990 PC game, set on 23 October 2015 — "the fastest completion time as of 4 April 2017, as verified by Speedrun.com". Checked in September 2026, speedrun.com shows 5-second runs on the same version, so the Guinness entry is a snapshot, not the current best.

The often-quoted "10.0 seconds by Stephen Twigge (1991)" is not a card record at all: Guinness says "This is solitaire the board game, not the card game", meaning peg solitaire. In 2024 the website Solitaired organised an attempt at "most people playing solitaire online in 24 hours" and says it set the record with 161,448 players; we could not confirm this on Guinness's own site.

Speedrun.com splits Windows Solitaire into Draw One and Draw Three, each by Windows version. Runs are timed with the in-game timer, need video and moderator approval, and may not use cheats or, on newer versions, the built-in solver. There are FreeCell and TriPeaks boards too, and Golf is run on the SNES game Super Solitaire. A few-second run is a deal-dependent sprint, not a contest where everyone gets the same deal.

Miami 2026: a "World Solitaire Championship"

The first event billed as the World Solitaire Championship was held at Temple House Miami, South Beach, on 20–22 February 2026. It was organised by PAPAYA (formerly Papaya Gaming), maker of the real-money Klondike app Solitaire Cash. According to PAPAYA, more than 500,000 players entered qualifiers inside the app and 400 finalists from four continents reached the live finals, playing for a $300,000 prize pool with $150,000 to the winner. PAPAYA and Extra report that every player got the same deck setup across timed rounds — the duplicate principle again. The winner was Sidney Ha, a 25-year-old pharmacy student from Elk Grove, California, who finished the final round in 31 seconds. It was a company-run event with qualifiers only in its own app, not a championship sanctioned by an independent governing body. The organiser's court case is covered below.

Paid-entry skill contests

In the US some solitaire apps run paid-entry, cash-prize "skill" contests: players of similar skill are matched on the same deal, and prizes go by result. Solitaire Cash is PAPAYA's own app; Solitaire Cube runs on the Skillz competition platform. Both are rated 18+, and in some states the prize contests are unavailable or played only for bonus credit. In April 2026 a federal jury in New York, in a case Skillz brought against Papaya, found that Papaya's use of undisclosed bots in its paid skill games amounted to false advertising. Final judgment followed at the end of July, and Papaya appealed in August, so the case is not over.

Game by game

"None found" means our research turned up no organised competition.

Competitions are rare for a reason: with no opponent, a contest must guarantee everyone the same deal and rules, and a server handing out deals does that most easily. So solitaire competition usually looks like a leaderboard on a shared deal, not a hall full of players.

Rankings on this site

This site works on the same principle. One deal number is one layout: #617 is the same deal for everyone, any time, and every deal number has its own rankings. Players who solved the same number are ranked by fastest time and fewest moves. Even in Klondike, the face-down cards are identical for the same number, so you are competing with people who had exactly the same luck.

The server checks every record itself. It takes your moves in order, rebuilds the deal from its number and replays them; if the replay does not end in a win, the record is not posted, and the move count is the server's own. Every deal served has been solved by a solver beforehand, so no one wastes an evening on a deal that cannot be won. FreeCell also has a duel mode: two players get the same number and 15 minutes, the first to finish wins, and if time runs out, whoever has more cards on the foundations wins. There is no entry fee and no prize money.

Sources

1. History of Patience/Solitaire — David Parlett
2. Duplicate bridge — Wikipedia
3. Interview with Paul Alfille (2000) — freecell.net
4. FreeCell FAQ — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
5. Nerts — Wikipedia
6. NNA Online Tournament Procedure — National Nertz Association
7. National Nertz Association Online Tournament Information — Tournament Player Stats
8. Crapette / Russian Bank — pagat.com
9. Russian Bank — Wikipedia
10. Spite and Malice — Wikipedia
11. The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games — Morehead & Mott-Smith, 1949 (Internet Archive)
12. Freecell.net — Dennis Cronin
13. Tournament information — freecell.net
14. TriPeaks Challenge — MobilityWare Solitaire Forum
15. Microsoft Solitaire Collection — Wikipedia
16. Celebrating Microsoft Solitaire — Windows Experience Blog, 2015
17. The 25th Anniversary Star Club Collection is now available — Windows Experience Blog, 2015
18. Microsoft Is Hosting A Solitaire Tournament — TechCrunch, 2015
19. Celebrating National Solitaire Day on May 22 — Xbox Wire, 2018
20. Special event helps players set a record … 30th anniversary — Windows Experience Blog, 2020
21. Fastest completion of Solitaire — Guinness World Records
22. Fastest game of solitaire — Guinness World Records
23. You Can Help Set a World Record for Most People Playing Solitaire in 24 Hours — Mental Floss, 2024
24. Solitaire Guinness World Records — Solitaired
25. Solitaire — speedrun.com
26. FreeCell — speedrun.com
27. TriPeaks — speedrun.com
28. Super Solitaire — speedrun.com
29. First-Ever World Solitaire Championship … to be held in Miami — PR Newswire, 2025
30. Sidney Ha Becomes First-Ever World Solitaire Champion — PR Newswire, 2026
31. How a World Solitaire Championship Turned Quiet Play Into a Global Spectacle — Extra, 2026
32. Meet the Faces Behind the First-Ever World Solitaire Championship — Screen Rant
33. Solitaire Cash — App Store
34. Solitaire Cube — Tether Studios
35. Skillz (company) — Wikipedia
36. WorldWinner — Wikipedia
37. Skillz Platform Inc. v. Papaya Gaming, Ltd. (S.D.N.Y. 1:24-cv-01646) — CourtListener
38. Skillz Wins $420M Judgement Against Papaya, 'Solitaire Cash' — Casino.org, 2026

Keep reading — A History of Solitaire (Patience) · FreeCell: History, Records and Competitions · All reading