Ottoneu Slack is the home of a lot of great Ottoneu-related conversation, but there are also other great conversations happening in Slack. We have a great Food and Travel channel, a channel for Baseball Cards and other collectibles, sports (let’s be honest, mostly soccer) chat, and a ton of other pockets for people to talk about their interests outside of fantasy sports and Ottoneu. One of those pockets is about video games, and recently very much about Balatro, one of the more popular games of the past year and one that I highly recommend you check out.
Balatro has the concept of a seeded run, meaning you can enter a code to get a deterministic run in terms of cards you’ll receive, packs you’ll open, etc. This allows players to compare scores in a more meaningful way. One of the folks in Slack suggested we all run on the ‘OTTONEU’ seed and see who can come up with the best point total. First, some ground rules:
Blue deck
White stakes
Enter the seed ‘OTTONEU’
Show a screenshot of your final result screen
Entries are open until 11:59pm ET Sunday, January 19. Winner gets enough store credit for a t-shirt and a sticker and free shipping.
Because this last entry is massive and because it seems that what jokers you’ve unlocked matters, we’re going to move from “best entry” as defined by furthest ante and then biggest hand score to a random drawing. Keep posting your scores! Everyone who posts at least once will be in the drawing at the end.
Last entry was massive… so I spent a long time figuring out an optimized strategy. You gave everyone a week to unlock whatever jokers they might need as well. Personally disagree with this decision, as I feel it takes away from the fun of the competition/challenge, but respect whatever happens. Just wanna make my voice heard.
I just want people to feel like they can still participate in the face of huge results. I personally think more people taking a shot at this challenge is good. I also think coming up with massive scores is worthy of its own praise! Though it is unclear if your most recent result is both Blue Deck and White Stakes. Your jokers have stickers that I do not believe are available at White stakes.
When I pointed out to @roadkiehl that you can’t see his deck, he double pinky promised he was on Blue Deck / White Stakes. It is really weird that the Balatro end screen doesn’t show the deck and stakes you played on.
I double pinky promise I was on blue deck and white stake (though any other stake would actually be more impressive). I agree it’s weird Balatro doesn’t show these stats in the end screen. Would be very easy to do so.
Oh also the stickers are from whatever is the highest stake I’ve beaten with each joker. They aren’t at all related to the stake of the current run.
I see your point, and I suppose I misunderstood the goal. I figured we were trying to optimize and take the seed as far as possible almost like speedrunning an old video game or something. If the goal is to maximize participation, I understand.
Regardless, this was a very fun challenge that had me play the game in a super weird and unique way. Thanks for organizing this!
I’m interested in the fact that the two highest scores so far have High Card as their top played hand. I assume the level on those is astronomical, and you are playing the joker that gives you points for all played cards? (if you can tell i have not googled strats for Balatro). Also i can take this off main lol
I had another run trying for high card with the burglar’s extra hands, and spent most of the time swearing at the joker that levels the played hand for not leveling high card–the random rolls were not kind on that run
