He is somewhat right about the ethics of true crime content, but that has nothing to do with him reporting lies as fact.

The better play would’ve been to be upfront with everything being fictional, then go all in - make stories about prisoners using wormholes to smuggle in contraband, or a vampire hunter accidentally killing an innocent human.

If Paul did something like that, he could have kept the channel and made his argument on there to a much wider audience. But maybe this idea would be too much effort for someone who makes AI slop…

if you only play one card, you can hold more steel/gold/blue seal cards in your hand

this doesn’t matter much for winning normal runs, but if you happen to get jokers that buff steel cards (i.e. Mime and Baron), copy said jokers, find ways to increase your hand size, and make every card in your deck the same card, you can get absurdly high scores and get really far into endless mode

my current high score is 6.817x10^98, which I got with a really good high card plasma deck run

again though, you do need to find exactly the right jokers for this, so building around any other hand type is almost always more reliable for winning ante 8

As others have said, Balatro does not lie to you - the listed odds are always right. But there are some ways to stack the odds in your favor outside of the obvious deckbuilding.

Namely, if you are holding a certain Joker, Planet, Tarot, or Spectral card, you will never see another copy of that card anywhere else through normal means. I’m also fairly certain Jokers, Planets, Tarots, and Spectrals that are currently in the shop offerings will not appear in their respective packs in the shop.

What this means is that you can slightly influence what you get by holding cards you don’t want. This is less useful for Jokers and Spectrals, but if you’re holding 2 Tarot cards and there are 2 in the shop, opening an Arcana pack gives you a 1/18 chance for each Tarot to be the one you’re looking for instead of a 1/22. Same goes for Celestial Packs, but there aren’t that many Planets, which makes the odds that much better.

This also means if you win with the hand you want to level up and have a Blue Seal card in hand, you should use the Planet before you cash out and go to the shop so that it can appear again.

The only exceptions to this that I can think of are having the Telescope voucher, which 100% guarantees that a Celestial Pack will have your most played hand’s Planet, having a Showman, which can even make the same card appear twice in one pack, or the Invisible Joker, which can show up again after you’ve sold it even if you keep the duped joker around.

On getting PhotoChad set up, my only advice is to pick up Riff-Raff (or skip for 2 common Jokers if you’re feeling real desperate) if you already have one of the two, and try to use Tarots to make your deck lean towards face cards. Similar advice for Lucky Cards - either get lucky and pick up Oops! All 6s or anything that retriggers cards, or don’t rely on them hitting to survive the next two seconds.

Finally, the Wheel never hits, except when you have a food joker that dies next round. Then it guaranteed hits on the food joker. /s

p.s. You say you’ll be “starved for either chips or mult” on Plasma? Unless I’m reading you wrong, the whole thing with Plasma is you don’t need to worry about getting both numbers up; you’ve gotta go all in on Chips early, since it’s easy to get a lot added with a few Jokers, then pivot to Mult late game if you can.

kinda crazy that they made it impossible to follow the only rule