This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker walkthrough: How to beat Lester the Jester

Welcome to our This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker gameplay walkthrough, which will help you escape the clutches of the mischievous Lester the Jester. Here you’ll find out how to get started, how the game works, and how to make trillions, quadrillions, and even quintillions of coins as fast as possible.

What is This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker?

As you can see in the This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker trailer above, this is an incremental or idle clicker card game on Steam where you need to accumulate coins by curating a lucrative deck of cards that flip to reveal the most powerful combinations possible. At first, you’ll be clicking one card to make a few coins, but you’ll end up with ten hands, exotic cards, Jokers, and more that can fetch trillions of coins, with the help of unlockable upgrades.

The name of the game hits the nail on the head: in a few ways does it really resemble poker, or one of the best poker video games. This Ain’t Even Poker is closer to a traditional clicker game than it is to Texas Hold’em — it is the poker theme and deckbuilding elements that add more depth than you’ll find in a typical incremental title.

The This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker developer is Mash, a solo dev also behind the MMO-style PvP and PvE game, Ring of Titans. It was released on December 11, 2025, with a price of $5.99. It also comes bundled on Steam with other gambling-themed games like CloverPit, so don’t miss our CloverPit walkthrough for more on that.

Escaping the Jester: How to make a billion coins

When you start the game, you’ll be introduced to Lester the Jester, who traps you in his carnival unless you can reach one billion coins. This sounds a lot at first, but you’ll be making plenty more in a single click eventually.

Next, you’ll see a board with a card in the middle. Clicking it returns a number of coins depending on the value of that card. For example, you’ll get fewer coins if you reveal a 2 of any suit than a king.

Since it’ll take you forever to reach your coin target if you continue this way, you can add cards to your hand by clicking the “Add Card” icon by clicking the tile to the left of your first card. The more cards you can add up to a maximum of five at this point in the game, the more chances you have of securing winning hand combinations.

Your early choice is whether to add cards this way or unlock upgrades. The upgrades menu, located to the left of your screen, displays the number of available upgrades based on your current coins. You initially have only one upgrade, Card Clicker, which increases the value of your manual hand flips with each upgrade, up to a maximum of three. 

Some upgrades are dependent on you unlocking others, indicated by the lines connecting them: they’re black if you still need to unlock the previous upgrade and white if you’re good to move on. In most cases, you don’t need to unlock an upgrade more than once to unlock the next in the tree if there are multiple upgrades available within each perk.

To the right of your cards, you have Lester’s Ledger, which you can click on to see more closely. This shows the current coins you have available for upgrades and bigger hands (also visible on your HUD at the top of your screen) and the coins you’ve made historically, including the coins you’ve already invested in upgrades.

This is crucial when it comes to This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker’s gameplay: when you have any financial goal, coins you’ve spent are included. You don’t need to worry about spending coins reversing your progress towards your goal. 

It is about any coins you’ve made historically, not your available currency to spend.

Below your upgrades is the Stats menu. Click on that to see the most lucrative hands you’ve flipped on your left and how much they earned, but you can use the left menu to drill down into the hands that’ve made you the most money on average over time and the overall total. While it isn’t worth specialising at any stage in the game, really, you’ll find that the more valuable hands tend to make you the most money, even though they’re rarer.

The only other thing accessible on your screen at this stage is the Settings menu, which can be accessed by clicking the cog in the top-right corner or pressing Escape on your keyboard. This allows you to save, quit the game, and adjust options such as graphics, frame rate, and music volume.

Once you have more cards and increased returns from manual clicks, it’s time to look at more upgrades. Your next options are Auto Flip, which automatically flips your cards every six seconds initially, and Add Deck, which provides an additional deck, starting with a single card. 

It’s important you don’t worry about what upgrades to get first; specialising doesn’t work in most cases. When it comes to This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker strategies, this is the key thing to remember: waiting to reach enough coins to level up upgrades multiple times is less efficient than levelling multiple upgrades at once. 

Later levels of upgrades and skipping further down the upgrade tree, and neglecting other cheaper upgrades, means you’re leaving perks that would’ve otherwise boosted your coin returns on the table.

For example, with Add Deck, you can max out your number of decks to ten, which will cost tens of thousands for your final decks. Pursuing only this and not adding new cards to your decks for a couple of thousand coins at the cheapest, or unlocking upgrades like Flipper (earn 20% more from automatic flips) for two thousand coins, is wasting your time. All upgrades are worthwhile, and because it’s your historic earnings that matter, no coins are ever wasted.

It’s really only for the first few minutes of the game that you need to manually flip cards: auto flip bonuses will eclipse the relative returns from the Card Clicker upgrade very quickly, and the game quickly becomes about managing your upgrades while cards flip in the background. At this stage, focus on the following:

You should be doing all of these things rather than focusing too much on one: if an upgrade feels expensive, look elsewhere for an investment that won’t hit your current coin total too much and prioritise those until your coffers get low, then start again. Keep an eye on each available upgrade and their leveling costs, plus the Auto Bonus next to each deck, to see where you can get some easy wins. 

There’s an element of luck to how often you get high-returning hands, but given the number of decks, flips, and available upgrades, things average out. In other words, there aren’t any This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker gambling elements at all, and you’ll reach your one-billion-coin target in an hour or so at most.

Expeditionary force: How to build a winning card collection

You’ll likely encounter the Expeditions system in the game before you hit one billion coins, but this is where This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker’s deckbuilding and strategy elements come in. You’ll have access to it once you’ve unlocked the Explorer upgrade. When you’ve done that, a new icon with a card and question marks on it will appear below the Auto Bonus upgrade tile to the left of each hand.

Clicking on the tile will initiate an Exploration Expedition, which, at this stage, will cost 40,000 coins. This is the same price for each deck, but this increases with each discovered card accepted, so have as many Expeditions going as you can afford and focus on other unlocks while they’re progressing. If the price of an Expedition feels like too much money, look for cheaper alternative investments, so you’re not waiting around too long. 

Once the wait time has elapsed — your progress is indicated by a horizontal line going down the tile, but if you hover over it you can see the time left in minutes and seconds, which is four minutes at the longest. Click the tile again, and the chest that appears until it opens to reveal new cards to add to your deck.

Now you have the choice to accept one of the two cards, or neither. Only when you choose a card does the cost of the next Expedition increase. You can increase the number of cards to choose from, how long Expeditions take, and how many clicks it takes to open the chest to reveal your cards with relevant upgrades. The latter in particular will feel expensive to unlock at first, but you’ll feel grateful for it when it comes to the sheer number you’ll be opening later on. 

All cards in all decks will be of common rarity to start with, but cards discovered on Expeditions have the chance of being rarer, and also belonging to multiple suits (Spades, Hearts) and card values (10, King) simultaneously. You’ll be able to unlock even rarer card types later in the game, but the rarer your card, the higher the coin multiplier it adds. Here are the rarities with which you start:

You can also destroy cards in your decks as well as add them. With the Destroyer upgrade, you get the choice to destroy or discover a card when you hit the Exploration Expedition button. This can get confusing when you have ten different decks to manage, but once you’ve reached one billion coins you’ll only look after one deck that’s flipped across a maximum of ten hands; all changes made to your one deck at this point impact all This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker hands flipped, so you don’t need to worry about strategising ten different decks.

After you have Ascended at least a couple of times — more on that in the next section — you’ll have the option to complete Merge Expeditions, with another tile appearing below the Destruction Expedition option. Here you have the chance to combine multiple cards in your deck to make an even more powerful one. You can also enhance this through the Smart Transmuter upgrade, which gives you more possible cards to combine.

Crucially, you can see the current state of each deck with the Deck Viewer upgrade, unlocked after Explorer. This is essential when you’re focused on curating your one deck in later runs in terms of deckbuilding. Here are some tips to help you best curate your deck:

Meeting Mary the Fairy: How to make 240 poker chips

When you meet your 1B coin goal, Lester the Jester goes back on the deal: he’s not letting you leave. Next, a new character, Mary the Fairy, turns up and offers to help, but for a price. Her deal is that you swap all the coins you’ve made in exchange for some poker chips and a coin percentage boost, depending on how many current coins you have.

Accepting this deal also brings you back to the very start, with one hand and one card — this is Ascension. Your coin percentage boost and number of earned poker chips now appear on your top menu bar. Poker chips will get progressively more expensive to earn, and your next goal is to earn 240, with historic chip earnings once again taken into account.

Now, you can spend poker chips in exchange for powerful new upgrades in Mary’s Upgrade Shop, but the twist is you can only spend chips when you’ve Ascended and reset your game. You should have enough coins to unlock a handful of Mary upgrades the first time you ascend, starting with Global Expeditions, which gives you just a single deck shared between up to ten hands, and Ascended, which gives you a useful starting coin bonus so you can breeze through the early stages of future runs. This is when the option to bulk buy upgrades with Shift-click, Ctrl-click, and Shift-ctrl-click comes in handy.

You should have several chips to spend on your first Ascension, which unlock more This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker features: quests, achievements, card merging, and jokers. You can also unlock more powerful card suits, values, rarities, and winning combinations. However, your approach should be similar to upgrades in the rest of the game: don’t specialise and look for the cheapest, most efficient boons possible. 

Because you can only spend chips when you Ascend, try to spend as many as possible each time and think carefully: you may not have the chance again for a while. You can still see the new upgrade tree below the stats menu and speak to Mary next to this, but you’ll need to click and drag to see more of your screen to spot it clearly. This is possible once you’ve unlocked the standard and very cheap Freedom! Upgrade for each run.

Once Achievements have been unlocked, you can access them by clicking the gold trophy between the stats and upgrades menus. It glows when an Achievement has been completed. 

Most Achievements will be completed automatically, so long as you have objects on your board making you coins automatically with standard upgrades, such as Loaded Objects, but some require you to go on all the different types of Expeditions, which you’ll be doing naturally anyway. You need to click into the Achievements menu and again on the smaller light-green icon on the top-right of your screen of a completed Achievement to batch-claim your cash in as few clicks as possible.

Quests can be found below Lester’s Ledger. The difference to Achievements is that you don’t need to manually click for your rewards on completed objectives, but you only have up to five and they stay stuck there if you don’t complete them. You can reject them and reduce the time it takes for a new Quest to appear with a Mary upgrade, but make sure you don’t have anything stuck there and keep things moving.

Your next Mary unlock is likely to be Jokers. Once you’ve unlocked the Joker Shop, the upgrade will appear below Lester’s Ledger. You have five options to choose from, provided you haven’t already chosen one and haven’t refreshed the store. 

Jokers also have rarity levels, but it’s no more expensive to buy a rarer Joker than it is a more common one. It’s worth checking whether it’s better to refresh the store for more valuable Jokers than it is to settle for something less good, even more so given that the price increases considerably with each Joker you buy, starting at 1B. 

When a Joker is bought, it’ll appear on your top-left hand, then top-right, and so on, but you can click and drag to move them to another hand if you want, or sell one for some coins back — the amount of coins will be listed on the Joker when you hover over it on your main screen. Jokers essentially act as a modifier for each hand, in that when a certain condition is met after a flip, the Joker ability stacks on top. You can have a maximum of ten Jokers active at once: one for each hand.

Once you have the key, This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker features unlocked, the important decisions you now need to make are when to Ascend. Each time you need to make sure you have room to optimise your game without waiting too long for new boosts.

If you’re finding that you’re waiting a long time between new upgrades or Auto Flip boosts and that you’re stalling on your way to 240 poker chips, make sure the following is the case before Ascending:

If all these criteria apply to you, and your momentum is still slowing, Ascend and go again with more Mary upgrades. Keep this up, and you’ll reach 240 poker chips as quickly as possible.

Rune with a view: How to finally defeat Lester the Jester

Even after you’ve reached 240 poker chips, you’re still imprisoned in the Jester’s carnival. Since Lester is never going to willingly let you leave, you’ll need to break out by force, with the help of Mary’s runes.

Once you’ve spoken to both characters, you’ll be returned to your main gameplay screen, but with a few changes. Now you have a health bar with 1B hit points below your HUD at the top of the screen, with the hands of the Jester looming over you. 

You also have a new Runes area on your board, below-left from the Joker shop. This generates runes repeatedly, but it is on a cooldown depending on the number of Rune Collectors you buy with coins; the more Collectors you have, the shorter the cooldown. You need runes to spend on the new Upgrade Expeditions (which will now appear beneath your usual ones, and cost runes to run) and in the new upgrades shop under the new glowing rune icon at the bottom of your runes area.

This is the final pillar of This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker’s gameplay: while your cards still need to be making coins to further enhance your deck and purchase Rune Collectors, your new goal is upgrading your existing cards with damage with which to whittle down Lester’s health bar. 

The strategy here remains the same as the rest of the game: don’t specialise and wait for expensive unlocks to appear when cheaper alternatives are available. For instance, Upgrade Expeditions that add damage to cards get expensive quickly, so you should also use runes on your new upgrade tree. 

When you upgrade cards for damage, they’ll be assigned a damage type (ranged, magic, or melee) and a damage value, which can be found at the top of the card tile in your deck viewer. When a damage-dealing card is flipped in any hand, that damage value is dealt to Lester. It’s worth refocusing your deck towards damage now, without neglecting coin generation: merge non-damage-dealing cards with upgraded ones, remove weaker non-damage dealers, and upgrade the same cards multiple times to make them even more potent.

As you upgrade the new This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker upgrades tree you’ll unlock and deal special stacking damage and other Lester debuffs, which is shown on differently-coloured tiles between the top HUD and Lester’s health bar. You can also see general damage being dealt by seeing the numbers popping up around Lester’s body. 

So, now you have these extra features to worry about. Here are all the things you need to manage to defeat the Jester as quickly as possible:

If you keep tabs on all these mechanics, you will eventually have completed the game and sent Lester the Jester packing, which is as close as you’ll get to a This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker ending. At this point, Mary will offer you the chance to either continue as you are or start your battle against Lester again, this time on a timer.