Maverick Solitaire

Maverick Solitaire is a challenging poker-based puzzle game. You are dealt 25 cards at random, and you must arrange them into 5 pat poker hands. (A pat hand is a straight, full house, flush, straight flush or royal flush.) Amazingly, this can be done about 49 times out of 50 when the cards are randomly dealt.

Many of the puzzles are very easy, and can be solved in a minute or two by an experienced solver, but some are more difficult, even fiendish, and of course, some cant be solved at all. You win points for solving the puzzles, and you can win more points if you correctly decide that a puzzle is unsolvable. Of course, you lose more if you decide that a puzzle that can actually be solved is unsolvable. Answers are available for all the puzzles.

This is a great app for passing a few idle moment while standing in line or whatever, but its also a fascinating, even addictive app that youll spend hours playing.

The puzzle itself was first publicized in the old TV show, Maverick, over 50 years ago. Novelty shops all over the United States sold out of playing cards the next day, as people wanted to see for themselves if it could really be solved so often.