Balatro

The code of Balatro is open source. Unzip your exe file and see that it's a bunch of lua source files in a trenchcoat.

The code is terribly written, so it'll probably take a while to find what you're looking for, but I once read through it check to see if Wheel of Fortune was actually a 1 in 4 chance. It is.

I doubt there is anything checking which deck you're using. Actual RNG is incredibly far from what our intuition about randomness is and it's made worse by many popular games having hidden pity systems to prevent streaks of bad luck. Balatro has no pity system. The game doesn't track if you missed Wheel of Fortune 6 times in a row. The next check is still 1 in 4.

It's a common thing with every game that has a significant element of random chance: Humans are just bad at understanding probabilities.

I think a lot of game design philosophy actually suggest that you should fudge probabilities to "feel" right. Gsmes like Fire Emblem and (I think) xcom actually lie about the probabilities and skew them to the extremes because that's just how people "feel" is correct.

Anyway, Balatro doesn't do any of that. The cards you are offered are entirely deterministic based on the seed, and don't depend on what cards you buy or skip. In each ante, rewards are in a specific order which isn't changed by anything in game.

I think the only luck manipulation it does is, if you are playing on gold stake, it will reroll the seed until the first legendary Joker is one you don't have a gold seal on.

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.