The official way to pronounce Balatro has been confirmed.
It’s not immediately clear from the way the game’s name is spelled whether people should pronounce it as ‘ba-LAH-tro’ (as in ‘tomato’) or ‘BAH-la-tro’ (as in ‘camel toe’).
Journalist Stephen Totilo has finally ended the debate, with the definitive answer published in the latest edition of his Game File newsletter.
Totilo asked Naman Budhwar, the head of video marketing at Balatro publisher Playstack, how people should say the game’s name.
“How do you pronounce… Ba-LAH-tro?” Totilo asked.
“BAH-la-tro is how LocalThunk says it,” Budhwar replied. “But it’s kind of a ‘gif / jif’ situation, where he doesn’t really mind how people say it.
“So people can say ‘ba-LAH-tro’, they can say ‘BAH-la-tro’, but we decided to go with his pronunciation.”
“BAY-la-tro?” Totilo joked. “Can I say that?”
“You can say BAY-la-tro, yeah”, Budhwar replied, perhaps not seriously.
Balatro was one of the major success stories of last year, having sold 5 million copies by January 2025.
The game has earned numerous awards, including Best Indie Game, Best Debut Indie Game and Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards.
It was also nominated for Game of the Year at the DICE Awards and won Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game, Mobile Game of the Year and Strategy / Simulation Game of the Year at that ceremony.
It also swept up at the Game Developers Choice Awards this month, winning awards for Game of the Year, Best Debut, Best Design and the Innovation Award.
VGC’s Balatro review noted: “The worst thing about Balatro is that it’s so good that we have to take time away from Balatro to write this review.”
“Balatro is an astonishingly addictive take on Poker that’s utterly impossible to put down,” we wrote. “Occasional difficulty spikes aside, it’s a piece of simplistic genius that we’ll keep on our Steam Deck forever.”
