Let It Ride Odds and Strategy Tips

One of my favorite of the casino-game/poker-hybrids is Let It Ride. Strategy for the game is simple, and a look at Let It Ride odds is easy, fun, and interesting.

Let It Ride is popular because of the potentially big payoffs. Shuffle Master invented Let It Ride in 1993 as a strategy for selling more automatic card shuffling machines.

You don’t have to beat the dealer or the other gamblers at the table, either. You just want to get a winning hand – which, in the case of Let It Ride, is any poker hand consisting of a pair of 10s or better.

You get 3 cards, and the table also includes 2 community cards. The house edge for the game is around 3.5%.

In this post, I’ll go into more detail about the house edge for Let It Ride, explain how to play, and offer some strategy tips.

How to Play Let It Ride Poker

You play Let It Ride at a casino table where you sit across from the dealer or you can play at real money online casinos. You share the table with as many as 6 other players. The dealer uses a single, standard 52-card deck which is shuffled by one of Shuffle Master’s automatic shuffling machines.

In front of you, on the felt of the table, are 3 betting areas:

• $
• 2
• 1

Don’t be scared off by the 3 betting circles. Let It Ride isn’t complicated at all.

You start by putting a bet in each of the 3 circles.

You’re usually going to face a minimum bet of $5 at a Let It Ride table, and all 3 of your bets must be the same size. After placing your bet, you get 3 cards, face-down. The dealer also puts 2 cards face-down in the middle of the table.

You’ll use the 3 cards in your hand along with the 2 community cards to make your final hand. You get paid off by the poker hand value of your final hand.

The first step is to look at your cards. At this point, you can decide whether to keep the bet you put in the circle labeled “1” or not. If you don’t like your 3 cards, you indicate this to the dealer by scraping the table gently with your cards so that the dealer will return your bet to you.

On the other hand, if you like your cards, you set them down behind the chips in that circle. Once you and the other players have decided whether to get their bet back or “let it ride,” the dealer turns over one of the community cards. At this point, you get to make the same decision about the bet in circle 2.

Your decision on that bet is a completely separate decision, by the way. It doesn’t matter what you did with bet 1; you can do whatever you want with bet 2.

You are, of course, stuck with the bet in the $ circle. The dealer reveals the final card and pays off based on the poker hand ranking of your hand based on the pay table for the game. That’s posted on the felt at the table, too.

The Standard Let It Ride Pay Table

Here’s what the pay table for Let It Ride usually looks like:

• Royal flush – 1000 to 1
• Straight flush – 200 to 1
• 4 of a kind – 50 to 1
• Full house – 11 to 1
• Flush – 8 to 1
• Straight – 5 to 1
• 3 of a kind – 3 to 1
• 2 pairs – 2 to 1
• A pair of 10s or better – even money

It’s unusual to find a different pay table for Let It Ride because it’s a proprietary game with rules specified by the owner of the game’s intellectual property.

You will find online, though, barely-disguised variations of the game, like “Let ‘em Ride.”

Even those knockoff games usually have the same payouts. They’re taking advantage of the fact that you can’t copyright the rules of a game, just the way they’re worded. You also can’t use their name. I’d argue that “Let ‘Em Ride” is similar enough to “Let It Ride” that they’d have a strong trademark infringement case.

But guess what, the casinos offering the knockoff games are usually located offshore, and they’re often run anonymously. Good luck suing a company running an offshore casino on the internet.

The Let It Ride Side Bet Bonus Game

Most casinos offering Let It Ride offer it in a version that comes along with an optional side bet of $1. Such games offer huge payouts on the best paying hands, but the house edge for the side bet is high compared to the house edge for the standard game.

Here’s a typical bonus pay table, although the bonus pay table often varies from casino to casino:

• Royal flush – 20,000 to 1
• Straight flush – 2000 to 1
• 4 of a kind – 400 to 1
• Full house – 200 to 1
• Flush – 50 to 1
• Straight – 25 to 1
• 3 of a kind – 5 to 1

You don’t get any kind of bonus payout for 2 pair or a pair.

The house edge for the main game is 3.5%, but for the bonus game, it’s over 25%. Don’t take the side bet.

Even though it seems cheap for just $1 per bet, the house edge ensures that the casino will walk away with a lot of your money if you keep placing this bet.

Appropriate Let It Ride Strategy and How It Affects the Odds

I mentioned already that the house edge for Let It Ride is 3.5%. This assumes that you’re playing with an appropriate strategy.

Luckily, the strategy isn’t that hard to implement.

For Bet #1, Here’s What You Should Do:

Let it ride if any of the following apply:

• You have a winning hand already
• You have 3 cards to a straight flush (unless those cards are 4 or less)
• You have 3 cards to a straight flush with a gap (but only if you have a card of 10 or higher)
• You have 3 cards to a straight flush with 2 gaps (but only if you have 2 cards of 10 or higher)

For Bet #2, Here’s What You Should Do:

Let it ride if:

• You have a winning hand already.
• You have 4 cards to a straight flush.
• You have 4 cards to a flush.
• You have 4 cards in an outside straight draw (but only if you have a 10 or higher)

If you have 4 cards to an outside straight, you can let it ride or pull your bet back. The house has a 0 edge in this situation, so it doesn’t matter which decisions you make.

The same holds true if you have an inside straight draw made up for 4 cards higher than 10.

How Much Does It Cost per Hour to Play Let It Ride?

Let’s assume you make 45 bets per hour at a game of Let It Ride. If you’re betting $5 per hand (or $15 per hand, depending on your point of view), you’re looking at losing about $7.88 per hour. That’s not a terrible price for an hour of entertainment at the casino.

To calculate that, you just multiply the amount of action you’re bringing the casino by the house edge.

But what happens to your average hourly losses if you take the optional side? It’s only a $1 side bet. How bad it could be?

As it turns out, very bad indeed. If you place that bet 45 times per hour, you’ll put another $45 per hour into action, but you’re expected to lose 25% of it.

This means you’re looking at losing over $11 per hour on the side bet alone, doubling the cost of your time at the table. Keep in mind that you’re not guaranteed this loss rate, either. That’s a long-term expectation based on the math behind the game.

In the short run, you’ll see variance. Sometimes you’ll see big winning streaks, and other times, you’ll see big losing streaks. The longer you play, though, the closer your results should get to the mathematically expected results.

Why Is the House Edge for the Side Bet in Let It Ride So High?

The main reason that the house edge for the side bet in Let It Ride is so high is because of the non-existent payouts for the 2 pairs and pairs of 10s or better.

You’ll see 2 pairs about 5% of the time, and you’ll see 1 pair of 10s or higher slightly more than 15% of the time. If you even offered an even money payout on those 2 hands, the house edge for the side bet would drop from 25% to just 5%.

All the hands where you get a payout are rare. You’ll only see a 3 of a kind on average once an hour, and that only pays out at $5. You won’t see a straight more often than once every 5 hours or so.

That’s why the house edge is so high on the side bet in Let It Ride.

Conclusion

Let It Ride odds are easy enough to understand. You have a percentage chance of getting each hand, and the hand pays out at a specific amount. Multiply one by the other and you get the expected return for the hand. Add them up, and you get the expected return for the game. Subtract that from 100%, and you have the house edge for Let It Ride.

Let It Ride strategy isn’t hard to learn, either. Mostly it has to do with focusing on getting winning hands before seeing the community cards or having strong draws to straights or flushes.

Also, avoid the bonus game or side bet. The house edge is terrible.