Let It Ride odds: house edge, pay tables and when to pull a bet

Let It Ride is a poker game with no dealer hand to beat. You make a five-card hand from your three cards and two shared cards, and you are paid on a fixed table if it is a pair of tens or better. The twist is that you can take back two of your three bets as the cards come out. This guide gives the exact odds of every final hand, the house edge on the common pay tables, when the maths says to pull a bet back, and what the side bets cost.

All figures were computed by us in code, by going through every possible deal from a single 52-card deck: 22,100 starting hands, each with all 1,176 pairs of community cards that can follow.

How Let It Ride works

The procedure below follows Pennsylvania's rules for the game (58 Pa. Code Chapter 643a). Maryland's standard rules describe the same sequence.

• You place three equal bets. Pennsylvania's rules call two of them Bet Number 1 and Bet Number 2. The third stays in action for the whole round.
• You get three cards. Two community cards are dealt face down.
• After looking at your three cards, you either withdraw Bet Number 1 or let it ride. If you let it ride, it stays until the end of the round.
• The first community card is turned up. You then decide on Bet Number 2, whatever you did with Bet Number 1.
• The second community card is turned up and your three cards plus the two community cards make your final hand.
• A pair of tens or better wins. Every bet still in action is paid at the same odds. A pair of nines or lower loses.

There is no dealer hand and no other player to beat. Your result depends only on the cards and on how many bets you left in action.

Odds of each final hand

Because every hand is five cards from one deck, the odds are the standard five-card poker odds. What matters in Let It Ride is how they line up with the pay table.

About three hands in four lose. Roughly one in six is a winning high pair, which only pays even money, and everything better adds up to about 7.6%.

House edge on the Let It Ride pay tables

Pennsylvania's rule lists two pay tables. They are identical except for the royal flush: table A pays 1,000 to 1 and table B pays 500 to 1. We computed the return of each with best play on both decisions.

The edge is quoted per unit of one bet, the one you can never take back. Because you pull most bets back, on average only 1.22 of the three units are still out when the cards are revealed. The loss per unit actually risked is therefore lower, about 2.86% on table A.

Halving the royal costs only 0.23 points of edge, because a royal comes up about once in 650,000 hands. The full house, flush and straight payouts matter far more to the long-run cost than the top prize.

Maryland's standard rules show how far this goes. They list table A as above plus two tables that cut the top prizes and raise the middle ones. We ran best play on each:

Table C pays a tenth of table A for a royal, yet it has the lowest edge of the three, because full houses, flushes and straights are hundreds of times more common than royals. On table C the best strategy also changes slightly: you let Bet Number 1 ride on 7.40% of hands instead of 7.28%, because straights pay more. The strategy below is the one for table A.

Pennsylvania also lets a casino cap the payout per hand on the main bets, and Maryland requires the layout or a sign to show any such limit. In Pennsylvania the cap must be at least $50,000, or the most one player could win in a round at the table minimum if that is higher, and it does not apply to the bonus bets. On a high bet a cap can lower the real value of a royal, so it is worth asking about.

When to let it ride: the decisions in numbers

The strategy below is what our enumeration found. A bet is worth leaving out only when its expected value is positive, and the two decisions are independent: what you did with Bet Number 1 does not change the right call on Bet Number 2.

After your three cards, let Bet Number 1 ride with:

• A pair of tens or better, or three of a kind.
• Three cards to a royal flush, such as K-Q-J suited or A-Q-10 suited.
• Three suited cards in a row from 3-4-5 upward. A-2-3 and 2-3-4 suited do not qualify.
• Three suited cards with one gap and at least one ten or higher, such as J-9-8 or 10-9-7 suited.
• Three suited cards with two gaps and at least two cards ten or higher, such as K-J-9 or Q-J-8 suited.
• Take it back with anything else, including a small pair.

After the first community card, let Bet Number 2 ride with:

• A pair of tens or better, two pair, or better.
• Four cards to a flush.
• Four cards to an open-ended straight with ten or higher on top: 10-9-8-7, J-10-9-8, Q-J-10-9 or K-Q-J-10.
• Take it back with anything else, including a small pair or four to an inside straight.

Best play only reduces the edge to 3.51%; it never turns it positive. Most of the time the right decision is to take money back, which is what keeps the cost per hand down.

The Three Card and Five Card side bets

Pennsylvania's rule sets out several optional wagers. The Three Card Bonus pays on your first three cards only, ranked the same way as in Three Card Poker. Its table A (straight flush 40, trips 30, straight 6, flush 4, pair 1 to 1) is the same table as the best common Pair Plus table, so we can give its return exactly:

The Five Card Bonus pays on your final hand at odds up to 20,000 to 1 for a royal flush, and progressive versions take a share of each bet into a meter. Those bets are much more volatile and usually more expensive than the main game, and their return depends on the exact table and, for progressives, the meter. Read the table on the layout or the information panel before you bet.

Let It Ride online and at crypto casinos

On a casino floor the cards come from one shuffled deck, which is the model behind every figure here. Online versions are dealt by an RNG or in a live dealer studio, and should state their pay table and RTP in the game's help panel. A provably fair card game at a crypto casino may instead draw each card independently, and our guide to provably fair blackjack explains how that infinite-deck model changes card odds. If a game does not say which deck model it uses, its stated RTP cannot be checked against tables like the ones above. What RTP means covers how to read those figures.

What the edge costs per hour

At $10 per bet on table A with best play, the expected loss is about $0.35 per hand. At 50 hands an hour that is about $17.50 an hour, before any side bet. The swing in a session is much larger than that, because a single four of a kind on three bets pays 150 units.

Set a budget before you sit down, use the casino's deposit limit tools when playing online, and see our responsible gambling page if play stops being fun.

Sources

• 58 Pa. Code § 643a.11, Procedures for completion of each round of play (via Cornell LII)
• 58 Pa. Code § 643a.12, Payout odds; payout limitation (via Justia)
• Maryland Lottery and Gaming: Let It Ride Poker standard rules (PDF)
• All hand frequencies, strategy and returns computed by us in C, by full enumeration of 22,100 starting hands with every pair of community cards from a single 52-card deck