Let It Ride

About Let It Ride

Let It Ride is the casino game where the bet can get SMALLER, and this is a straight version of it. You put three equal units out before you see anything. You get three cards face down; two more go in the middle, also face down, and those are yours as well. Look at your three and decide whether to take the first unit back. A community card turns over; decide the same thing about the second. The last card turns and every unit still out there is paid on your best five cards, or it is gone. The third unit never comes back, and that is where the entire house edge lives. A pair pays even money at tens or better and nothing at all below that - a pair of nines takes your money exactly as fast as seven-high does, which is the single cruellest number in casino poker and is printed on the wall here where you can read it. What is not standard is what happens on the hand everybody actually remembers. Correct play takes a bet back about seven times in ten, so the moment that stings is not a bad beat, it is the hand you correctly pulled off that went on to pay. Every casino on earth lets that one go past. Here the conductor tears you a STUB for it, and three stubs plus half a unit buy a LOOK: the last community card, turned over early, before you decide the second bet. That matters because Let It Ride is solved - the whole strategy is nine lines and an evening - and no card in the world has a column for "and I have already seen the last card". The numbers are unusually clean about when to buy one: a look is worth exactly nothing on a hand that already pays, exactly nothing on a hand with no outs, and the most in the middle, so it is worth buying precisely when the decision is hardest. Every figure this game shows you is exact rather than estimated, because with no dealer and only two hidden cards the whole game can be enumerated: 22,100 opening holdings, 270,725 four-card positions, all 2,598,960 five-card hands. The house edge is 3.51% of a unit and the app will tell you so. There are three ways to play: an endless cash game across four cars you open by hours at the table rather than by luck, a four-car Overnight with forced units where you go forward or you get off, and a Daily Deal seeded off the date so every player in the world gets the same twenty-five hands. Afterwards you get a debrief no card room would ever show you: what taking it back was worth, as two numbers - everything you kept off hands that lost, against everything you left behind on hands that paid - and a grid of every decision you have made, graded against the solver, with your worst shape picked out in red. Free to play, no downloads, in your browser.