Let It Ride Strategy
In most casino games, wins are frequent. Sure, you might go on losing streaks, but for the most part, you can expect to win half the time or just a little less, and sometimes break even. In Let it Ride, you’re going to lose a lot – over 75% of your hands won’t pay anything at all!
So, why would you play Let it Ride if you’re just going to watch yourself lose again and again? While it’s true that you won’t see many wins, you’ll usually win a lot more on your winning hands than you lose on your losing hands. Because you have the choice to “let it ride” or to take back two of your original three bets, you can save a lot of money on losing hands, and make sure that your money stays in when you have the best of it.
Proper Let it Ride strategy takes advantage of this by ensuring that you only keep your extra bets on the table when it is in your favor to do so. By doing this, you can keep the house edge low and make sure that you’re playing on nearly even terms with the casino.
Some of Let it Ride strategy is quite obvious. For instance, you will always “let it ride” when you have a hand that’s already good enough to win, like a pair, three of a kind, or two pair. But what do you do when you have a draw?
When you look at your first three cards, you should always let it ride if you’re holding three cards to a royal flush. You should also keep your bets on the table for a lot of straight flush draws; anytime you have three consecutive suited cards (except for A-2-3 or 2-3-4), you should let it ride, and you should also leave your money out there for three suited cards with just a one card gap if you have at least one high card (like 8-9-J) or with two card gaps if you have two high cards (for instance, 8-T-Q or 9-Q-K).
With four cards, the strategy gets even simpler. You want to let it ride with any four card flush draw, including straight and royal flush draws. You should also let it ride when you hold an open-ended straight draw – that is, four consecutive cards that can complete a straight by adding a card at either end, like 5-6-7-8. Keep in might that four-card straights using an ace do not apply, since they can only make a straight in one direction (i.e., with A-2-3-4, only a five completes the straight).
And that’s it! With just those few simple rules of thumb, you’ll be playing optimal Let it Ride strategy. With this strategy, the house edge is approximately 3.5%. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds, because that’s only the edge compared to a single bet you put down on the table, not all three that are in play at the beginning of each hand. For instance, if you play with three $20 bets, the house edge is only around 70 cents each time you play.
One other thing to look out for when playing Let it Ride is the common side bet that lets you pay $1 in exchange for huge payouts if you make a big hand – usually $20,000 for a royal flush. This bet, like most side bets, is a sucker bet that has a huge house edge. Some online casinos may offer a progressive bet that has an increasingly large royal flush bonus; unless the progressive jackpot is exceedingly large, it’s still a bad bet.
