Why this game is solvable and the ones beside it are not
Let It Ride sits on the carnival-game shelf next to Caribbean Stud and Mississippi Stud, and this site publishes a computed figure for exactly one of the three. The reason is structural rather than a matter of effort.
All three of your bets in Let It Ride pay on the same final five-card hand, and they pay independently. Nothing you decide about the first bet changes what the second is worth. So there is no game tree to search: a bet should ride when its own expectation at that moment is positive, and the whole game collapses into two averages over a deck.
Caribbean Stud does not collapse, because your hand is played against a dealer hand drawn from the same deck, which is C(52,5) times C(47,5), roughly four trillion deals. Mississippi Stud does not collapse either, because three raise decisions compound over a board that grows. Where this site cannot compute a figure, it says so rather than quoting one in the same voice as the derived ones.
The three decisions
| Bet | Decided on | Ridden on | Expectation per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Your three cards | 7.28% | 354517/3248700 |
| Second | Four cards, one community turned | 15.09% | 742459/3248700 |
| Third | Mandatory, never withdrawn | 100% | -242173/649740 |
The first two rows are the part worth reading twice. Correct play leaves the first bet out there on 7.28% of hands and the second on 15.09%. The overwhelmingly common right answer is to take your money back, which is the opposite of how the game is named and marketed.
Two house edges, and which one to use
The figure the industry quotes for Let It Ride is about 3.51%, and that is measured against one initial bet, because one unit is what you commit before anything is dealt. Our computation agrees: 3.5057%.
It is not the number that tells you what the game costs you. Because you withdraw two bets most of the time, the average amount left on the table is 1.2237 units, not three. The loss per unit actually at risk is 2.8648%. That second figure is the one to carry into a comparison with blackjack at 0.5153% or the craps pass line at 1.4141%, where a unit staked is a unit staked.
Neither figure is flattering. The point of publishing both is that quoting only the first overstates what a session costs, and quoting only the second understates what you are asked to put up.
The pay table this is computed from
| Hand | Pays | Hands in 2,598,960 | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 1000 to 1 | 4 | 0.000154% |
| Straight flush | 200 to 1 | 36 | 0.001385% |
| Four of a kind | 50 to 1 | 624 | 0.024010% |
| Full house | 11 to 1 | 3,744 | 0.144058% |
| Flush | 8 to 1 | 5,108 | 0.196540% |
| Straight | 5 to 1 | 10,200 | 0.392465% |
| Three of a kind | 3 to 1 | 54,912 | 2.112845% |
| Two pair | 2 to 1 | 123,552 | 4.753902% |
| One pair | 1 to 1 at tens or better | 1,098,240 | 42.256903% |
| High card | loses | 1,302,540 | 50.117739% |
A pair pays only at tens or better; a lower pair loses. Pay tables vary between casinos and the royal flush line in particular is sometimes cut. Every figure above is computed from the table shown, so if the one in front of you differs, the numbers on this page do not describe it.
What the frequencies are worth on their own
The right-hand columns are the exact five-card frequencies, enumerated rather than quoted. They are the check on everything else here: an evaluator with a bug in it cannot reproduce 1,098,240 one-pair hands by accident. They are also published in our open dataset under CC-BY, so they can be recomputed rather than believed.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the house edge in Let It Ride?
- 3.5057% per initial bet, computed exactly from all 2,598,960 five-card hands. That is the figure the industry quotes.
- Why is the element of risk lower?
- Because you pull two of the three bets back on most hands. Only 1.2237 units ride on average, so the loss per unit actually staked is 2.8648%.
- How often should I let the first bet ride?
- On 7.28% of three-card hands. The rest of the time pulling it back is worth more than leaving it out there.
- How often should I let the second bet ride?
- On 15.09% of four-card hands, once the first community card is face up.
- Is Let It Ride better than blackjack?
- No. Blackjack computes to 0.5153% on this site under a standard rule set. Even the element of risk here is more than five times that.
Every figure on this page is produced by
five_card_math.py, which enumerates all 2,598,960 five-card
hands and checks its category counts against the frequencies every poker
text prints before anything is written. The house edge is also checked
against the band published analyses occupy. That check has already caught
one error in this page's own history: the first solve divided the total
loss by three bets instead of by the one initial bet the published figure
uses, and reported 1.1686%. Last computed August 2026.