When former truck driver John Breeding invented Let It Ride, he developed it as a game that would benefit from his earlier invention, Shuffle Master card shufflers.
What do you when your company creates a breakthrough gaming invention and you want to sell more products?
If you’re Shuffle Master, which later became SHFL Entertainment Inc., you invent a game that needs the invention you created.
The game invented by the company was Let It Ride, a poker variant that still exists in several Nevada casinos. In the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s most recent monthly gaming win statistics, Let It Ride was reported to have 32 units in 27 casinos.
John Breeding, a former truck driver who became interested in how casinos were losing money to card-counters, founded Shuffle Master in Minneapolis in 1983 and borrowed $30,000 to invent a single-deck automatic shuffling machine to prevent the edge advantage card-counters had acquired by providing a freshly shuffled deck for every game played. The first single-deck shuffler appeared in casinos in 1992.
Breeding’s company then turned its attention to developing games that needed those shufflers.
Let It Ride was one of those games and when it was first introduced in 1993, its high payouts made it a popular new casino attraction. Within a decade, Let It Ride had 133 units in 85 casinos.
SHFL Entertainment was acquired by Bally Technology in 2013, which eventually was absorbed by Scientific Games, now a division of Las Vegas-based Light & Wonder.
Let It Ride is a poker variation based on five-card stud and instead of playing against the house, players are rewarded for the value of their hands. Let It Ride is one of the few table games that allows players to take back a portion of their wagers if they don’t believe they’re going to have a winning hand.
Players are dealt three cards and there are two community cards dealt face up in sequence as the game progresses.
Bets are placed in three stations with equal amounts. After the first community card is revealed, players can take back one of the three bets. When the first community card is revealed, the player can decide whether to take back one of the bets or to “let it ride.” When the second community card is revealed, the player has the same option.
Decisions are based on trying to form the best possible poker hand with the five cards on the table, the three dealt to the player and the two community cards.
The payout is 1:1 for a pair of 10s or higher; 2:1 for two pairs; 3:1 for three of a kind; 5:1 for a straight (a sequence of five consecutive cards); 8:1 for a flush (all cards in one suit); 11:1 for a full house (three of a kind and a pair); 50:1 for four of a kind; 200:1 for a straight flush (a sequence of five consecutive cards all in the same suit); and 1,000:1 for a royal flush (10 through ace, all in the same suit).
Some casinos offer a Let It Ride side bet that pays out on the three cards dealt to the player.
Let It Ride has decreased in popularity as more players discover the signficant advantage the casino has over the player.
The house edge in blackjack is 0.5 percent in most blackjack games. For craps, the house edge is calculated at 1.41 percent.
For Let It Ride, the house edge is calculated at 3.51 percent.
In the past year, Let It Ride has won $15.1 million for Nevada casinos that offer it, down 13.2 percent from the previous year. The Control Board said the game won 25.4 percent of the money wagered on it in 2024.
