What do you do when your business creates a breakthrough game invention and you want to sell more products?
If you Shuffle Master, who later became SHFL Entertainment Inc., invent you a game that needs the invention you created.
The game invented by the company was Let It Ride, a poker variant that is still in several Nevada casinos. In Nevada Gaming Control Board’s latest monthly gaming statistics, Let It Ride reported 32 units in 27 casinos.
John Breeding, a former truck driver who became interested in how casinos lost money to the card countries, founded the Shuffle Master in Minneapolis in 1983 and borrowed $ 30,000 to invent a one-tire automatic shuffling machine to prevent Edge Advantage-card countries from providing a beginner for every game. The first one-tire shuffler appeared at casinos in 1992.
The breeding company then turned attention to developing games that needed these shufflers.
Let it Ride was one of these games and when it was first introduced in 1993, its high payments 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 2013, which was eventually 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 some of their bets if they do not think they will have a winning hand.
Players get three cards and there are two community cards that are divided in succession as the game progresses.
Investments are placed in three stations with equal quantities. After the first community card has been revealed, players can take back one of the three bets. When the first social card is revealed, the player can decide 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 shared player and the two community cards.
The payout is 1: 1 for a pair of 10 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 flushing (all cards in a suit); 11: 1 for a full house (three of a beat and a couple); 50: 1 for four of a kind; 200: 1 for a straight flushing (a sequence with five consecutive cards in the same suit); and 1,000: 1 for a royal flush (10 through ESS, all in the same suit).
Some casinos offer a song It Rida Side -bet that pays out on the three cards distributed to the player.
Let it go has decreased in popularity when more players discover the significant advantage that 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 estimated at 1.41 percent.
For Let It Ride, House Edge is estimated at 3.51 percent.
Over the past year, Let It Ride has won $ 15.1 million for Nevada casinos that offer it, a decrease of 13.2 percent from the previous year. The control board said that the game won 25.4 percent of the money was set in 2024.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@ theplayerlounge.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @rickvelotta at X.
