Question of the Day - 25 February 2025

Let It Ride is not quite totally extinct, but practially.

Let It Ride is one of the oldest proprietary table games. That means it was among the earliest of the new inventor- and company-designed games supplied to the casinos starting in the late 1980s. Prior to that, casinos and card rooms offered only the traditional public-domain games of blackjack, craps, baccarat, roulette, big six, and pai gow poker.

The patent for Let it Ride expired more than five years ago, so it too is now in the public domain. Thus, there’s less incentive for game distributors to support the original, as competitors and casino operators can run them for less cost after re-trademarking them. That said, Galaxy Gaming’s version of Let it Ride found little demand in comparison to the newer and hotter games.

In addition, Let it Ride has faded pretty much out of view, because it's a paytable game. You play against a paytable and not the dealer with your final hand, so it’s more volatile and lacks the potential for a showdown win if the dealer has a weak hand.

Many players not only found it boring, but considered it a license to steal. And it had a fairly high house edge (2.8%), even with optimal play, plus high variance. On average, two bets were riding about 8.5% of the time with a win rate of approximately 85% and one bet riding about 85% of the time with a dismal 11.5% win rate. 

For the same reason, the dealers couldn't stand it; they called it Let It Die and Let It Rot, since the players usually lost money and blamed the dealers, so the tips were minimal, if any. 

But as the question states, it was definitely a popular game in its time. An article from 2004 listed the top 10 proprietary games at that time: Three Card Poker was number one with 1,500 placements, LIR number two with 625 placements, and Caribbean Stud number three with 600 installs. Times change. but at least part of the reason for LIR's and CS's decline was the rather high house edge,

When we last ran this question in 2021, LIR was still available in a few places. We believe it's disappeared from many of those, but can probably be found in some last holdouts.